Time, Technology and Globalization
Soraj Hongladarom						Michael R. Kelly
Department of Philosophy					Department of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts						Collins Hall
Chulalongkorn University					Fordham University
Bangkok 10330, Thailand					Bronx, NY 10458
hsoraj@chula.ac.th						aikelly@fordham.edu						
I. Introduction
	People often talk that time changes everything. But what is perhaps more interesting is how cultural conceptions of time, which both construct and are constructed by social custom, are changing.  In this era of globalization, with the phenomenal growth and power of the Internet, it appears that time itself is changing very rapidly.  And this change has profound implications for the developing identities of local cultures. We would like to be able to show in this paper that time is also a victim of globalization and technological drive.  
We are not concerned with physical time, the object of study for physics, or the individual subjective experience of time.  Nor do we claim the existence or non-existence of physical time.  Our argument is concerned with the role time plays in forming certain kinds of society and culture, how a culture's conceptions of, and attitudes toward, time shape its historical and social conditions; in short, time as constituted by social and cultural practices.  We realize that the issue of the Internet's impact on social conceptions of time is subtler than a capricious denouncing of this technology.  What we propose, then, is a critical approach to understanding how the globalized time of the Internet alters a culture's local time.  
Global time, in our view, is constituted by the hegemony of one set of practices over others.  The Western solar calendar represents global time in that it is accompanied by the spread of one set of practices at the expense of others throughout the globe.  The advent of the Internet, it tends to be thought, merely complicates and radicalizes the problem.  We suggest, however, that the western expanse of power throughout the globe was made possible by technology, which first made possible the mode of time measurement characteristic of global capitalism, but now has become the latter's servant.  Clearly, it is too early in the age of information to offer either a Luddite's uncritical rejection or a technophile's fetishistic acceptance of the Internet and its hegemonic or liberating capacities; yet two main possibilities appear on the fore as the most likely outcomes of the Internet's global presence, and we would like to argue for an intermediate position. 
	The first follows what Feenberg has termed the substantivist's view.  Substantivists maintain the non-neutrality of technology and claim that it advances automatically in a unilinear, hegemonic direction.  Accordingly, substantivists maintain that the global time of the Internet threatens to eradicate the traditions and differences that constitute the infiltrated culture's identity.1  The second possibility follows from multi-culturalism's belief that differences between and within cultures are ineliminable, even in the face of rapid technological imperialism.2  Indeed, proponents of cultural criticism often evidence their position by highlighting the growing awareness and appreciation of cultural difference made possible by the very tool substantivists wish to charge with homogenizing the world and reducing cultural difference to the dominant, western model.  
	Yet, as Feenberg rightly objects, demonstrating the limits of techno-rationality and the persistence of cultural particularities cannot settle the question concerning the potentially victimizing or liberating capacity of technology, the Internet in this case.  Feenberg contends that cultural differences must extend beyond trite nuances—he mentions as irrelevant American and Japanese disagreement on the relative merits of sushi for future generations—to fundamental difference (Feenberg 1999, 13). It appears to us that differing conceptions of time, which inform such cultural particularities, hold the key to beginning to find differences that may qualify as fundamental. 3 
This essay will focus on the place of cultures and the roles they play in this changing conception of time. On the one hand, we propose that individual cultures cannot afford to let their conception of time and their ways of measuring it become the victim of these seemingly irresistible forces of global time.  On the other hand, we suggest that any attempt to resist the threat of a cultural overhaul by the potentially hegemonic aspects of global time requires a familiarity with, and some degree of assimilation to, this new mode of time. The purpose of the present study is, then, to meditate on the seemingly antithetical desires of preserving traditional conceptions of time and their corresponding social practices, while integrating the new global time of technology. Since identity and tradition often run counter to globalization and globalization requires at least some changes in tradition and identity, the dilemma can be acute. We believe that to reconcile these conflicting pulls and to resolve the dilemma is one of the most urgent tasks facing local cultures of the world nowadays.

II. Time and Technology:  The Rise of the Linear Conception of Time

	We look at time neither as part of physical reality, nor as temporality (i.e., as individually and subjectively experienced), but as part of what John Searle calls "social reality."  In The Construction of Social Reality, Searle argues that social reality is constituted by institutional facts where the latter essentially depend on human agreement and human institutions for their existence, thus differing from physical reality, which does not depend on such agreement or institutions.4  In this sense, socio-cultural conceptions of time are akin to money and law in that they need social and cultural institutions for their existence, while the physical time itself is part of what Searle, following Anscombe, calls 'brute facts.'5 Examples of time as part of social reality can be found in how a culture measures time and on what members of a culture think about time. In the West, time is divided into the familiar years, months, days and hours; however, in ancient Thailand, one day is divided into 30 natees, each natee containing 48 minutes.6  The duration of one hour, therefore, is not part of the physical reality (as evidenced by the relativity of measurement), because one day can be divided into 24 hours or 30 natees, according to which system one is using. The natees, moreover, are something that can be referred to as if they were objective (for example, in telling the time and setting up appointments); hence they are part of social reality. 
