Cyberspace Time and Infertility Thoughts on Social Time and the Environment

This essay uses a personal experience of infertility as a metaphor for a deepening societal alienation, as work and other social activities are increasingly disembodied from grounded, face-to-face contexts into asynchronous bit-actions, the tempo of which is driven by the lightning speed of global digital communication. A history of modern and even postmodern time and its social-conditioning effects, the discourse on technological change (and attendant objective, disembodying language), and new reproductive technologies are discussed, as are possible ways of recovering a sense of time as experience and human memory, and applying this to a renewed social science of implicated participation.