DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-037

Faculdade Cásper Líbero, São Paulo, Brazil

liliane.pellegrini@gmail.com

Abstract:

The accelerating pace of life and overcoming spatial barriers marked the history of capitalism and that seems to have caused a compression process of the two dimensions (time and space). The phenomenon of compression also reflected in the representation of the world, in a way that the perception of shrinkage experienced throughout history – the once vast world – has been reduced to a global village. This paper intends to comprehend and discuss the transformations of the representation of the world by instant communication and mobility. Therefore, the article discusses the breakdown of the two-way relationship between space and time – brought by Bauman (2000) –, the compression process presented by Harvey (1992).

Fluids or liquids neither fix space nor bind time. They do not have a pre-defined shape and they are constantly ready, and prone, to change it. As explained by Bauman (2000:2) “and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but ‘for a moment’”. And it is this mobility and inconstancy of fluids that assimilates them to the idea of lightness. In other words, the possibility of moving easier and faster as lighter we travel. (Bauman 2000).

This “liquid-modern” kind of life is a way of living at the liquid modernity presented by Bauman wherein the members act under conditions that change in a shorter time than the necessary for consolidation of habits and routines, also ways of action (Bauman 2009). This means that this society can not remain structured for a long time.

The feeling of living at a liquid atmosphere is what Bauman understands as the essence of the contemporary society. The values we follow and defend are more volatile, as the relations between people and between human being with the world they live in. The search for instantaneity, that marked the humankind for many centuries, continues even more avid. We seek to extinguish the barriers from time and from space. We want everything here and now. And yet, we cannot longer imagine a period when was necessary to wait and to grub carefully the unknown.

1. Time and space dimensions in the contemporary society

According to Bauman (2000), time as a measurable concept, as history, began in modernity. There are some examples in history that searches to explain how the time-space wedlock became two different concepts: the astronomers measuring the velocity and the distances of celestial bodies, or Newton calculating the exact relations between acceleration and the distance passed by the 'physical body', or even Kant, the philosopher, conceiving time and space as “two transcendentally separate and mutually independent categories of human cognition” (Bauman 2000:111).

While man used only natural mobility tools, the biunivocal correspondence between time and space dimensions predominated, in a way that “far” and “long”, just like “near” and “soon” were used almost as synonyms. In other words, meant the amount of effort applied in order to man walk by a certain distance. The space definition corresponded to the trajectory using resources as the human body or hunt, like riding. Time, on the other hand, was defined according to the necessary duration to travel a given space using the same resources (Bauman 2000).

The development of transportation and communication facilities, during the XIX and XX centuries, represented a rupture factor of this correspondence, due time acceleration. Faster transportation facilities, as train and automobile, reduced time of spatial displacement. Furthermore, innovations in the field of telecommunications, like the telephone and the telegraph, made it possible the immediate contact between interlocutors separated by large distances.

By the time when distance began to depend on employed technology, time acquired features of flexibility and expansiveness as opposed to space, which remained inflexible, in the sense of cannot be straightened, curled and manipulated. Because, unlikely space, the possibility and change from time has made this last component a disruption factor. It was now the dynamic polo on time-space combination.

This rupture sources, however, go back to the Industrial Revolution period, which accelerate the craft production process. The instrumental rationality of capitalism has it basis the elimination of idle and unproductive time, searching ways to accomplish tasks more quickly, and so, maximize value. Time is now a tool focused mainly to win space resistance and, then, became money. Because, as Bauman explains (2000), time shortens the distances and makes it possible to overcome obstacles and old boundaries, as desired by human ambition.

The accelerating pace of life and the overcoming of spatial barriers marked the history of capitalism in such a way that seems to have caused a compression process of the two dimensions:

as space appears to shrink to a 'global village' of telecommunications and a 'spaceship earth' of economic and ecological interdependencies - to use just two familiar and everyday images – and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of time-space compression of our spatial and temporal worlds (Harvey 1992: 240).