	The rapid spread of capitalism across the globe, spurred on by the force of globalization, especially through the Internet, has engendered profound changes and disruptions in the lives and cultures of the people, mostly in the Third World countries, who have to contend with a clash between their traditional conception of time and the newer one coming to them with globalization.  One clear illustration of this is that Thai people stopped using the natee system at least a century and a half ago, when they decided to adopt the western clock and calendar in order better to deal with Europeans. What we are concerned with in this paper is that, with the spread of globalization, even the little that remains of a culture's indigenous conception of time may be obliterated. But we are also proposing that the two can live together and how.
	Soon afterwards every corner of the world followed this system and largely abandoned their traditional ways of time keeping. Together with the natee system, the lunar calendar fell from normal, everyday use in Thailand, and was replaced by the Western, solar-based calendar. Today the lunar calendar only remains in use in religious circles, e.g., in telling Buddhist holidays, or for monks to observe their religious practices. 
	Thai culture has been changing very fast, and how it changes is certainly not unique. Since time is integral to how members of a culture view themselves, changing cultures happen together with changing conceptions of time. In the past, the Thai conception of time emphasized the character of continuity.7 They believed in continuity across life, traditions and the environment from ancestors into endless future generations. In this sense, time stands still and is taken for granted.  Influenced by a Buddhist cosmology wherein the universe consists of different levels of hells and heavens, with the earth in the middle, this model of time appears analogous to other pre-modern models (Plato's and Aristotle's come to mind) in that it emphasizes continuity and hierarchical structure-and a corresponding intellectual and moral authority—rather than dynamism.8 In the west, ancient and medieval cosmologies understood time as merely the moving image of eternity.  In the sublunary sphere of the cosmos, time manifested itself as a series of discrete, incessant points marching forward and poorly imitating the perfect circular motion of the unchanging supralunary sphere.  All action, all purpose in life as it played itself out in the sublunary realm imitated  and was oriented towards the authority and perfection of the unmoved mover, or, later, the Judeo-Christian God.  
Such conceptions of time fall from prominence, however, during the rise of modernity—which was made possible by technological advances both as regards time-technologies (e.g., the mechanical clock) and other technologies in the service of science (e.g., the telescope)—although for the Thais this event occurs at a much later date and in a slightly different way than it does for the west.   The linear view of time had begun asserting its prominence in the west well before the hierarchical and circular view of time had been fully effaced, and time-technologies played a big hand in this transition. 
	As Don Ihde has noted, time technologies appeared very early on in human civilization.  Lunar calendars, sundails and water clocks all constitute early time technologies. These primitive time technologies reflected some "natural rhythm" of the progression of time, but also began to "technologically mediate that progression."9  Though common enough today that they are scarcely noticed, the mechanical clock took center stage in medieval times, continuing the technological trajectory of mediating time experience in order to make it more accurate and easier to regulate. Indeed, early mechanical clocks served the needs of Christian monks, who sought an effective way to coordinate and regulate their prayers and other activities more precisely than through relying on nature alone.10  Coupled with the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo—both of whom depended upon perception extending technologies for their discoveries—time technologies would soon undermine the truth of the ancient and medieval cosmos, divorcing time from its astronomical context and its corresponding moral truths. While early time technologies disclosed the rhythmic progression of nature, the heavens and its movements were now to be measured and time according to the standard of technology (Ihde 1993, 57).  Despite being linearly measured itself, the morally oriented time of the monk would soon be replaced by the modern Newtonian conception of objective time indifferent to any transcendent authority.
	On the modern conception, time becomes a successive series of linear, irreversible, iterable, and empty points carrying no inherent value, for, according to Newton, time resembles an absolute, empty container that allows for a clear distinction of past, present and future. What is meant by 'modern' in this case is the new conception of time gradually replaced the ancient conception, first in the West and then in the other parts of the world. The modern, Newtonian conception was part and parcel of the emergence of the modern world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  With the onset of the industrial revolution, the clock becomes increasingly important and assumes a larger role in human experience, for it enabled owners and factory managers to measure the amount of work, which was essential to quantifying labor. As Lewis Mumford notes in Technics and Civilization, "the mechanical clock made possible the idea of regular production, regularworking hours and a standardized product."11 
	The change in how time was conceived paralleled that in the beliefs and the attitudes of the people toward themselves and the world. In the ancient, cyclical conception of time, new, original developments were not possible; everything and every event was simply an expression of metaphysical reality that has always existed. But the confidence of the modern mindset in changing and developing the world could not have arisen without this new conception of time which opens up possibilities of striking bold new paths that have not existed before. Indeed, the industrialized way of life contrasted sharply with and was totally foreign to the agrarian sensibility that measured the amount of work by the quantity of produce harvested. With the absences of a moral authority governing time and human actions therein, the modern, industrial conception of time also gave rise to an individualistic sensibility that emphasized 'bettering oneself,' particularly materially.  It is this hybrid of the modern view of time and its industrial application, i.e., the modern capitalist form of time, which gets exported to other, non-western cultures, Thai culture in our case.
