Social Theory and Media Theory: Contributions of Schutz to the Understanding of New Social Realities

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the debate about time and the new social realities resulting from recent changes in the media field. For this, we propose a rereading of a well-known author in social theory: Alfred Schutz. Schutz highlighted the importance of media and the modification of the concept of time. The author did not think of time only descriptively. Instead, he opened a deep dialogue about consciousness and social relations, in perspective with the concepts of space and time, conceptually elaborating these relations. The article has two sections, each corresponding to an approach to time made in media theories and recent social theories. The first one discusses a possible acceleration of time, and the second one discusses the relation of time to memory. We bring the debates to the article, and Schutz's contributions to them, fostering the debate between social theory and media theory, as well as contributing conceptually to recent reflections.