I had an interesting conversation with my mother yesterday. We were talking about how much time it can take to answer one’s emails, as well as how difficult it can be to find time to sit down and concentrate on writing or creating or thinking or just being. She commented, “it seems like we have a new relationship with time.”
I asked her what she meant by that. She explained, “I often hear people saying, ‘things seem to be going faster and faster’.” We then remembered a conversation we had a few years back with my grandmother. My mother had asked her, “in the 1950s, when you were a young woman, do you remember things being this busy, time moving so fast?” My grandmother answered, “no! you all seem to be much busier today than people where then.”
I have been thinking of this conversation in relation to an article I read a few days ago about a former businessman who decided to live for one year without money. Someone he met through Freecycle.org donated a caravan for him to live in. He set up the caravan on the property of an organic farm in exchange for working there three days per week. Throughout the year he foraged for food, built his own stove, bartered, rode his bicycle, and lived simply. Interestingly, the article described what happened to time as he led his life without money:
“Everything in Mark’s life takes a lot longer as part of his new moneyless routine. Washing his clothes takes a couple of hours of scrubbing with hand-made soap. Even a cup of tea takes half an hour to make! But Mark says, “It’s all worth it in the end because the feeling of liberation and connection with nature it has afforded me more than compensates for the minor inconveniences.”
“Taking time out from the hectic money-driven world that we live in has taught Mark a lot. Although his experience of living without money has occasionally been difficult, it has also been the happiest time of his life.”
Mark Boyle, The Moneless Man: A Year Of Freeconomic Living. http://tinyurl.com/22k28b9
Reading this it strikes me that there is perhaps a relationship between time and one’s impact on the environment. The more simply one lives: the more time it takes: the less impact one has on the planet. Or maybe: the more complexly one lives: the faster things move: the more impact one has on the planet? The equation is simplistic, but perhaps worth considering…
For example, Mark might take 30 minutes to pick fresh nettles growing nearby his caravan, gather wood, build a fire, boil spring water, and make a cup of tea. A time-consuming, yet meditative activity. Meanwhile the typical American, waking up at 7am for a commute to work, might take 2 minutes to make a cup of instant coffee by boiling water drawn from the vast infrastructure of a city water system, plopping in a few spoonfuls of powered coffee picked and processed far away, and rushing out the door with cup-in-hand. In the 28 extra minutes the coffee drinker has saved he perhaps checks his email, writes two quick messages, eats a peanut butter sandwich, skims the newspaper headlines on three websites, and packs his laptop up to take to work. I can guess that the convenient cup of instant coffee has a much bigger environmental footprint than the cup of nettle tea – let alone the impact of all the other activities that the coffee drinker manages to squeeze into his day!
All this makes me wonder … what is the nature of digital time? That is, the speed of business transactions, communication, trading, purchasing, life, the stock market, travel, bank loans, etc. that is enabled by computers, the internet, mobile devices. Is digital time always faster? What is the relationship between digital time and the environment? Or, the relationship between digital time and other kinds of time – family time, day/night time, season time, sleep-time, creative time? What happens if/when we choose not to participate in digital time?
I mentioned that I was interested in investigating the experience of “digital time” to a colleague at lunch. She immediately said, “oh, you mean like how when you spend an evening without your computer time seems to stretch out forever, and when you have your computer it just goes by so much more quickly?” Yes …
Digital Living: FIN_IND_USA 
Sep 02, 2010 @ 22:46:47
Good stuff Amelia. I agree in principle that we need to slow down and that’s part of a lighter footprint. But I see some kind of acceleration with time, meaning, we humans using the Internet ( and all related technologies, including cars)are going in a certain direction. There is TREMENDOUS momentum. Mark is a brave but very lone wolf.
Somehow, its like we need to ride this wave AND KEEP COMING BACK INTO THE PRESENT MOMENT( see Eckhart Tolle) whenever possible. And keep opening our heart. And keep living as lightly as we can BUT keeping in mind that we are between two worlds. Taking time often to live in ” Mark’s world” is a good practice plus, meditation,vision quests, entheogens, sweat lodges, shamanic journeying, ceremony, music, art, etc.
