Chapter 4 - The Internet and the End of Shared Time

The internet did not speed time up.

It changed whose time counted.

Before this shift, time was shared in ways that were rarely named. Offices closed together. Broadcasts ended together. Mail arrived together. Even disagreement unfolded inside common temporal frames. People waited for the same things, at roughly the same pace, whether they liked it or not.

Shared time did not require agreement. It required synchronization.

Synchronization is a quiet form of authority. It aligns expectations without argument. When everyone knows when something ends, few people need to ask.

The internet dissolved this alignment gradually, then decisively.

It did so by separating delivery from reception. Messages could arrive instantly, but responses no longer had a single expected window. Content could be published at any hour, but its consumption scattered across days, weeks, or not at all. Events no longer happened for everyone at once. They happened to anyone, whenever.

This felt, at first, like freedom.

No more waiting for the evening news. No more office hours as gatekeepers. No more fixed schedules imposed from above. Time became individualized, customized, on demand. Each person could move at their own pace.

But shared time did more than coordinate schedules. It coordinated meaning.

When everyone encountered something at roughly the same moment, interpretation had edges. Conversations began and ended together. Attention gathered, then dispersed. Disagreement unfolded inside a bounded interval. Even outrage had a half-life.

The internet removed those bounds.

It did not abolish sequence, but it multiplied it. Every interaction now exists on its own timeline. Messages are sent on one clock, received on another, answered on a third—if they are answered at all. These clocks do not reconcile themselves.

Someone must reconcile them.

In shared time, delay was legible. If a response did not arrive by morning, it meant something. If a show had aired last night, everyone knew it was over. The calendar did not need explanation.

In networked time, delay floats. A message unread may be unread because it was unseen, ignored, postponed, forgotten, or deliberately held. Time no longer clarifies which. Silence does not settle into meaning. It accumulates possibilities.

Possibilities require interpretation.

This is where pressure enters.

The internet did not create constant availability. It created constant addressability. Anyone could reach anyone else at any time. Addressability sounds neutral. It is not. It implies a standing possibility of demand.

When addressability becomes ambient, response becomes ambiguous. Ambiguity does not remove obligation; it relocates it. The recipient must decide when a response is due, whether it is required at all, and what a delay will be taken to mean.

These are not technical decisions. They are social ones.

Shared time once handled this distribution quietly. The internet handed it back to individuals.

This redistribution did not occur evenly. Those with more power could delay without consequence. Those with less could not. The disappearance of shared time did not flatten hierarchies. It made them harder to see.

This is often described as overload. Or distraction. Or attention deficit. Those descriptions focus on capacity. The more relevant issue is expectation.

In a world without shared time, expectation no longer expires on its own.

Content remains available indefinitely. Messages remain technically answerable long after their moment has passed. Conversations can be resumed months later, as if nothing intervened. The record preserves possibility even when interest has faded.

This persistence alters how endings work.

Under shared time, an ending was obvious because attention moved elsewhere collectively. Under networked time, attention fragments. Some move on. Others do not. The ending is no longer synchronized.

This desynchronization makes closure visible—and risky.

Ending something now means choosing an ending point that others may not recognize. It invites disagreement not only about the decision, but about whether the moment for decision has arrived at all.

The internet did not remove endings. It privatized them.

Privatization increases variance. Different people end things at different times, for different reasons, according to different cues. Without shared time, there is no common signal to anchor these decisions.

So people hesitate.

Hesitation is not indecision. It is caution in an environment where the cost of ending has become unpredictable.

This unpredictability is amplified by record-keeping. Networked systems remember. Screenshots exist. Threads persist. Old messages can be resurfaced without context. The past does not recede; it remains searchable.

In shared time, forgetting was built in. Not perfectly. But sufficiently. Things that were over became difficult to retrieve. Effort was required to reopen them.

Now reopening is effortless.

Effortlessness changes behavior. It discourages finality.

Why end something decisively when it can be reopened later? Why declare closure when silence preserves optionality? These questions are rarely asked explicitly. They operate as background incentives.

The internet is often described as a medium of immediacy. In temporal terms, it is better described as a medium of suspension.

Nothing needs to end because everything can remain accessible.

This suspension does not feel dramatic. It feels like lingering. Like conversations that fade but never conclude. Like work that pauses but never finishes. Like commitments that are neither honored nor abandoned.

The absence of shared time makes all of this plausible.

Consider public attention. Events still occur. Outrage still flares. But without synchronized consumption, attention does not resolve into aftermath. It disperses unevenly. Some remain engaged long after others have moved on. Disagreement persists without a shared sense of “after.”

The event does not end. It fragments.

Fragmentation requires management. Someone must decide when to disengage, when to stop responding, when to let a topic go. These decisions are not enforced by time. They are personal.

Personal decisions carry interpretation.

This is why the internet feels exhausting even when one is not constantly online. The work is not consumption. It is calibration. Deciding when something is over without shared cues requires continuous judgment.

Judgment does not scale well.

The loss of shared time also alters authority. When everyone operates on their own timeline, authority loses its temporal leverage. Announcements no longer land together. Deadlines no longer synchronize behavior. Instructions circulate, but compliance occurs asynchronously.

Authority becomes informational rather than temporal. It can tell, but it cannot end.

This weakens closure across domains. Institutions announce decisions that remain contested. Conversations persist beyond their moment. Work continues past its natural stopping point.

The internet did not cause these changes alone. But it made them irreversible.

Once people experienced individualized time, returning to shared schedules felt restrictive. Coordination began to look like control. Synchronization came to resemble imposition.

So shared time was not defended.

What replaced it was not chaos, but continuous partial attention. Everything available, nothing settled.

This condition is often framed as abundance. In temporal terms, it is excess possibility without expiration.

Expiration used to do important work.

It reduced choice. It limited interpretation. It allowed people to stop without explanation.

Without shared time, stopping becomes conspicuous. It must be chosen, justified, or at least managed.

This is not a critique of the internet. It is an observation about its temporal effects.

The internet did not destroy time. It dissolved its shared authority.

What remains is real time: simultaneous clocks without synchronization, persistent records without closure, and constant addressability without shared expectation.

Time still passes.

But it no longer passes together.