What arose for me when researching the pre-colonial African concept of time was the idea that although we live and operate within a linear framework of time, technology and cyberspace have began to conjure an alternative sense of time. The internet fosters what Andrew Gallix refers to as ‘non-time’, a concept that builds off of Marc Auge’s ‘non-places’.

“There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the “end of history”. Meanwhile, new technologies are dislocating more traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for instance, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence. Internet time (which is increasingly replacing clock time) results in a kind of “non-time” that goes hand in hand with Marc Augé’s non-places.” (Gallix, 2011)

In his 1992 book ‘Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity’, Marc Auge states the concept of non-places. Without directly saying it, he alludes to the cause of these non-places being late capitalism. Non-places are airports, shopping malls, motorways, train stations, for example. Places that however fascinating they are, do no confer a sense of place. Everyone feels at home within them because they are completely void of identity and equally alienating to everyone from every background. There is no relational or historical concern within these places, so it is as if they are trapped in time, a vacuum.

‘Everything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the present.’

‘The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude.’

If a non-place is a liminal void where everyone is equally alienated, then cyberspace is a digital void that mirrors non-places. Gallix referring to the internet “fostering a ghostly presence-absence” is evocative of the struggle with self-acceptance and self-worth in the age of the internet, as mindless scrolling, instant dopamine rushes and the acceleration of information seems to collapse our linear perception of time in on itself; the chronic addiction of receiving information and outputting thought in an endless cyclical manner results in our self perception becoming disembodied, our idea of ourselves being almost totally synthetic and informed by what we consume in the digital domain. This relates closely to John Locke’s blank slate theory and the Tabula Rasa, as our learned experience is almost infinitely increased by the amount of information on offer.

Gallix, Andrew (2011). Hauntology: A not-so-new Critical Manifestation. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jun/17/hauntology-critical

Auge, Marc (1992). Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Verso. Le Seuil.