It’s very exciting to be alive now. Thanks for doing what YOU are doing. Bill
PS. There is so much more to say but thought something was better than nothing.
Sep 09, 2010 @ 13:45:48
Bill, thank you so much for reading and taking the time to write.
Sep 07, 2010 @ 12:14:14
This is wonderful, Amelia. You so inspired me. I’ll have my intro to comm students do their first response paper on this topic: Time & Forms of Communication. They can either blog here or give me a conventional paper. Fascinating how this may play out in your documentary!
Sep 09, 2010 @ 13:43:19
Great! Very much looking forward to seeing what your students may post.
Sep 14, 2010 @ 20:44:04
How does the way you communicate define your time in your everyday life?
The way I communicate defines my time everyday. When I wake up, I immediately check my e-mail to see if classes are canceled or reply to any e-mails that I have missed from the previous night. Then I login to Facebook and quickly catch up with my friends by commenting on photos and such. Throughout the day I attend class, but because of my cell phone I am still connected to my e-mail and facebook. So throughout the day I am always communicating with people via e-mail or face to face. I do not know how I would keep up with all of my friends, family, professors, and events without technology. There is simply not enough time in the day without the internet as a means for communication.
How do different forms of communication you engage in may create different feelings and expectations about time?
The most popular forms of communication I find myself engaged in is obviously Facebook, Fordham e-mail, and iChat. When I am on facebook I always find myself losing track of time. I feel as though I am only on for a few minutes, when in reality I have been on for two hours. I believe this is so because there is so much you can explore in a such a short amount of time. One can easily get lost in looking at new pictures that were posted, commenting on someone’s status, even leaving video posts on a friends wall. Fordham e-mail does not change my perception of time, just because e-mailing is not time consuming. If someone e-mails me I read it and respond and then log off. iChat, like Facebook, I always find myself losing track of time. It is amazing being able to talk to ten people at once. It is so easy to fall into the trap of the internet. It’s like time doesn’t exist while you are there, but when reality sets back in it is crazy how much time has actually passed.
How should this topic be researched ?
This topic should be researched by taking a group of students and not allowing them to use the internet at all, and see what types of different ways they come up with communicating. Time will definitely go by a lot slower without quick access to answers and communication via e-mail.
Sep 15, 2010 @ 13:53:39
Laura: great, thank you for the comment. In our project we’ll be able to observe people’s daily routines and your post made me think of how the way we divide time in our daily lives has possibly changed in the last decade, 5 years… Those routines of checking FB the first & last thing in the morning & evening…
Sep 16, 2010 @ 02:26:17
Hi Amelia. I completely agree with your blog and found it super interesting! I am a student in Minna’s Intro to Communication and Media Studies class and what you wrote about was quite relative to what we speak about in class. Living in our day and age, time and speed have taken on entirely new meanings. It almost seems as if they change with every new iPhone, Lexus or Mac commercial in which they claim to be literally “redefining efficiency”.
When Minna was giving us this assignment she finished class by saying, “I will be emailing you this information in about 5 minutes.” I laughed a little at this because it was the epitome of instant communication. Time flies because I am so accustomed to receiving emails on my phone and now texts are replacing phone calls, because calling is just too slow!
I definitely agree that there is a relationship between, as you put it, “time and one’s impact on the environment”. I also think that a relationship can be made between time and one’s health. How often do we find stock brokers, lawyers, even doctors, being so consumed with maximizing what can be done in a certain amount of time, suffer from high blood pressure, heart attack or stroke? It would be interesting, yet HIGHLY unethical, to perhaps conduct an experiment between methods of communication used (blackberry, iPhone, standard phone with no email) and high blood pressure. I am sure we would fine that instant communication can create health problems for those who abuse it.
