Cell-phone and text-messaging and social-networking technologies have begun to wash away at adamantine “mechanical time,” the unyielding time of clocks, and to suspend us within “mobile time,” which can be made to flow whichever way we want.

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally