Chronocentrism is the assumption that certain time periods are better, more important, or a more significant frame of reference than other time periods, either past or future. The perception of more positive attributes such as morality, technology, and sophistication to one's own time could lead an individual as a member of a collectivity to impose their forms of time on others and impede the efforts towards more homogeneous temporal commons.
History
Chronocentrism was coined by sociologistJib Fowles in an article in the journalFutures in February, 1974. Fowles described chronocentrism as "the belief that one's own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison". A criticalview described it as the belief that only the present counts and that the past is irrelevant except to serve as a reference to a few basic assumptions about what went before. More recently, it has been defined as "the egotism that one's own generation is poised on the very cusp of history". The term had been used earlier in a study about attitudes to ageing in the workplace. Chronocentricity: "...only seeing the value of one's own age cohort...described the tendency for younger managers to hold negative perceptions of the abilities or other work-related competencies of older employees." This type of discrimination is a form of ageism.
The Long Now Foundation is an organization that encourages the use of 5-digit years, e.g. "02016" instead of "2016," to help emphasize how early the present time is in their vision of the timeline of humanity. The use of two-digit years before Y2K was an example of chronocentrism.
Applications
The "Copernican time principle" is a temporal analog of the Copernican principle for space, which states that no spatial location is any more or less special of a frame of reference than any other spatial location. Some authors have extended this to also include that no point in time is any more or less special than any other point in time, though this cannot be universally applied Chronocentrism is also considered a norm in music until the twentieth century when musicians believe their music preserved a style of interpretation that formed an unbroken chain of authority and orthodoxy. For instance, Romantic musicians deliberately changed the style when performing earlier repertoire.
