Tech-Talk with Prof. Judy Wacjman at Darwin College
The Technology & New Media Research Cluster is hosting an event with distinguished Professor Judy Wajcman (LSE).
Date: Thurs 10 March 2022, 5pm
Location: Darwin College, Old Library
Title: "Optimizing Temporal Capital: How Big Tech Imagines Time as Auditable". After the talk there will be room for questions and discussion.
Abstract
The belief that technology can be profitably employed to control and manage time has a long history. In this talk I show how electronic calendaring systems have become emblematic of the contemporary vision of mastering time, codifying a distinctive quantitative orientation to time. Drawing on interviews with calendar designers, I explore the quest among knowledge workers in Silicon Valley to embed a culture of temporal optimization through the use of calendaring software. Their response reveals a specific kind of technoscientific world: one fixated with solving the problem of time scarcity in contexts organized around maximizing productivity. Furthermore, this world is increasingly embracing the power of predictive data analytics and artificial intelligence. Yet rather than being the progressive act that many Silicon Valley designers posit, this move toward automating time is the latest in a series of long-standing moral attempts to subject time to a particular brand of rationalization. This orientation to, and valorization of, the fast-paced, full life requires incessant performance on our part and the relentless pursuit of self-enhancement. In other words, positing that time has now become fodder for pattern recognition, I argue that calendaring software configures time events as auditable data that is ripe for accounting in the service of both old and new forms of socially-constructed optimization.
About the Speaker
Prof Judy Wajcman is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at LSE and a Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, where she is the Principal Investigator on the Women in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence research project. She is a Visiting Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and a member of the AI100 Standing Committee.