The compression phenomenon also reflected in the representation of the world, in a way that was experimented a shrinkage perception throughout history – what was once termed as the world wide, was reduced to a global village. According to Bauman (2000), the community can be considered in these days as “the last relic of the old-time utopias of the good society”. And it was reduced to the size of the nearest neighborhood and is now classified not by its content but by its borders. Harvey (1992) also defends this same idea and shows that transport innovations significantly influenced this change, progressively annihilate space through time, as highlighted by Harvey (1992) in the following figure:

Fig. 1: Representation of the world in four stages.

The funnel-shaped illustration shows the shrinkage of the representation of the world in four stages, relating each one of them to the speed of transportation facilities of the period. The framework developed by the author of this article, coming up, appointing each phase according to the data presented by Harvey (1992) and specifies its duration [1].

Table 1: Transportation facilities of each period.

The phase named by the author as “Vast World” lasted for a longer period compared to the others: were 350 years in which the representation of the size of the world has not changed significantly. This phase began with the great maritime voyages, resulting, among others factors, in discovery of lands and development of cartography. From the maritime exploration was being built a new world design – vast, however finite, and therefore, possible of be explored to exhaustion. The perception of vastness possibly derived from long transoceanic voyages to access distant continents from Europe.

From the “World Steam” phase, significant technological advances occurred in transportation in the range of about 100 years, until the aviation era, which started in motors for propulsion phase and is current with the jet engines of phase called “Global Village”.

This article does not intend to explore the transformations of each phase profoundly. However, for better understanding of the space-time compression phenomenon, will be presented two examples comparing the correspondence made by crossing the Atlantic Ocean, in different periods and by different kinds of transportation.

The first corresponds to the discovery era, where the vast world was still in the process of being completely unraveled by man (European) due to Iberian nautical science ingenuity. The letter written by Pero Vaz de Caminha to king Dom Manuel sharing news of Brazilian lands discovery, left for Lisbon on May 1, 1500. Due to the secret and confidentiality safeguarded the document at the time, there aren’t accurate records of the date the correspondence was received in Portugal, however, it is estimated that was at June 15. The notification of an important political event for that period, certainly treated as priority, took more than forty days to cross the Atlantic Ocean, by the faster transportation and most advanced technology of that time, the Portuguese ship.

The second example refers to the period between the two World Wars, when opened the first aero postal mail between France and South America by the mythic company Aéropostale[3], famous for performing risk achievements at the time, such as night flights, fly over the Andes and operate the first commercial flight across the South Atlantic, performed by one of the most daring pilots of the company – Jean Mermoz. On May 12, 1930, he piloted a single-engine loaded with 130 kilos of mailing pouch for 19 hours uninterrupted, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, since Senegal to Natal on the Brazilian coast. The provision of that service reduced the transport time of a letter between France and Argentina from thirty to eight days.

The technological innovations of transportation enabled the news across the world to be received more quickly, and what was once far, appeared closer, contributing to the perception of space shrinking due to the shorter physical displacement of the message (letter) by faster transportation facilities.

However, in addition, other innovations also contributed to this shrinking perception, as the development of telecommunications technologies, like the telegraph and the telephone. In this case, yet, the message could be switched instantly between geographically distant interlocutors, eliminating time travel of the spatial displacement, once necessary for the correspondence exchange.

At first, telegraphy depended on long wires and submarine cables to exchange messages. However, unlike correspondence by letter, that the delivery time was proportional to the velocity of the transportation and to the distance to be, telegraphic messages could travel by the electric fluid at the speed of 25,000 kilometers per second.

Since 1837, when the first telegraph model was patented, the difficulty of transposing spatial barriers would be restricted to the installation of wires and cables, because message could travel swiftly through this structure.

The world seemed even smaller, because events in distant places could be reported in terms next of the event date. Until then, the newspapers circulated with delays of days and weeks, because the only available means of obtaining the account of events was through correspondence, in a way that time for a message to go away impacted the term of its disclosure. An example of this can be found in the edition of the British newspaper The Times on January 9, 1845, with news reported from Cape Town eight weeks late and news of Rio de Janeiro from six weeks ago. News from New York was four weeks delayed and from Berlin, one week. With the advent of the telegraph, the flow of news information has become almost instantaneous, also inaugurating a new phase in journalism (Standage 1998).

If for centuries the communication distance was as fast as the fastest transportation of the era could travel, in 1905, according to the testimony of an Brazilian telegraph engineer (Silva 2011), it had been completed the wires and cables network required to do a telegram around the world in just nine minutes. It was established the instantaneity of communication on a global network.

