Minna’s post Fast Food Publishing about the pressure that the new media ecology is putting on the publishing industry as a whole to speed up production has gotten me thinking about the nature of time in a digital world more generally. Have the internet and other digital devices increased the speed at which we are expected to do things? (Probably, yes.) Such as: responding to a personal or business ‘letter’, or to a party invitation or telephone call, and publishing or releasing books / films / music. Or more expansively, today how is time organized in daily life and family life? What aspects are governed by “digital time” vs. by other parameters like the rhythm of night and day and of the seasons?
Bill McKibben’s book The Age of Missing Information (1992) is relevant to this question. McKibben writes evocatively about the kind of information that we now have access to in the “information age” – which at the moment he was writing was epitomized by TV, and now is only intensified by the internet – vs. the information that we do not have access to in this way of living. That is, McKibben argues, although we know much more about world history, computers, cars and so on than our ancestors there are some things we know much less about. Almost any person 100 to 200 years ago, for example, would have known the ins and outs of the land where they lived perfectly: when growing seasons would begin and end, where to graze sheep or cattle, how long the nights vs. days would be. Now much of the Western world spends a far greater percentage of their time in front of screens (TV, internet, mobile device) than outdoors.
While McKibben deals more with information than with time in his book he does discuss to time-related shifts – ones that would be worth further exploration.
Digital Living: FIN_IND_USA 
Jul 03, 2010 @ 18:48:46
amelia: the question of time, alone, would be a great focus, maybe even the one for the documentary? i love the way ideas flow and your posts across the ocean inspire me (as well as do the couple of comments we’ve received). will think about time with time, but this also reminded me of the other evident and yet not so evident issue about digital living: proximity and distance.
a couple of years ago zygmunt bauman, the famous sociologist of globalisation, wrote in the guardian that never in human history have we known so much about human suffering and been so helpless to do anything about it. he, of course, was referring to the fact that before mass media we knew little about anything beyond immediate circumstances, and were able to participate more concretely in problem solving. today, we get so much information about miseries of the world, yet that information is overwhelming.
but more about this in a separate post that i’ll soon write about media rituals!
Jul 05, 2010 @ 09:20:30
Yes! Proximity and Distance and Time. Are these all things that information and communication technologies affect our experience of? Can ICTs affect things so fundamental to our everyday experience and our understanding of where and who we are in the world? How so? What are the actual effects – are they concrete? Or are they elusive and tantalizing – showing us something that we have little power to truly take part in?
An exploration of time could indeed be an interesting focus for the film(s)! I wonder how using film – a time based medium itself – could be useful in terms of reflections on time with the use of things like slow and fast motion, stop motion, real-time, faster and slower cuts, jump cuts, replay. That is, film as a descriptor of time.
The issues of proximity and distance seem so relevant to a project like this one that is situated in multiple places. Opposite but complimentary to Bauman’s comment is the notion that media – perhaps most directly TV and movies, but certainly internet as well – can paint pictures of the ‘good life’ that exists or seems to exist elsewhere. For example, in China there is a very large difference in standard of living between the cities and the countryside. To Shanghai’s New York-like lights and traffic there are millions of small-scale farmers. Across the street from the suburban apartment complex in Beijing where I stayed in 2005/2006 was a basement internet cafe with perhaps 100 computers. It was constantly packed with users. Conversely, someone I knew at that time told me that the Chinese government was worried about allowing and promoting internet access in rural areas because this could cause unrest when the rural residents learned, through the internet, that their lives were so very different from people in the cities. Whether or not that was an actual policy, it reflects individual and perhaps political beliefs about the power of the internet to transform one’s sense of one’s own place in a country or in the larger world.
Jul 06, 2010 @ 16:07:28
Oh, what a lovely chain of thoughts. Yes, a timebound medium to document time, and maybe we could think of something simultaneous; online? Let’s explore…
And: Read this today from NYT (again), their columnist Roger Cohen on South Africa, football, globalisation, proximity, distance & networks. I think his comment was very observant about the collision of old & new thinking:
“Could it be that we’re just stuck covering the world in conventional ways, gazing at formal frameworks (like states) that are as obsolete as my old Olivetti? Networks outstrip nations that are left playing catch-up, like those long-haired Argentines chasing trim German shadows. Networks are hopeful. They’re where the coming generations live and love.
Americans are the most creative inventors of those networks and the most stubborn in resisting their nation-dissolving impact. Therein lies a good measure of the world’s tensions.”