Time and the Nation: Conceptualizing the Temporal Effects of a Global Media System

The vast expansion of the electronic media—and especially the rapid growth of digital media—in the last decades have brought about vast changes in the ways people interact and the spaces they inhabit. However, this article argues that in a mediated world, where technology has for all practicality conquered space, the temporal dimension, that is, communication across time, is all too often overlooked. As more and more scholarship on globalization looks at ways in which digital media are blurring the local and the distant, the public and the private, the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ of social interaction, I make a case for the importance of investigating the temporal dimension of communication in the construction, development and maintenance of societies. As this article argues, despite the importance an understanding of time has played in theories about cultural and social development, little work has been undertaken by media and communication scholars to investigate ways that the electronic and digital media articulate a community’s relation to the past. Hence, this article brings together a varied body of literature from diverse fields of inquiry that have focused on different aspects of these issues. While many of these works have often been cited, the article does a rereading in order to excavate some of their central, yet overlooked, ideas in an attempt to construct a framework for understanding the temporal arrangement of communication in society and the nature of the media’s role in these arrangements.