	Instead of the cyclical conception of time where everything will eventually return (no matter how long it takes) this new conception emphasizes time as unidirectional. In the cycle, there is in fact no real distinction between past, present and future. If time is indeed a cycle, then no matter how much one tries to change the future, the attempt will always be futile. Not surprisingly, then, under the influence of the old conception there was little incentive to work hard and achieve material progress, since the future is believed to be similar to the present.  Yet for a poor Thai, the influence of this new, western model of modern, linear time means that she must migrate to the urban areas in search of a better paying job, and that time is now measured in terms of working hours in a factory. Rather than working in a field on an unending cycle, she finds herself measuring her life according to a quantified amount of time translating into wages.  
Yet a remarkable feature of contemporary Thai society is that these notions of time coexist.  A villager from a rural area lives under the pre-modern conception of time.  In most cases, however, she goes to Bangkok in search of jobs and returns home during the summer Thai New Year holiday to stay with her family, shuffling between the modern conception of time in Bangkok and the traditional one back home.  With such technologies as the Internet, however, globalization comes in much more varied form than in the 19th century. Thai culture now faces a new set of challenges. 
	With the Internet there seems to be a sense in which a new conception of time emerges, one characterized more as a net or a web than the moving arrow of modernity or the circle mirroring eternity of antiquity. A radicalization of the 'time as arrow' metaphor arises with the advent of the Internet.  The Internet differs markedly from the older communication technologies, such as the telegraph, telephone or two-way radio,  insofar as it allows for the possibility of transferring texts, images, sounds, video clips, computer files and anything that can be digitalized at the speed of light (allowing, of course, for occasional congestion of the bandwidth). The telephone and two-way radio are both 'synchronous' means of communication, meaning that they require the  presence of both parties at the time of communicating. The telegraph, on the other hand, allows for 'asynchronous' communication, in that the message can be transmitted to the receiving end but required decoding and typing out the message in order to complete the transmission. The Internet, by contrast, does all these seamlessly, thus very rapidly accelerating the process of communication. Moreover, the Internet also enables a common person to be heard and seen all over the globe, as she puts up her own personal website on the Internet. This cannot be done with the older technologies. 
Hence, instead of a single, linear picture where a single strand of time incessantly presses ahead, many strands of times now exist together. This, of course, does not mean that there are a number of 'physical' times all existing side by side. It means, instead, that the Internet and other communication technologies have begun to make it possible for many social and cultural conceptions of time to coexist; indeed, the same power of the new communication technologies that drive globalization and threaten to homogenize cultures also allows for various localities to assert their identities and agendas, thereby opposing the very homogenizing force that the Internet itself appears to engender, "substituting control from below for bureaucratic control from above” (Feenberg 1999, 224).

III. The Net, Strands of Time and Cultural Difference

	In The Information Age,12 Manuel Castells documents in detail the impact of information and communication technologies on how time is understood. Castells calls the new kind of time "timeless time,"13 the time occurring "when the characteristics of a given context, namely, the informational paradigm and the network society, induce systemic perturbation in the sequential order of phenomena performed in that context" (Castells 1996, 464.)  His point is that electronic communication enables time to be disconnected from locality.  Furthermore, Castells views the new kind of time as belonging to "the space of flows, while time discipline, biological time, and socially determined sequencing characterize places around the world, materially structuring and destructuring our segmented societies" (Castells 1996, 465). Time ceases to be connected with place when everything flows at a very high speed, particularly when financial survival depends upon a culture's conformity to the speed of global time, i.e., the time in which the world's interconnected and computer-mediated activities, taken as a whole, take place. Global time here is not an abstraction; it is a concrete entity (in the sense that Searle's institutional facts can be concrete), since it is constituted by the global practices such as financial transactions. An American who invests in the Tokyo Stock Exchange may stay awake at night watching the market. For him the fact that the transaction is taking place at, say, 2 AM in his time zone does not really matter. What does matter is that his close monitoring of the market effectively connects him to Japan Standard Time. To the American trader, Japan Standard Time thus can be regarded as his own local time. As he immerses himself in the actions of the Tokyo market, watching what transpires through his computer screen, he somehow plugs himself to the Tokyo time and loses himself from his own time zone where he is physically present. For him, time is indeed money because if he did not stay awake at 2 AM at his own time zone he would not be able to make any money from the Tokyo market. And, of course, he shares this attitude toward time and money with all those who are trading at the same time in the market.