In addition to the personal heath complication noted above that accompanies a fast paced, time-centered lifestyle, I found Mark’s coffee bit helpful to point out something else. Not only does taking time to make a cup of tea keep Mark stress free, but the natural ingredients he is using, in contrast to the instant, processed coffee, can have even more of an effect on his personal well-being. Could we go farther to attribute the Western obsession over time to our health care problem? Perhaps the reason that American health care is so expensive and, at times, quite unattainable, could be that our obsession over time has lead to long-term health problems that insurance companies need to pay for, therefore raising prices of health care all around.
In close- I could say I will do my utmost to live a slower lifestyle, but as I am writing this I am already thinking about the millions of things I have to do tomorrow. BUT thanks for giving me something to think about and strive towards!
PS- My apologies for the length of this! It was my first time blogging 🙂
Sep 16, 2010 @ 02:40:56
J: what a lovely blog post (I’m sure A will respond to it shortly, too). Many issues to talk about and comment on further, will save that for later when we get more comments here & as position papers. I just wish to note that I enjoyed your personal & concrete observations, opinions and suggestions. To me, you post is another proof how an engaged mode of discussing important issues and concepts such as a blog is effective; it evokes creative & critical thinking.
Sep 16, 2010 @ 11:13:28
Thanks so much for your post. Exciting to see a conversation forming on this topic.
I like how you’ve highlighted the concept of efficiency: “accomplishment of or ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time and effort.” What is efficiency today? Does efficiency in an information society differ from efficiency in an industrial or agricultural society? Is using more technology more efficient? Or, not? Are there any downsides to efficiency?
Also, related to your thoughts on the relationship between health and communication Catherine Middleton has done some research on people who use their mobile email devices heavily. For example: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ejis/journal/v15/n3/full/3000614a.html
Sep 16, 2010 @ 15:50:51
Amelia,
After reading your blog, a few points really stuck out to me. I’m a student in Minna’s Communications and Media class, and already we’ve talked about the impact of technology on our lives and the way we communicate. While digital time is fast time, it is more importantly wasted time in most instances. Just imagine if we tallied up all the time spent social networking–from updating statuses to liking ridiculous groups to, frankly, cyber-stalking your crush.
About two years ago I had a sort of realization about all this wasted time. So I decided to start up other hobbies, mainly reading and writing or playing guitar. For a good two weeks I had made significant strides in reducing my “wasted time”. But the urge to login or check my e-mail still remained. So, I went back to my old ways because I knew I couldn’t hold off any longer.
This impulse to constantly be connected is slowly becoming less compulsive and more necessity. Too much stress is placed on making the most of time to the point where we take for granted all the little things in life. Your point about instant coffee and Mike’s process for a self-made cup of tea (which I read his link, and his story is simply amazing and inspiring) manifests the touch or contact we’ve lost with nature and magnifies our reliance on technology. Sure, instant coffee may take 1/15 of the time, but think of how that remaining time was spent by Mike. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In the extra time it took Mike to make his tea, think of the crucial internal reflecting that occurred, something so vital, I believe, to improving your being and working towards a spiritual connectivity to nature.
Today, it is the FaceBooks and Twitters that are stripping us of this time of reflection. Logging in to see if you have any notifications very well takes you an a 45-minute tour of faces you’ve never seen and gossip you never really needed to know. So I agree with you completely that digital time is indeed fast time. It’s up to you, as the individual, to slow things down and appreciate life for all it has to offer.
Sep 16, 2010 @ 16:39:26
Tim: Interesting. I’d love to hear (and will ask in class) more about the impulse/s that drew you back to ‘your old ways’. How much external pressure/necessity? How much learned routines? What keeps us hooked in fast digital time?
Sep 17, 2010 @ 03:09:12
Amelia-
I found your blog entry very interesting to read and I agree with you that digital time has given each of us a whole new unrestricted momentum during our present-day and a different perception of time. It seems almost every year, major companies, such as Apple, are coming up with new innovations to accelerate communication, therefore allotting people more time in during the day to accomplish other tasks, seemingly making the day go by faster because more things are being completed. With these innovations, tasks can even be completed simultaneously.
