Time as Data: Silicon Valley’s Quest for Temporal Optimization

• In Event: Social Constructions of Data and the Implications of Data Representation

Abstract

Digital calendars have become a new platform for time-making, time-measuring and time-keeping. They form part of the infrastructure that configures arrangements among people and things, not only exacerbating a distinctively quantitative, “spreadsheet” orientation to time, but, of late, seeking to optimize our activities through algorithmic intervention. This vision is increasingly realized in the form of intelligent digital assistants whose tracking capacities and behavioral algorithms aim to solve life’s existential problem—how best to organize the time of our lives. We draw on interviews with engineers in various high tech companies in Silicon Valley to argue that calendars and other types of scheduling systems like digital assistants are emblematic of a larger design rationale to mechanize human thought and action in order to make them more efficient and reliable.

The belief that technology can be profitably employed to control and manage time has a long history and continues to animate contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries of what automation will deliver. We assert that these imaginaries largely reflect the belief that time is an exclusively individualistic resource. This belief obscures the politics of time embedded in what can and cannot be graphically represented, encodes normative values about idealized temporal rhythms and prioritized activities, and perpetuates the driving cultural imperative for accelerated time handling. We use the case of contemporary scheduling systems’ design and use to uncover the consequences of treating time as data, while simultaneously situating these considerations within the long-standing but mistaken belief, hegemonic in Silicon Valley, that automation will deliver us more time.

Authors

• Ingrid Erickson, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

• Judy Wajcman, LSE