Private and public time

We’re used to thinking of privacy in terms of protected spaces, and often hear comments about how isolated individuals and families are in modern society. A guy opens his garage door remotely so his Lexus can slip into the garage, and the door is closed before he’s out of the car.

In the last chapter of his study of schedules and calendars ( Hidden Rhythms ) Eviatar Zerubavel discusses public and private in temporal rather than in spatial terms.

Private times are times in which we are socially inaccessible – we may be gone fishing, power-napping, or in a private conference with an important client. What is common in each case is that the time is “sociofugal” rather than “sociopetal.”

Schedules enable us to protect private times. He quotes Erving Goffman: “By proper scheduling of one’s performances, it is possible not only to keep one’s audiences separated from each other . . . but also to allow a few moments in between performances so as to extricate oneself psychologically and physically from one personal front, while taking up another.”

Social status is often linked to the thickness of boundaries around private time. You have to run through a gauntlet of secretaries and pass through multiple office doors to see the CEO, and his time is protected in the same way his space is. At the same time, high status also fuzzies the boundaries between private and public time, because high status typically involves high and often diffused levels of responsibility.

Having done field work on time use and experience in a hospital setting, Zerubavel analyzes the rigid organization of private time as an aspect of the “bureacratization” of the professions. Despite the persistence of a professional ethos that demands beyond-the-call availability, “ever-availability is a gradually dying phenomenon,” and he argues that “it is the rigid manner in which professional commitments are temporally defined today that seems to be one of the key characteristics of modern social organization.”