Throughout the entire day, I feel that I am constantly in contact with people through my iPhone and MacBook. Why should I call someone and potentially spend an hour speaking on the phone to them when I can just shoot them a quick text message? Why should I take the time to write a letter, address it, buy a stamp, and bring it to the post office when I could just type out a quick Facebook message and send it with the click of a button from my own bed? Why go out and print birthday party invitations and mail them out when I can just send a Facebook event invitation? The amount of time cut off of these tasks by digital time is almost unreal. However, what about the time I spend going through albums of friend’s pictures when I should be writing a paper? How about the time I take to text message during class while I should be listening to the teacher? Or the time I could be spending with my family while I am sitting in my room Facebook chatting with friends? Although technology that promotes fast communication has its advantages, it can also take away precious time and lead to wasted time. Although Mark’s tasks took him much longer to complete because everything he did was manual, his time was not wasted!
The ways we communicate nowadays also lead me to different feelings and expectations toward the people I am communicating with. Because the communication is so quick, I expect an immediate response. For example, when someone does not text me back right away, I almost get anxious or even hurt at times. I interpret a long response as ignorance or lack of interest. Realistically, I am just being impatient because I am so used to a fast-paced time!
An interesting experiment would be to remove these tools of communication from the lives of college students. Would more be accomplished due to the absence of their distractions? Or, could it go the other way? Would less be accomplished due to the lack of efficient means of communication?
Sep 17, 2010 @ 11:29:50
Katie: Thanks for bringing up the research aspect (also, thank you Laura) — that was a part of the assignment. We briefly discussed the University of Maryland experiment about dependency, if not addiction, on media gadgets… Your point is also very valid about the issue of efficiency and the new ways we define it, as noted by A & Jacqueline.
Sep 18, 2010 @ 01:12:10
Amelia-
I think depending on what you are doing time either goes bye very quickly or extremely slow. if i am enjoying what it is that i am doing, time seems to fly bye and when i am doing something i don’t want to or not interested in, time seems to drag.For example, whenever im in class(other then media studies of course) an hour and 15 minutes seem like 3 days but whenever Im in the cafeteria with my teammates in between classes 2 hrs feel like 2 minutes. my days start every morning at 630 am and end around 11. in my busy schedule there never seems like there’s enough time in a day. i barely watch tv and i mite find time to check out urban/ hip hop sites before bed. Every year i have football camp 4 3 weeks straight. We are isolated from outside distractions and are not allowed to leave the camp site. this year i had no tv and no lap top, so i know how it feels to be w/o digital time.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 10:55:45
Darryl: I’m SO glad you feel like our class doesn’t feel like 3 hrs… 🙂 Also, the training camp could be seen as an interesting experiment. You must have been completely immersed in training but did you miss digital means of communication at all? Did you feel isolated in any way from the rest of the world?
Sep 18, 2010 @ 15:38:47
When engaged in discussion regarding communication and its relationship to time, it’s important to recognize the fact that time is a constant, continual phenomenon. The colloquial phrase “making time” is actually quite a misleading idiom, seeing as no one can “create” time. We can manipulate the hours in our day so that we have more availability and freedom, but no matter what, one day is always going to equal 23 hours and 56 minutes. If time is a linear development, then communication becomes a staple element in our alloted existence here. Thus, the introduction of text messaging and social networking sites have revolutionized this linear concept of time. For example, I can text my friend Matt while I am in the middle of something and continue doing whatever it was that I was already doing, let’s say homework. Compare this to if I were face-to-face with Matt. If I am with someone in person (which I prefer substantially more than non-facial communal relations), then my TIME is devoted to him or her and the interaction that I am engaging in in that moment. “Conversations lived” (related to “stories lived”) then, takes up blocks of time on that aforementioned linear path that we all have. However, through the revolutionary endeavors of text messaging and social networking, we can SIMULTANEOUSLY converse and perform, without “wasting” time. Sure, we can all multitask, talk in person and perform things at the same time, but why not converse in person, live an action or actions, and text as well? Therefore, modern communication has “added” (again, improper vocabulary) time in our very busy lives.