	To illustrate further, an Apple iMac has the ability to connect to time-servers around the world to set its clock.  A Thai, for example, no longer needs to listen to the nationally broadcast radios for her time announcements in order to set her watch.  She can be in Thailand but can tell the time by looking at her iMac, which shows very accurate time through its connection with a time-server not physically located in Thailand at all.  Thus the time on her office computer gets the information about the current time from a remote server in another country.  So there is a sense in which the Thai is not located in Thailand, although she is physically present in the country. Thai time is thus set by global time, and hence there is a congruence between the two, in the same way as the natee system was abandoned in favor of the familiar Western way of time keeping.  Here, the Thais' adoption of the 24-hour a day system and the setting of their computer clocks through the remote time-servers share the same characteristic in that both are cases of a locality participating in global time, for both are constituted by (either free or forcible) emulations by the non-western cultures of those of the West. The situation is very different from the remote past when time of day was learned by watching the sun or the stars, or in the city by listening to the daily blast of the canon, which occurred every day at noon. The sun, the stars, or the daily firings of canons are all tied to specific places. One watches the sun and measures its position to tell the time. But the time varies from longitude to longitude as the earth rotates, keeping sun-measured time strictly local. But with the global electronic network, the sun, or the stars, or the daily cannon blast, in short, the local, ceases to be relevant. When one sets one's time according to the remote server through the Internet, time seems to be disconnected from place. 
	Consequently, the Internet makes it possible for there to be many different local times happening together. The American stock trader monitoring and participating in the Tokyo market through live broadcast shares some aspects of his Japanese counterpart’s locality on the floor of the market.  The Thai who owns the apple iMac and sets his computer's internal clock through the connection to remote time-servers thus (in a sense) shares some sort of locality with the servers also.  However, the point is that global time—as it emerges from the practices of a hegemonic culture and then is emulated and followed by others—also becomes local to some extent.  It is not an empty abstraction. When the Thai connects to the remote time-server, he loses touch with the physical reality that envelops him. He ceases to look at the sun to tell time, but to his internet-connected computer. Local time, as time constituted by strictly local practices such as watching the sun or the stars, seems to lose out against the practices brought about through the communication technologies. 
	Still, this is not the whole picture. Mike Sandbothe argues that while the Internet certainly makes possible the perpetuation of the typically tyrannical one-to-many communication channel (like the television and radio), it also opens the many-to-many communication channels where locals can communicate and coordinate their activities; in fact, it is the latter that has become prominent with the Internet.14 Hence, a new conception of time where local agendas can become much more visible appears. This condition, we submit, could hardly be accounted for by the dominant conception of time as a single strand of forward moving points, since the single strand conception seems to accord more with there being only one dominant conception of time. The proliferation of local agendas, which already include socio-cultural conceptions of time, seems to call for a new thinking about time that allows for the possibility that there exists multilayered, multithreaded conception of time. 
	It might seem paradoxical that when the local benefits from the global and incorporates the latter within its domain, the conception of time which is a part of this local/global interplay should be multilayered and multithreaded. For it should be part of the local instead. However, the fact that the local co-opts the global within its domain does not mean that the local completely absorbs the latter. On the contrary, the very fact that the local co-opts or absorbs the latter (to the extent that this is possible at all), shows that the local itself does not remain completely unchanged. For example, Thais can participate in the worldwide financial transaction, which operates on the one-to-many model under the one modern capitalist conception of time, and soon afterwards go to a Buddhist temple to meditate, and, metaphorically, enter a wholly different time.15 In this case, neither conception of time remains static. The local conception changes as a result of interaction with the world; furthermore, the global conception also changes because of the interaction with the local.
	A salient aspect of current globalization is such that there are ongoing contests between globalization and localization. Robertson calls this condition 'glocalization,'16 meaning that the two are but alternate sides of the same coin, a kind of action and reaction dialectic that always accompany each other.  When the Internet appears to make way for a complete globalization, a strong movement against it typically arises. Curiously, it is the Internet itself that makes such resistance and movement toward localization possible. As the Internet makes many-to-many communication possible, where one does not have to own a television network to be able to convey one's thoughts and ideas across to one's peers all over the world. This characteristic of the Internet also enables groups of like-minded people to organize themselves through the network, as can be seen in the multitude of usenet newsgroups and e-mail discussion groups on a very large variety of topics and interests. And there exist many research works documenting the emergence of this kind of organization as a counterbalance against the force of globalization in many areas. These self-forming networks of civic groups, joined together through the communicative capability of the Internet, thus points to an encouraging scenario where the common people are armed at least with some tangible means by which they can organize and resist globalization in their own way.   
	As a result of the infusion of information and communication technologies, time ceases to be connected with place. That, however, does not mean that time is completely cut off from locality. Instead, it is the information and communication technologies themselves, which, paradoxically, make possible both the connection and separation of time and place. This paradox occurs on two levels.  First, the very means by which time gets severed from locality also may serve local groups and local needs attempting to reassert the time of the local.  In the event that a resistance movement arises and proves successful, global time and local time now coexists. Yet we can explain this paradox by the fact that the time that is disconnected from locality is 'global time,' which is contrasted with 'local time,' a time, such as the Thai's old agrarian cycle of rice planting and harvesting, which is bound to locality. Global time, then, seems to exist side by side with a number of local times throughout the globe-except for those places that categorically refuse the push of modernization, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban regime-and the very mode of transmission that makes possible the severance of local time from place enables local agendas to voice their resistance to this divorce.

