Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 5

distant events; and our exposure to otherness, whether within our own society
or in other societies.
Individual experiences of time and space, which are themselves never stable
but highly dependent on when and where people live, work, interact, and the
cultural frames of meaning they use to bring the world into consciousness,
both draw upon and reproduce wider, social orders of meaning. In this way,
the ways in which each person creates time and space are not purely indi-
vidual a airs, for they utilize collective, irreducible social categories. More-

over, these experiences and interpretations are always heavily conditioned by
social position, class and income, education, occupational experience, gender,
ethnicity, age, sources of information, cognitive and ideological

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filters, and a
host of other factors (e.g., ability to travel). Within any society, there is always
a multiplicity of times and places, often radically di

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ff erent from one another.

Thus, time-space compression never a ects every social group identically;

what is often represented as one process is in reality a multiplicity of pro-
cesses that play out unevenly according to the prevailing dictates of power
and ideology.
Experiences of time and space are also heavily scale-dependent: how we
give meaning to the private space of our living rooms is quite di

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erent than
that which we assign to the public space of the city or global economy
(although to the informed person these di

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ff erences often dissolve); how we

interpret the last ten minutes will be signi erent than how we view

the last century. Individual perceptions of time rooted in the rhythms of
everyday life are not the same as the views of historians or scientists, who
often focus on processes that take much longer than a lifetime to unfold.
There is, of course, a great variety of types of abstract time with greater or
lesser degrees of relevance to many people's daily experiences, such as eco-
nomic time, or the length of the working day and productivity per labor hour.
Similarly, historical time exhibits a multiplicity of temporal scales; Braudel
(1979), for example, used three, including daily life unfolding at the “tempo
of individuals,” larger scales or “conjunctures” based on seasonal or annual
trends and cycles, and the largest scale, the longue durée , which he holds to be
equivalent to social structures that exceed the individual lifetime. For the
physicist, time may be measured in nanoseconds; for the geologist, in millions
or even billions of years. Lightman's (1993) delightful collection of

fi cantly di ff

fi fictional

essays o ers a dazzling array of possible time worlds, including reversible

time, time with a known end-point, time without memory, time without a
future, time in which humans live just a day, and time whose rate of passage
varies geographically.

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What is time-space compression?
Time-space compression broadly conceived involves the multitude of ways
in which human beings have attempted to conquer space, to cross distances
more rapidly, to exchange goods and information more e ciently. The