As a result, we have all come to subconsciously expect this convenience in our lives. Let’s say we all had to contact our small group regarding our presentations (for exaggeration, imagine, if you will, it was the smallest, but a necessary, detail), after class and before the invention of telephones. How would we go about doing it? We would have to walk around campus looking for each other, ask around to see where everyone is, or even, if we knew where they lived, still have to trek over to the other side of campus in order to engage a dialogue. New technology has completely eliminated the need for that to occur. I can even text message my entire group at the same time! Think of how much time we saved!
Ironically, research in this has already begun.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129940063
Sep 19, 2010 @ 02:40:31
Excellent argumentation & examples, as well as references to theories, David! I just want to point out that symbolic interactionists, CMMers and basically any social constructivists would most likely argue that those 23h56min and similar exact measures do not matter that much; what matters (and ultimately defines our reality) is our perceptions, the way we experience time (whether constructed via symbols, through interaction and conversation specifically, etc. So it’s not the tech as such, they’d argue, but the interaction it facilitates that creates our realities, also related to time (let’s face it, your short msg to your friend would be very different in form and maybe even content, were it f2f or via fb. Do you see the difference I’m getting at?) And yes, this issue is of a great interest of many researchers, also: http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com/
Sep 18, 2010 @ 16:21:12
Hey Amelia,
Im one of the students in Minna’s Intro to Communications class and after reading your post I was reflecting quite abit on how fickle our perceptions of time could really be. This point was made especially with the story of Mark who gave up his fast moving money time for a much simpler life in a year. It made me reflect on my own life, being raised in the electronic age and in the city where new technologies and forms of communication are unveiled each year. WIth these developments, come new distractions that practically make time disappear. I cannot even begin to estimate how much time of my life has been devoted to the internet, or video games and even television. There are task that Ive taken for granted in this age…like you touched upon how making coffee takes a few seconds now. Its an example of how different my generation was from previous generations. I have access to Google or Wikipedia where I can find any information I desire within a few clicks…whereas people years ago, had to actually read and search libraries for that sort of information.
Im not complaining because that has made life much simpler for me but it makes me realize that the forms of communication I have been exposed to in my life, just makes time disappear. It makes much of our work simpler while expanding our distractions (facebook) tenfold.
Even when im walking through Manhattan I realize that everyone around me is just rushing by with their cellphones and blackberrys and ipods just taking time for granted. We always have somewhere to go and something to do. That makes time go so quick.
There are times where I get out of the city with my family and it is like a whole new world. Theres peace and tranquility and no hassle or distraction. I could spend my evenings looking at the sky and just appreciating it instead of surfing the net and chatting it away on facebook. Those are times where I can understand Mark’s story a little better because when life is lived much simpler, you can appreciate it much more. We can enjoy the natural world and not the manufactured world. And although we are able to enjoy the environment much more…we wouldnt be able to impact it as much as we do with our technologies because its not as efficient.
If this were to be studied…I think an ethnographic approach would be most effective because it allows us to participate in the cultures and allow us to experience time firsthand from a simpler and complex standpoint. The results of that would be very interesting, because the perception of time really relies on how a person decides to use it.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 10:58:18
Isacio: A very nice, observant self-reflection and THANK YOU for bringing up the research component — your arguments for ethnography are well-founded 🙂
Sep 19, 2010 @ 00:16:36
Hello Amelia,
You bring up some very good points. I have never actually thought of time this way, but I definitely agree with you. The way we communicate does affect how quickly time seems to go by. I am very dependent on technology to get by the day. And to a certain extent, inventions like cell phones, the internet, and computers have made daily tasks easier to accomplish. Since I see that things could be done in such an efficient and quickly manner, I try to squeeze in more tasks into my day without considering how much time I really have. That is why I think most people are constantly in a hurry; everyone feels as if they do not have enough time to complete everything that needs to be done. We expect too much out of our day because of the ways we communicate.
