Неедновременност в световното общество. Към разграничаване между традиция и модерност
Asynchronicity in World Society: on the Distinction of Tradition and Modernity

Summary/Abstract: The essay analyses certain effects of modern electronic communications media. Among these effects are the global simultaneity of events and a nearly unrestricted global communicative attainability. If one can infer from these that the dominant temporal frame of modern society is the simultaneity of events, we are dealing with an interesting restructuring of the times of the day. Time is homogenized across the difference between day and night and across the differences of time zones. Therefore the possibility of communicating and connecting to earlier communications is a global possibility given anywhere at any point of time. This is again related to a significant shift of the boundary of human civilisation from the spatial to the temporal dimension. The enormous relevance of time for the system of modern society is obviously related to social systems based on communications and, therefore, on elements which have the form of temporalized events. By the fact that social systems come to consist of events, the well-established distinction of tradition and modernity becomes relative, for from this new point of view any social system must be analysed as an entity consisting of simultaneous events and reproducing these events as an autopoietic system. This means that the traditional formula of the "asynchronicity of the simultaneous" has to be substituted by an evolutionary perspective favouring the simultaneous existence of diverse and dissimilar social possibilities.

• Details
• Contents