Time in fragments: dystopia, temporality and historical consciousness in the digital age

Abstract

The writing of history can be understood as a creative effort to configure images to represent the movement of time, observing the change of things and the passage of this time. Through narratives that interweave events and build historiographical plots, history makes time intelligible, accessible, and understandable when transformed into temporality. The purpose of this article is to seek concepts that are able to illuminate this process of temporalization of time in contemporary western society, marked by the action of actors in the digital space, by the presence of technologies that significantly increase the speed of production and exchange of information and forms of communication. For this, we intend to discuss the concept of "Updatism" (ARAÚJO; PEREIRA, 2018), relating it to the structure of digital space. We believe that such a notion has the potential to raise issues that can directly impact historiographic work in the 21st century, given the way time is perceived and temporalized. We foresee, in this scenario, that the challenges that "Updatism" proposes to historians revolve around two aspects: the mastery of digital space and the reflection about the possibility of facing a perception of fragmented time and the configuration of an increasingly dystopian historical consciousness.