For instance, I like to write a list of tasks every morning so I could have an idea of what I want to achieve before the day is over. There are times that I am able to check off everything of my list, but then there are other days where I just can’t seem to get everything done. This happens mostly because of the different ways I communicate. When I can’t finish certain tasks it’s because I’m distracted with things like my cell phone, and the internet. Instead of spending hours on facebook and twitter, I could have completed a homework assignment. But it is almost unavoidable to not be involved in social networking because everyone is doing it. If you want to contact a friend, you could send them a message on facebook. If you want to speak to a celebrity, you can tweet them on twitter.
All things considered, the way we communicate through technology is the reason why time always seems to fly by. If my cell phone and laptop where taken away from me, I would be more likely to get everything done and still have time left over. I know this for a fact because my parents have told me that once they moved to New York their lives became fast paced. When they lived in their home country, they didn’t worry about time because they always had plenty of it. They would engage in conversation in person versus a conversation online. Their first impression was what people saw when they first met them, versus a first impression now being your facebook profile. The ways we communicate definitely define time in one’s everyday life.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 11:03:55
Paola: A very poignant comment about our material context/environments and time (others have made it as well, but you expressed it very clearly): How urban environments have a faster pace (the New York minute…). It would be interesting to research how digital communication technologies and environments correlate — how much does the fast-paced urban living get faster with tech, as opposed to living in rural areas (given you have access to tech…)
Sep 19, 2010 @ 00:59:14
Hi Amelia,
I’m a student in Minna’s Intro to Communications class and I agree with your thoughts on digital time. Time, especially in New York City moves at a rapid pace. Everyone is on the their Blackberries or iPhones, rushing about to meetings, to Starbucks, to work, or to the subway. Even though I communicate mainly through email, facebook and telephone, I am thankful that I don’t have all three combined on my cell phone. I have no yearning to stay connected. It is nice to be “cut off” from the world wide web. When I have to upgrade my cell phone, I have no choice. Verizon Wireless now has a mandatory $10 data fee, whether you want internet on your phone or not.
The relationship between digital time and the way we communicate is now being upgraded to an entire new level of instant send/receive. With internet access everywhere one goes, the sender party expects the receiver to open, read and reply to their message within minutes. I was talking about this issue with my friend this summer–we were both complaining on the new Verizion data fee and how we don’t wish to be “connected” 24/7. She recalled a time during school, in which she arrived at her 8:00 a.m. class and her professor was not there. She waited a bit and then returned back to her dorm to check her email. Earlier that morning, my friend was sleeping. No college student willingly wakes up earlier than 7:30 a.m. for an 8 o’clock class. Her morning ritual of brushing teeth, washing face, getting dressed, eating a quick PopTart and running out the door would have to be interupted with turning on her laptop, making sure her internet was connected, and signing onto her email account. Because she chose not to participate in digital time she was not aware of the cancellation of class, nothing on her phone notified her that she had a new email. The constant checking of email is a new addition to daily routines, interupting or being a part of family time, sleep time, creative time.
For college students (myself included) going on one’s computer entails checking Facebook which eats up about an hour of one’s time–reading people’s statuses and walls, looking at their photos and seeing who was active on your own wall. Some of the people we “creep” on are not even close friends. We are just doing this because we are bored and can’t seem to stop this constant need to go on Facebook. Time is only wasted on the internet; this 24/7 connection to the world needs to be put to rest. New Yorkers and people in general need to take some advice from Mark and learn to enjoy their surroundings, stop and smell the flowers so-to-speak.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 11:08:17
Nicole: a set of very good examples! (About environments, see my reply to Paola.) I very much appreciate your comment about how we indeed, in most contexts, are pushed if not forced to live ‘digital time 24/7’, whether by service providers or by the assumptions of our work, school, etc. context that we indeed are constantly connected.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 03:26:20
Hi Amelia!