Since its discovery until half of the XX century, the telegraph was the main system of long-distance communication, when it was passed over the phone, whose main advantage is the voice messaging transmission, allowing the caller to hear their loved ones who were away. Despite differences between the two systems, the instantaneity of communication, characteristic of telegraphy, also persisted on the telephony.

The time-space compression to the point of reducing the world to a global village is the striking feature of contemporary society, where the only limit not yet overcome by man is the speed of light (Virilio 1995).[4] The long effort to accelerate the speed of the movement reached its apex:instantaneity, which, in turn, is an attribute of the changing relationship between space and time.

Thus, the change that is spoken of is the fact that space has become irrelevant, thanks to time annihilation. In this contemporary world where space can be traversed instantly, the difference between 'distance' and 'here' is nullified. “Were the outcomes of human actions before they could become conditions of their effectiveness, and before they could be deployed to make yet more differences, and the differences more profound and less contestable than before” (Bauman 2000:112).

From the time it was possible to transgress the limits to movement speed; power has become extraterritorial and went on to travel with the electronic signal speed, facing no more space limitations. The development of cellular technology was significant in this meaning. For Bauman (2001), the advent of the mobile phone serves well as coup de grâce in symbolic dependence on space, because the own access to a telephone point is no longer required for an order to be given and fulfilled. The difference between “close” and “far” is about to disappear.

Although instantaneity was already present in society through communication by telegraph and telephone, and the cellular combines features of both, we highlight the following differentiation concerns about the predecessors: individuality, mobility and portability.

The first, individuality, is a device for individual use, is not shared among people established in a certain fixed point, be a residence or a company. The cell phone waives the mediation of third parties (telegraph operator, operator or person who answers the phone and finds the recipient of the call). Also, allows customization of the device, such as: ringtones, color, custom covers, screen shots, applications, etc. So, each unit, although replica of another, may be perceived as unique and exclusive, revealing the preferences and characteristics of its user.

Next, there is mobility, than can be used anywhere regardless of access to a fixed point or wires. And portability: the apparatus is lightweight and can be carried in a pocket. It monitors the user in their spatial displacement.

2. Final considerations

In a society of instantaneity and inconstancy, tomorrow is elusive, ephemeral and unreal, even used to pass credibility and hope to people. As if we used an ideal of accomplishment that will probably never materialize. Between the past and the future, the human being builds a bridge between durability and transience, living in a liquid modernity where it is necessary to assume responsibilities and live in the moment instantaneously in time and space unique.

Instant factor – classified by Bauman (2001) as “cancellation of space resistance and liquefaction of the objects materiality” – allows each moment to seem infinite. The term “long-term” is not out of our vocabulary, but seems to have lost its meaning and has each time less importance, because, if we live in a society that used and discarded things and people faster than ever, gain more time is not attractive. While the solid modernity was looking for “eternal life”, fluid modernity does not incorporate it (Bauman 2001).

The new formulation of the space-time binomial alters the human society and man's relationship with the environment. The liquid power is in who can liquefy. In other words, who has the freedom to make decisions, occupies a more prominent space and is free to move almost imperceptible. The administration in lightweight capitalism consists in keeping the labor away from space, because the software era is no longer holding any of the two dimensions, and allows freedom of movement, volatile and fickle, by its dynamic development in any space and time around the world.

Before, the time we needed to get somewhere was the same for all people, regardless of social class. This relative equality left them on the same level. With the advent of the steam engine, there is a possibility of differentiation: the one who has access to the most effective means of transportation saves time. Even today, even with space-time compression increasingly effective, geographical distances continue, but also remain differences in mode of locomotion. Besides the differentiation between modes of moving people, like car and airplane, it is necessary to take into consideration otherwise studied in this paperwork, which is communication. In this one, the search is increasingly supplying the time to put a human being in instant contact with other geographically distant through the cell phone, for example.

And is this portable and disposable device, designed to allow the constant availability and contact with the outside world of the nomadic people that represents the culture of instantaneity. Is the way we live today that values individuality, immediacy and mobility. A world where the speed of light is no longer enough.

References

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