6 - Screens and Time

Summary

This chapter, which opens by employing Forest as an example of an app which aims to help people avoid procrastinating on screens, is concerned with screen time. In particular, it discusses postdigital temporal rhythms, or the ways in which people experience time on, at, with, and against screens. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s theory of time, Chapter 6 situates durational time within a new, postdigital context, where free-flowing subjective time on screens is mediated by what Bergson terms qualitative multiplicity. These ideas are discussed against a backdrop of reflections from crescent voices, including data processed by ATLAS.ti, which tabulates what interviewees had to say about time and memory on screens. The chapter observes a trend in interviewee responses that experiences of time on screens were very often described as being strongly intuitive. Crescent voices frequently lost track of time in habitual movements on screens, a slip which interviewees found could give comfort by offering a break from clock time. Expanding on this, the chapter elaborates how screens disrupt notions of time as a predictable, measurable entity.