I found your take on communication and the manner in which it affects time eye opening. In today’s society, it is undeniable that we are technologically driven people. In fact, I thought your grandmother made a great observation when she called the world today “busier.” Years ago, people relied on much slower methods of communication and as time progressed so did those methods of communication. Yet, somewhere along the way I think we lost ourselves in the hustle and bustle of technological advancement.
On a recent trip to my grandfather’s countryside home in Puerto Rico, I experienced first-hand the dramatic impact a “technology-free” lifestyle can have on a person very much accustomed to the fast-paced 21st century. On a good day, I would be pacing back and forth by a single telephone pole, iPhone overhead, praying for at least one “bar” to show up on the screen. Undoubtedly, that month in Puerto Rico felt like a year. Still, I returned home with good memories and fun experiences that may not have occurred had I been preoccupied with my computer or cell phone.
There is a correlation between time and technology in the sense that communication devices really do consume a lot of hours of the day. Indeed, if one were to conduct a survey of activities people had time to do after being deprived of their iPhones and/or BlackBerrys, he/she would probably see that they had a lot more time to enjoy life’s simple pleasures like reading or spending time with a friend/family member. All in all, I think we have become so used to the allotted time we give our computers and cell phones that the minute we are unable to use them we have that distressing moment of “Now what?”
Sep 19, 2010 @ 11:20:37
Melissa: Your personal example is wonderful, made me smile (could visualize the scene…). An experiment about digital time in itself. And yes, surveys would certainly be a way to map how people spend their time if deprived from digital communication devices for a period of time. If we’d like to gather detailed information, survey questionnaires might pose a challenge in that the researcher would have to be able to envision and categorize different ways of spending time in advance, as in:
How did you spend your time (choose all that apply)… (1) with people, socializing, (2) with conventional mass media (TV, RO, newspapers, magazines), (3) with hobbies, (4) sleeping, (5) other, what… (just examples to illustrate the point… 🙂 )
But more about that in our next class!
Sep 19, 2010 @ 17:24:54
Hi Amelia,
I am one of Minna’s students in her Communications and Media Studies class and after reading your interesting blog entry on digital time and communicating, it made me think a lot about how it affects the world and me on a daily basis. I came to the realization that the generation of people in my age group wastes a ridiculous amount of time checking their Facebooks, Myspaces, Twitters, E-Mails, and taking advantage of other sources of communication our modern-day technology has brought us. Just about half of an average person’s day and probably about a quarter of every hour is involuntarily dedicated to some kind of digital communication. It has become an incurable disease caused by advances in technology.
When my family and I went on vacation this past summer, I tried an experiment that I thought would help me better understand how dependent I am on electronic communicating. I left my phone at home for a week to disconnect myself from the electronic world. Besides the fact that that week’s vacation felt like a year, I felt disconnected from the world for failing to satisfy my seldom urges to check my Facebook notifications, emails, and text messages since I had the inability to do so. It somewhat scared me that I felt this way. Have I become so dependent on my cell phone that without it I feel lost?
This is life today. My parents were in London several months ago walking in Hyde Park and noticed how on a Sunday no one was bringing out their blackberry or cell phone. It was all about family and face time without the intrusion of digital interference. Perhaps that’s a solution to life today in America. I believe you do want to slow up the moments you spend with the people you love. Nothing compares to seeing each other in person and having a voice -to -voice conversation.
The question is, can we have it all—the speed and connection of digital communication and the time and willpower to live without it?
