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Commentary:
For many purposes for which we construct the temporal extension or duration of activities, or their frequency in time, we find it useful to distinguish slower and faster processes, less and more frequently re-curring events
= even in classical AT, we recognize that activities have longer characteristic times of execution than actions do, and operations have shorter characteristic times; this is fundamental to their integration with one another
= that actions and activities have characteristic times is best attested by the MEANING which the PACING of an action or activity has for us: as Bourdieu noted in his critique of Levi-Straussian structuralism, it is not just whether or not an exchange is completed that matters, but also how timely, delayed, or over-hasty it seems
= we have further examples in the phenomena of interactional synchrony and participatory discrepancies in jazz ensembles: matching of rates is important, and variation from some normal or expected average rate carries information
= but do activities have just one time-scale or many? what happens when we go from material processes per se to material processes with meaning in ecosocial networks?