Chronemics is the study of the concepts and processes of human temporality, or connections with time, as they are bound to human communication interactions. Chronemics concerns the study and uses of various kinds of objective time involved in our daily timing and habits associated with  our formal and informal obligations. However, chronemics also concerns subjective or personal temporalities. Combinations of subjective and objective time concern our own everyday personal time. It is this personal time, a combination of technical timekeeping and personal times and tempos, that is centrally and highly related to human communication. This entry is intended to explain how human temporalities comprise a nonverbal chronemics of human behaviors.

Chronemics is the newest area of nonverbal communication studies, and this new focus seems to link and bind together, for the first time, all other systems of nonverbal communication. All forms of nonverbal communication messages have their own temporalities, beginnings and endings, startings and stoppings, zeros and ones, befores and afters, faster and slower, and so forth. Verbal messages, too, have major temporal features. We could not possibly communicate without human temporality.

Chronemics should provide for a more dynamic study of emotional interactions between people. We are Homo temporalis; we all have a complex temporal identity, a composite of personal levels of time experiencing, to be discussed later in this entry. Chronemic studies developed from interdisciplinary time literature and research reports in biology, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

Littlejohn, Stephen W and Karen A.Floss. (2009). Encyclopedia of Communication Theory.USA:SAGE.

Penanggungjawab naskah :

Gayes Mahestu
Edwina Ayu Kustiawan