IV. Time and Ethics 

	Is the situation where local time ceases to exist, replaced by global time measured through the information and communication technologies, a cause for concern? And if it is indeed the case that the world is characterized more accurately as operating under a web of global and local time, rather than the former exclusively, then is the globalization of time still a cause for concern? Our thought is that globalization of time is indeed a cause for concern, especially if time is considered as a function of society and culture, and not as part of the objective physical reality only. Viewed this way, even Newtonian time itself is richly connected with the socio-historical settings that gave rise to the industrial revolution and guns and steel, two of the three key elements that Jared Diamond discusses in his book as responsible for the rise of Europe in the past five centuries.17 For, along with the essentially modern faith in 'progress' and 'development,' it is the conception of time as an absolute container that allowed for a clear distinction of past, present and future and Hence, when the current technologies are changing how time is understood, what changes is not only time itself, but the whole socio-cultural settings within which time plays an integral part. When understanding and conceptions of time change, so do the society and the culture.
	Given that a narrow percentage of the western, capitalistic archipelago dictates the course of global time, as global time becomes more profuse, local cultures that hope to maintain any kind of economic stability find themselves forced to become global too. This happens despite the fact that local cultures are able to assert their identities and agenda through the Internet. Local cultures again find themselves confronted with the paradox that the preservation of their values and traditions, which are conditioned by and condition the local conception of time, remains contingent upon some degree of assimilation to the irresistible forces of the medium that drives global time. In order for the voices of those opposing globalization to be heard, those voices need to merge with globalization, or perhaps more accurately into glocalization, to use Robertson's term. This can be seen in the way non-governmental organizations (NGOs) associated with the United Nations are using the technology to organize global protests against globalization.
However, the merging of globalization and localization is not something about which we can unqualifiedly be happy. The constant dialectic of the process means that it is at least difficult for the globalizing force to realize their agenda.  And since the opposing party's political and financial strength trumps that of the local, the conflict appears to favor the former in any case. What seems particularly worrisome about this trend is that global time now approaches global domination, if not militarily, then culturally and mentally.18 As Paul Virilio has noted, "worldwide time ... devalues the local time of immediate activity," making strangers of those things, persons and traditions closest to us.19  When every corner of the world dances to the same tempo, watches the same clock (or clocks) set to the same universal (financial) time server, or is 'synchronous' with everywhere at the same time, what would this prospect look like but a place where global domination is complete? 
	When the time of the current globalization era appears to follow the universal (financial) time-server, when everywhere merges together under the same time frame, local particularities suffer the most. Even though they could use the very means of domination for resistance, the situation is irreversibly different from the time before the current information and communication technologies, when cultures were more effective in erecting boundaries protecting their identities and consciousnesses. This is so because the less pervasive technologies before the Internet were much less effective in changing how locals thought and believed. The instantaneous movement and mass dispersal of texts, images, sounds, and video streams, along with the possibility of interactive communication, seems to make the Internet a much more effective means of influencing ideas than, say, the printed media or even the television. This is so because, in a situation where a locality is totally infused with the Internet, thoughts and ideas naturally spread very easily and rapidly; hence it is conceivable that in such a situation the influence of the Internet would be much more pervasive than in another one where it does not spread as much, even though there are also pervasive use of other communication technologies such as the television, radio and the print media.  Since the Internet is much more effective in transmitting information, and especially since it enables many-to-many communication, the spread of thoughts and ideas would presumably result in a network of minds all seemingly connected to one another. 
Thus, a local culture may not have been able to resist the gun-boats of the colonialists, but they largely thought and believed as their ancestors had done, because those who came with the gunboats did not come primarily with the intention of changing the minds and consciousness of those they were out to colonize. What they aimed at was more basic, raw material, open access to market, and the like. They did not aim at influencing the mindset or the attitudes of the local people, as the globalizers today seem to be doing, either consciously or not. However, with the new media and communication technologies, the possibility of absolute control is not actually a far fetched one. In Imperial China, putting every corner of the empire under the same clocks and calendars symbolized the absolute power of the Emperor over all his subjects. Hence, it is tempting to think that the contemporary world, where clocks in PCs are set through the Internet to one of only a few time server machines mostly located in the West is dominated by the West through its role in setting the time, just as all of China once was ruled by the Emperor who proclaimed the time and the calendar for his empire. 
	The question of time in the age of information, then, becomes another aspect of the question of global equality or inequality in general. More specifically, it concerns the question of the threat to fundamental cultural identities and difference worldwide. In Reinventing the Wheel, Peter Hershock talks about 'colonization of consciousness,' where the western-dominated media influences the thinking of local people to such an extent that they, perhaps unconsciously, follow the patterns of thinking of the west.20 Hershock draws an example from his experience in Indonesia, where he found a Balinese girl to be a fan of the American series McGyver, but appeared to know little about the epic Ramayana, which formed the core of her Hindu belief. (Hershock 1999, xi). If there is indeed a disparity of power between those who control the media and those who do not, then this inequality calls for action. And, as we have seen, the Internet plays an ironic role in both allowing for the globalizing forces to unleash their power and at the same time enabling locals to resist it. Here the crucial point is that the locals need to be connected to the Internet. This requires electricity, computers, Internet service providers, telephone network and, most importantly, skills and attitudes that motivate locals to realize the anti-globalizing tendencies of the Internet. In short, fighting the pernicious aspects of the Internet requires that local cultures compromise their stances toward development and globalization. Members of a culture cannot decide to turn their backs against electricity and telephone and still expect the Internet to be their ally in their resistance to globalization.
