How Silicon Valley sets time

Abstract

Digital calendars are logistical media, part of the infrastructure that configures arrangements among people and things. Calendars increasingly play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our consciousness of temporality. Drawing on interviews with Silicon Valley calendar designers, this article explores how the conceptualization and production of scheduling applications codify contemporary ideals about efficient time management. I argue that these ideals reflect the driving cultural imperative for accelerated time handling in order to optimize productivity and minimize time wasting. Such mechanistic approaches treat time as a quantitative, individualistic resource, obscuring the politics of time embedded in what can and cannot be graphically represented on the grid interface. I conclude that electronic calendars are emblematic of a long-standing but mistaken belief, hegemonic in Silicon Valley, that automation will deliver us more time.

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