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Information is Humanitarian Aid
Summary: Deep, conceptual discussion of polychronicity — a mental activity and overt behavior that describes a continuum of activity patterns by two levels of analysis: individuals and groups. In short, polychronicity is “the extent to which people (1) prefer to be engaged in two or more tasks or events simultaneously and are actually so engaged (the preference strongly implying the behavior and vice versa), and (2) believe their preference is the best way to do things.”
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Summary: Discussion of ways people experience temporality in different ways — as equivalent/homogeneous fungible moments and distinct/heterogeneous epochal times. In each case, these temporal realities help to coordinate social activities and convey meanings about them through relatedness/contrasts. Adam, Giddens, McGrath, and Orlikowski are cited.
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Summary: General backgrounding on the social construction of time through the ages and the notions of 1) divine intervention for measuring time and and 2) the use of metaphor as a sensemaking tool for understanding social beliefs, behaviors, motives, and actions.
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Summary: Ubiquitous computing study of time management that proposes to treat time as a tangible artifact.
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Summary: The authors extend classic CSCW literature to propose “porous time” as a new approach for examining sociotemporality that challenges the dominant temporal logic (see contested areas below). Four specific elements of porous time (spectral, mosaic, rhythmic, and obligated) are described as more realistic representations of lived experience and offer more multi-faceted ways to consider time in future theoretical and applied sociotemporal research.
Synthesis: Like the Lindley paper, Mazmanian, et al., contributes a much-needed re-engagement with and vocabulary to describe sociotemporality as a modern phenomenon. Building from Zerubavel and Reddy’s work and complementing Lindley’s meta review, this paper takes a more organizational theory approach by ethnographically examining sociotemporal tensions between work and family activities. The citations are a Who’s Who in organizational HCI via UC Irvine with references to earlier work by Voida, Palen, Mark, Bowker, and Grudin.
Summary: Empirical study on how people adapt/adjust their thinking about temporal constraints, and structures in order to accomplish daily tasks. The paper presents a typology of the temporal reflexivity process (conceptual, behavioral, procedural and structural) that people use to fine-tune their actions in the workplace. Helpful overview of temporal structuring concept.
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Summary: Lindley’s position paper serves as an important theoretical bridge between classic sociotemporality literature and more recent interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about and designing for time. Acknowledging the contributions of Zerubavel, Orlikowski and Yates, and other works that have long informed HCI and CSCW research, the paper signposts new research that broadly explores temporality in organizational studies, HCI design, and coordination work.
Synthesis: This paper strikes me as a pretty urgent call to arms to integrate broader notions of sociotemporality into HCI research, including non-Western philosophies. That a fair number of different CSCW/CHI sub-disciplines began publishing about sociotemporal concerns in a brief period of time can’t be explained away as a happy accident. Without knowing the backstory, it does seems to hint that there was some rising concern within the qualitative HCI research community about the future direction of coordination work studies and about design implications for new SaaS/technical products that promote faster-paced lives at huge societal costs in terms of quality of life, stress, and misplaced (industrialized) values.