	Discussions of the possible impact of information and communication technologies on consciousnesses and belief systems necessitate what we would like to call an ethics of time. This is an investigation of both empirical and more importantly normative issues surrounding how time—as a function of how a society organizes its activities and how it views itself—and human values are related and mutually construct one another. Industrial time not only enslaves those who measure every moment of their lives according to the clock, but also those in the so-called less developed societies have begun to feel the pinch of the globalized time and time keeping. Financial transactions are conducted at the speed of light, transcending and ignoring national boundaries or boundaries of cultural entities. Here, in the cyber-world of instant stock trades, cultural difference fades into the background. Market experts, however, might contest this point, suggesting instead that facilitating business transactions largely depends upon recognizing cultural differences and traditions. Failure to demure to the Japanese corporate figurehead or to recognize the volatility of a political debate at a business meal with Latin American executives surely would complicate, perhaps even foil, relations. The question, then, rests with the authenticity of the recognition of such fundamental differences in cultural practice.  For too often the acknowledgement of such cultural particularities amounts to a commodification of them insofar as—to culturally paraphrase the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative—the cultural identity becomes a means [to facilitating financial transactions] rather than an end valued in itself. What are the normative issues involved in such events? How should we human beings who inhabit this world together act in face of them? These are some of the questions of the ethics of time.

V. Between Globalization and Isolation

	When a local culture recognizes the need to integrate with others in the world and at the same time its need to protect its identity vis-à-vis other, more powerful cultures, a dilemma is created. The way out is that, local cultures can have it both ways. Since it is possible for the cultures to realize their particular agenda through the Internet, cultures indeed can and should maintain their distinctive identity and at the same time merge with others economically and even culturally. What this means is that cultures cannot realistically erect walls around themselves and shut themselves off from influences from other cultures. And at the same time they should try to protect their own identity vis-à-vis the other, often more powerful, cultures.  Thus, a philosophical analysis is here needed to find out how these apparently opposing demands are to be met.  In any case, that a culture should try to protect some form of its identity follows from the fact that, were cultures’s substantial differences allowed to be lost, we would end up with a single, giant monolithic culture.
	This proposal is not the simple juxtaposition of the different conceptions of time in the same cultural entity. It is not the case that we can lock up the traditional conception of time such as those described in the Buddhist or Greek cosmology and go on with the global conception. The global conception seems, prima facie, all encompassing. Even the past can occur in the consciousness of members of the globalized culture as something that occurs in global time. This is apparent in cases where even longed for 'times' of the past are commodified and made use of economically. For example, Thai traditional dances are bundled into packages, taken out of their roots and contexts, and presented to diners in an expensive restaurant as mere entertainment. The past is made use of as a commodity to divert the present and to make money. The past in a sense exists in the present. (And certainly Hollywood, among others, has also commodified the future for the enjoyment of the present; witness the rash of future-oriented science fiction movies.)
	The proposal we have in mind, on the other hand, respects the integrity of the past (and the future) and its time. There is a dynamic relation consisting of constant negotiations and renegotiations of the past and the present, of local time and global time. The internal dialectic of globalization (or glocalization) should be carefully nurtured so as to provide locals with effective means to resist complete globalization and to protect their identities. Thus, instead of bundling the traditional dance as an entertainment package for tourists, the traditional dance should be allowed to retain its meaning in such a way that it becomes neither relics from the past, nor mere entertainment package. Such meaning can be found, for example, in the way the dances are integrated into the meaning-making activities of the culture. Perhaps the dances themselves would be innovated or newly choreographed such that it provides the audience with a sense of community, ties with the past, or an occasion for making sense of their surroundings in the same way that all meaningful artistic creations do. The only meaning for the packaged dance in the restaurant seems to be that it provides diversion and entertainment with no deeper meaning and certainly no enrichment. This is dance with its own life and meaning. Local time, time tied to particular places, thus finds its niche in today's globalized world as still tied to the same place (or, in case of diaspora, transported together with the members of the migrant culture). Local time in this sense develops its own internal logic. It is not locked up in enclaves of so-called 'preserved past' where its loses all its meanings. On the contrary, it remains vibrant and active in its role of informing how the society anchored by it views itself and how it functions.
