Digital technologies are having a profound effect on the temporalities of individuals, households and organisations. We now expect to be able to instantly source a vast array of information at any time and from anywhere, as well as buy goods with the click of a button and have them delivered within hours, while time management apps and locative media have altered how everyday scheduling and mobility unfolds.

Digital Timescapes makes the case that we have transitioned to an era where the production and experience of time is qualitatively different to the pre-digital era. Rob Kitchin provides a synoptic account of this transition, charting how digital technologies, in a wide range of manifestations, are reconfiguring everyday temporalities. Attention is focused on the temporalities associated with six sets of everyday practices: history and memory; politics and policy; governance and governmentality; mobility and logistics; planning and development; and work and labour. Critically, how to challenge and reorder digitally mediated temporal power is examined through the development of an ethics of temporal care and temporal justice.

Conceptually and empirically rich, Digital Timescapes is an essential guide to our new temporal regime. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Human Geography, and History and Memory Studies, as well as those who are interested in how digital technologies are transforming society.

About the Author
Rob Kitchin is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute.

Reviews

"A book rich with insights on the inexorable relationship between time, technology and power. Kitchin maps the unevenness of time in digital culture while he also reveals the inequitable unevenness, and a possible way out, of the types of time that continue to dominate the study of time."
Sarah Sharma, University of Toronto

"A much-needed book that updates and rethinks the time-technology nexus. Rob Kitchin provides an eloquent and accessible theory of time from the perspective of human geography. It was about time; we have been waiting far too long."
Anne Kaun, Professor in Media and Communication Studies, Department for Media and Communication Studies, School of Culture and Education

"Kitchin conducts a tour de force of scholarship on the concept of time...It sets a new research agenda for geographical research for a new generation of scholars. It is a book that will be of great interest to many interdisciplinary scholars on time, space and the digital."
Ayona Datta, Space and Polity

"Rob Kitchin's new book Digital Timescapes: Technology, Temporality and Society (2023) is structured around a gap, or as he puts it in the preface 'a significant omission'. The book is not only a synoptic treatment but also a response to something implicit in Kitchin's analysis: namely time."
Benjamin N. Jacobsen, Space and Polity

"Rob Kitchin's Digital Timescapes is a masterful exploration of the temporal dimensions of digital technologies....offers fresh insights into the complex and multifaceted nature of time in the digital age and will be of interest to both time theorists and practitioners across a range of disciplines."
Judy Wajcman

"...offers a comprehensive and insightful exploration of the intersection of digital technologies and temporality."
Yujie Dong, Information, Communication & Society

Book Information
ISBN 9781509556403
Author Rob Kitchin
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 476g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 158mm * 23mm