Sarah Sharma

In the AI Story

Sharma's research extends Wajcman's analysis in a critical direction: where Wajcman focuses on the gendered distribution of time within households and workplaces, Sharma analyzes the broader political economy of time across class lines and service relationships. Her studies of taxi drivers, airport workers, and service employees in urban spaces document how the temporal sovereignty of powerful actors is maintained by the temporal availability of workers whose hours are structured by the demands of those they serve.

The synthesis with Wajcman's framework is natural: both thinkers reject the treatment of time as a neutral resource distributed equally, and both insist that the apparent temporal freedoms of some populations are produced by the temporal servitude of others. Applied to AI, the combined framework reveals that the temporal wealth of the builders celebrated in the AI discourse depends on chains of temporal labor — content moderators, data annotators, infrastructure workers — whose time is colonized in ways the builders' time is not.

Sharma's work is particularly important for understanding the global dimension of AI's temporal politics. The developer in Lagos is embedded in a temporal ecology that extends well beyond her individual relationship with the AI tool. Her working hours may be constrained by domestic responsibilities structured by the absence of care infrastructure, by infrastructure failures that fragment her productive time, and by economic conditions that convert her hours into a commodity sold at rates determined by the Global North. Sharma's framework makes these chains visible in ways that individual-scale analysis cannot.

Sharma's more recent work has extended the analysis to gender and technology specifically, connecting directly to Wajcman's concerns. Her 2020 book Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan critiques the temporal assumptions encoded in canonical media theory and proposes alternative frameworks grounded in feminist analysis of care time.

Origin

Sharma completed her PhD at York University in Toronto in 2007 and has held appointments at the University of Toronto since 2008, where she currently directs the ICCIT (Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology). Her intellectual formation drew on the Canadian tradition of media theory — Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis — which she subsequently critiqued from feminist and critical-race perspectives.

Her work has become increasingly influential in sociology and science-and-technology studies as questions about the political economy of time have become central to debates about digital labor, AI infrastructure, and the global distribution of technological costs and benefits.

Key Ideas

Time is relational, not absolute. Temporal experiences are produced by social position and the relationships that position establishes with others' time.

Temporal freedom is produced by temporal servitude. The apparent sovereignty of powerful actors depends on chains of workers whose time is structured by the demands of the sovereign.

Service work has temporal stakes. Taxi drivers, airport workers, and other service employees negotiate time as a primary medium of their labor, not merely a container for it.

Global temporal chains extend further. AI's temporal politics extend through content moderation, data annotation, and infrastructure work distributed across the world economy.

Media theory encodes temporal assumptions. Canonical frameworks in media studies assume temporal conditions that hold only for specific social positions, making them inadequate to analyze others' experiences.