	One way of doing this is to find a way for global time not to be all encompassing. The way can be found when one realizes that anything global is necessarily too vague and unspecific to have real meanings to lives in a locality. Imagine a possible all pervasive and all encompassing global network of everything. Here is the possible scenario of the end of globalization, where anything anywhere is the same, where there are no differences in cultures whatsoever. In this situation, humans cease to be the kind of humans that we have all been aware of. If anything anywhere is the same, then all humans would be the same. But since living does not occur only on the global network, there always remains the kind of living one has always been doing, and it is this living that singles out local cultures and makes it the case that global culture or global time cannot be that all encompassing. One still contacts and interacts with one's peers whom one can touch in the flesh (the real flesh, not the virtual one made possible by the global network). One still shares stories, traditions and prejudices, which one would be reluctant to do with strangers, or just anybody who happens to be on the network. The big thing that differentiates the two is that the former is not mediated by the computer connected to the network. It is a difference between touching someone naturally and seeming to touch someone else through prosthetic devices. 
	The point is this:  If this difference alluded to is a viable one, then there is a world of difference between global time and local time. Global time in this sense exists as an important tool by which a local culture connects to other local cultures. But the local cultures still remain local, for it is always easy and preferable in many cases, to touch someone directly. This, however, does not mean that to connect to members of one's family always needs to take place locally. One can certainly "connect" to one's close relatives and friends through the Internet and, of course, the older technology of the phone. This aspect alludes to a dimension of communication technologies that fosters closeness and the power to resist global agenda discussed earlier in the paper.
	Hence local times always have a role to play. The two times exist side by side. One may, however, suspect whether being able to touch someone (either directly or through some kind of mediation or not) is sufficient for maintaining the identity of a particular culture. But touching is only one aspect of direct communication and living together that constitutes a local culture. One touches others; one also talks to, argues with, bargains with, gets angry with, or falls in love with others, all without the mediation of the global network. And these many connections between people constitute a culture. Since these communicative acts usually happen close to the place where the members live, members who already share quite a lot of traditions and stories together, local identities are thus carried on and transmitted. These obviously cannot be preserved intact, but for cultural identities to become meaningful they need to be responsive to outside changes. In the case of members of a culture living far from the original place of that culture, communication technologies certainly can connect them with members of their own culture. Nonetheless, the tie would appear tenuous if they stayed away from their original culture long enough. One can certainly talk to one's relative who has decided to live abroad on the phone, but if the tie is not renewed through frequent visits it would seem that sooner or later the one living abroad will be absorbed into his or her adopted culture. So real contacts still remain important. 
	Therefore, a middle way between globalization and isolation is available. On the one hand, local cultures feel that they need to integrate somehow into the globalized economy, which implies living within the framework of global time. On the other hand, local cultures can preserve their identities vis-à-vis the changes. Times exist as a web in at least two different layers. 
	In this case, humans are not trapped within a deterministic scenario of time technology, so to speak. This is so because, in realizing the conceivability and plausibility of the local and the global to exist side by side, one is free to determine how much of the global and how much of the local one would like to have. It is indeed the case that in order for a local culture to adopt the time keeping practices of another, the local culture has to amend many of its own traditional ways of doing things. But then there is no one necessary course of action that one must follow. One has always to deliberate on what one finds to be the proper balance between the global and the local in one's own situation. The Thais apparently solved this problem through segmenting their activities without thereby worrying that these differing systems conflict with one another or not. By putting the use of the lunar calendar to the Buddhist practices, adopting the Western calendar in daily lives and engaging in the sleepless global financial transactions all at the same time, Thais seem to have stricken what they find to be a workable solution of keeping their own identity and at the same time participating in the global transactions too. Other cultures might decide to do it differently. No matter how a culture decides, the picture is clearly not a deterministic one of a culture being imposed on a foreign set of practices without there being any alternatives.

VI. Conclusion

	One might imagine a child spending minutes watching a clock and its ticking hands, and one can also easily imagine the same child when she grows up glancing at a digital clock on her computer to know the time, perhaps on her way to an appointment. Is the time shown on her iMac global or local? It depends. As part of the global time network, it could be an instrument of global domination. But, glancing at the time on her iMac, our grown woman clearly can depend on it to organize local settings, to perform very local activities with her circle of friends and acquaintances. Technologies bring local times together under the same network, but they can be harnessed, we believe, so as to yield to local needs and purposes. In many cases locals do not need to follow the time standard set from far away, for there are times when we do not feel we need to connect to those far away, but instead to those whom we can touch directly, flesh to flesh. In these cases, time ceases to follow the global time zone and stays in a zone of its own.21

Endnotes

1  Verbeek, Peter-Paul.  "Don Ihde: The Technological Lifeworld." In American Philosophy of Technology, ed. H. Achterius.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, 133.
2  Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology.  New York: Routledge, 1999, 13.
3  Trite nuances, of course, are those differences between cultures that are not substantial and are in fact merely differences on the surface without any real differences in values or beliefs, which can well be fundamental. Thus the Chinese may believe that the family or the group should take precedence over the individual in many cases of value judgement, while the Europeans may prefer the latter. This is a fundamental difference. However, when the Chinese and the Europeans disagree on what they like to eat while agreeing on these fundamental values, then the difference appear to be a trite one. Differences in conception of time would then be fundamental because it presupposes completely different set of values and belief systems. To believe that time is part of a moral universe and that time is a quantifiable commodity thus seems fundamental in this sense.
