Abstract

In the beginning of Third Millennium, Western societies seems to share the image of passing time as a threat, deactivating the classical modern representation as an opportunities storage. The current temporal rules force individuals to react against emergencies and risks to trace the experiences back to a timeless and self-sufficient present. This imperative keep on being strictly intense, as all the temporal determinations in history, but it doesn't offer the counterbalance of the benefit of a stronger integration of human activities. So far, sociological literature has read the phenomenon as a consequence of the exasperation of typical modern acceleration, causing the desynchronization of different social times interlacing in the social structures. The suggested remedy was to turn on digital technology and development of individual flexible skills. A method that didn't work out, increasing the temporal discomfort. In this paper we propose to analyze the heritage of thirty years of "time-space compression" not as a simple acceleration but as the more general contraction of collective time horizon, the cognitive infrastructure that allow an homogeneous group to conceive duration and to inscribe the finite temporality of human beings in a meaningful plan. Radicalized compression become a "space-time asphyxia", setting up a "regime of immediacy" based on real-time that corrode the Modernity structural elements about thoughts formulation and knowledge transmission.