What is Social Time

Despite the increasing interest in understanding screen time and its effects, there are very few papers published on how the notion of “screen time” is conceptualized – both in terms of what “time” refers to in this context and in terms of what a “screen” denotes nowadays. In an attempt to contribute to this lack of theoretical grounding, the authors outline four theoretical grounds for understanding time. Further, they suggest that the notion of “screen” needs to be problematized in similar ways. In this chapter, the authors illustrate how the four different conceptualizations of “time” in relation to this broader understanding of screens open up for a new range of studies of “screen time,” and they suggest that this conceptualization is necessary in order to move toward.