4  Searle, John.  The Construction of Social Reality.  New York: Penguin, 1995, 1-4.
5 John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 2. Searle first mentioned the distinction between institutional and brute facts in "What Is a Speech Act?" In Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965; and in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969. The notion of 'brute facts', however, is ultimately due to G. E. M. Anscombe, in "On Brute Facts", Analysis 18.3(1956). In this paper we do not argue that the social, cultural and historical conceptions of time is the same or is different from physical time. We focus more on how a culture looks at time, what their attitudes are toward time and how they measure time; in short we focus on the role the notion of time plays in a culture. 
6 Lithai, Phya. The Three Worlds of King Ruang.  Bangkok: Department of Fine Arts, B. E. 2515 [1972 AD], 265-267. The original manuscript dates from the fourteenth century.
7 Hongladarom, Soraj. 2002. "The Web of Time and the Dilemma of Globalization": The Information Society 18: 241-249.  Cf. also Mulder, Inside Thai Society: An Interpretation of Everyday Life. Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1996.
8 It is interesting to note that for both Plato and Aristotle the dynamic form of time experienced in daily human life represents something like the moving image of eternity.  It is true that Aristotle presents one of the most penetrating and enduring interpretations of dynamic time in chapter 10 of book IV of his Physics, but his cosmology places the earth at the center of a heliocentric universe and posits a perfectly circular 'movement' guided by the unmoved mover occupying the universe's outer most layer.
9 Ihde, Don. Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction.  New York: Paragon Press, 1993, 56.
10 Cf. Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1992, p. 14.
11  Cf. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963.
12 Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture.  London: Blackwell, 1996, 429-467.
13 Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, p. 464. Castells' metaphorical expression, 'timeless time,' presents a potentially misleading description of the situation, since even though electronic communication might seem as fast as light, it is not instantaneous, transmission does not occur without some lag.
14 Sandbothe, Michael.  1999. "Media Temporalities of the Internet: Philosophies of Time and Media in Derrida and Rorty": AI & Society 13.4: 421-434.  Sandbothe's claim echoes Feenberg's contention that technologies can enable minority groups to substitute "control from below for bureaucratic control from above" (Feenberg, 1999, 224).
15 One might object that this co-existence between global time and local time could also have happened in the age of industrial time before the Internet, so the situation described here is not unique. It seems quite possible that people of the industrial age could have moved between the industrial time and the traditional time of their culture. However, as Sandbothe points out, the Internet distinguishes itself to the extent that it offers the potential to give to the locals the power to assemble and to form a network that could effectively resist the force of globalization. Before the Internet, the only means of asynchronous communication, which is necessary in forming a network and in binding a community together, was the fax or the traditional mail system. However, both are too cumbersome when compared with e-mail, which is much more flexible and efficient. The telephone, for instance, provides the speed to conquer distance, but the message delivered requires at least some relays; the Internet, however, includes the benefit of both speed and mass exposure with one click of the 'mouse.' It is true, or conceivable, that in the industrial age a community could be formed utilizing the available communication technology as well as to form a kind of resistance. But the phenomenon becomes much more radicalized with the e-mail.
16  Robertson, R. "Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity." In Global Modernities, ed. M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson. London: Sage Publications, 1995, 25-44.
17 Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: A History of Everything for the Past 13,000 Years. London: Vintage, 1998.
18 Cf. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics, trans, M. Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.
19  Virilio, Paul. Open Sky, trans, J. Rose. New York: Verso, 1997, 83.  Cf. also, Open Sky, p. 20.  For a discussion of the devaluing of the near as it occurs within the dominant western world, see Michael Kelly, "Technological Drive, the Self and the Ethical," Manusya 5 (2002).
20 Hershock, Peter. Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999. p. xi.
21 An earlier draft of this paper was originally written by Soraj Hongladarom, and presented orally by Mike Kelly at the Twelfth Biennial International Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, "Nature and Technology," held at the Centre for Philosophy, Technology and Society, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, July 9-11, 2001. This paper is the result of our continued cooperation after the conference. We would like to thank the members of the audience for their helpful comments, particularly, Noel Boulting, Nigel Dower and Chen Fan. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Philosophy in the Contemporary World, whose comments led to many improvements of the paper.  Part of the research for this paper is supported by the Thailand Research Fund, under grants no. BRG/14/2544 and BRG4680020.   It might seem paradoxical that we have connected to each other from different halves of the world, one from the west and the other from the east, utilizing the very technology that is the object of our critique in order to produce the paper.  But as the paper suggests, we by no means aim at dispelling globalization or the use of information and communication technologies altogether.  Instead, we searched for a solution how the global and the local could stay together without contradiction or conflict, which we believe to be one of the most urgent tasks facing philosophers today.