TIMe experience in Europe's Digital age (TIMED)

The recent mass proliferation of digital technologies means that people now live in a state of permanent connectivity. The effects of this on the availability of time, the use of time and experience of temporality for the individual and for society are presently unknown. The TIMED project will establish, for the first time, the specific effects of digitalization on time experience and the sense of temporality across Europe. WP1 will determine what digitization means to people, using a qualitative and quantitative methods. WP2 will use questionnaires to establish how the forms of digitization identified in WP1 affect the passage of time, time pressure and time perspective. In WP3 interviews will explore what constitutes free time in the digital age. WP4 will use real-time behaviour analysis to establish how digitization affects time usage and the passage of time during daily life. WP1-4 will be conducted in 6 European countries: UK, Germany, Spain, Poland, Switzerland & Czech Republic enabling comparisons across countries and cultures, and between people of different ages, genders, employments, levels of digital engagement. Finally, WP5 will use lab studies to establish the psychophysiological mechanisms through which digital engagement affects time experience. The TIMED project will provide a ground-breaking account of how and why the perception, use and allocation of time are affected by personal levels of digitization and cultural norms, and how this then impacts on quality of life. The information generated will enable us to, for the first time, establish how digitalization affects individual temporal experience and whether it is aiding the development of unified European temporal experience or enhancing existing cultural differences. The evidence generated will have significant implications for the promotion of health, wellbeing and economic outcomes through the mitigation or enhancement of the consequences of increased digitalization on temporal experience.