Felipe Torres is going to present a working paper on 'Modern regimes of temporalities - A Paradox between Diversification and Homogenization'

The following is the exposure of the structure for a research project that is focused on the centrality of Modern experience on Time as structural condition on contemporary societies. In this sense this writing represents a first introduction draft for an approach on “regimes of temporality”.

As a first background, the connectivity of today's World, facilitated by the progressive advances of media and technology, creates a global atmosphere in which space and time acquire new states. Coordination between different cultural spaces requires the emergence of universal mechanisms of interaction, from a standardized global timetable to mobile communication devices, laptops, Internet access, etc. All these account for a World that is globalized though means that generate uniform frameworks for interaction. Moreover, the plurality of lifestyles that are proposed (i.e. through advertising and identity construction and the consumption of certain differentiating products) indicates a reality opposed to standardization or homogenization, with diversity as a value, a search for cosmopolitanism, and an enhancement of originality and innovation. This work suggests that this paradox is observed in a privileged way through an analysis of the experience of modern times: as a mechanism of social coordination (Elias, 1984), time tends to standardize social relations beyond elements that seek to make it measurable in order to coordinate social ties. At the same time, modern time has no "center" to the extent that society is not governed by the existence of "one" time: time is experienced differently whether we are in the East or West, North or South, and it also can depend on social classes, age groups, gender, etc. This characteristic allows us to speak of a multiplicity of times (Fabian, 1983).

How is this apparent contradiction possible? What are the possible causes of this phenomenon? These are some of the questions that the following work proposes to address.