Sep 19, 2010 @ 22:50:59
Tara: Many good points, but special thanks for mentioning the cultural differences bw the US and the UK — 2 relatively similar western countries, at least if viewed from a global perspective. This is precisely what intrigues Amelia and myself in our project.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 19:24:11
Hi Amelia,
I am a student in Minna’s Intro To Communications class and I very much enjoyed your post since I believe that you make many good points as well as bring some important matters to light. Many of us go through our days (and our lives) constantly glued to our phones, computers, iPods, etc. and do not have any conception of time or how much of it we are actually using up by constantly emailing, text messaging, instant messaging, or talking on the phone. Before we know it, our day is done and we are going to sleep only to wake up the next day to do the same exact things. It seems that almost everyone has fallen prey to the disease of Digital Time. Many of us text message, Facebook chat, email, Skype, and talk on the phone as if we had all the time in the world. However, before you know it, hours have passed when it seems like only a few minutes have. I too am guilty of this misconception of time. Oftentimes in my night class, (definitely not Minna’s class!) I find myself on the web browser on my Blackberry searching through random websites in order to pass the time. I feel as though when I do this, time goes much quicker since I am keeping myself occupied by technology. The other day however, I happened to forget my phone in my dorm room because I had to rush to class, and the time that I spent without surfing the web felt like it had dragged on for what seemed like forever. Without my dose of technology, 5 minutes seemed like it had turned into 5 hours. I agree with Bill’s comment above that we, as human beings, are all moving in a certain direction, and that direction is always forward. Many of us feel that the technologies that we use everyday are what allow us to continue moving forward. After all, email and blackberries allow us to keep in touch with business partners. This connection, in turn, allows us move forward in our careers. Keeping in constant connection with a significant other allows that relationship to escalate, which can help us to move forward in the personal part of our lives. We all face tradeoffs, being glued to technology allows us to move forward, but at the same time causes us to catch the disease of “Digital Time”. We use this technology so much that time just seems to fly by. Interestingly enough, on the flip side, when we do not have our phones or computers, or when we are not constantly emailing and texting, we feel as if we are wasting precious time that could be spent being productive. I lost many hours of sleep this summer from an internet game that I played very often. Some nights I would start playing at midnight, and then when I felt I had been only playing for maybe an hour, I would look at the clock and it would be 4AM. Digital time really does seem to go much more quickly than real time does.
Regardless of everything, I have a theory. This constant use of technology and this constant connection with the world around us causes many of us to build up stress. It may seem small, but the need to respond to someone’s messages, check one’s emails, or even make plans, causes us to be under stress since we become aware that these are extra things that need to be done in the day on top of whatever else it is that we have to do. A friend of mine recently did not pay his cell phone bill, and as a result, his service was shut off. At first he told me that he felt his days dragged on since he had nothing to do, but as time went on, he told me that he actually became happier. He claimed that it was nice not to have to worry about calling people or responding to text messages and voice mails, and he found other things to do with his now extra time. However, when he got his phone back, he seemed to be back under the same stress that he was under before his service was discontinued. I feel that to support my theory, research in the form of a survey could be conducted. Perhaps people could be chosen whose time is defined by the way in which they communicate, and then these people could be deprived of their technologies for a set amount of time. Their stress levels could be measured, and they could be given questionnaires which ask them how they spend their now free time, as well as how they feel emotionally without being glued to their technologies. These technologies make us much busier as Amelia stated, and this sense of being busy, in turn, puts us under stress.
Digital Time is a disease which not only causes us to fly through our days without any conception of how much time we are actually spending going through our routines, but also stresses us out, even if we do not realize it. Because of this misconception, we have a false image of the world around us. If we did not have this misconception of time, perhaps we would be able to “stop and smell the roses”, use the time that we have meaningfully, and see the world (and life) for what it really is.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 22:54:34
Another post full of excellent, fun examples (and Im so glad no on dares to say how bored they might be during our sessions). I especially liked the way you articulated this ‘fake efficiency’ (see also previous comments): when we’re connected we waste so much time on trivial matters but when we’re not, we feel so inefficient…
Sep 19, 2010 @ 19:58:42
Hi Amelia,
I absolutely agree with your observation on digital time. Having just moved to New York for college, I find that the idea of digital time and the rushed life is more apparent than ever before. All around me I see that everyone is in a hurry to try and get 9000 things done at once and, according to them, they never seem to have the time to do it. The phrase ‘so much to do and so little time to do it’ is more relevant than ever before; in this new age of technology everything from doing business to just saying hi to the family back home revolves around the rush of digital time. I myself find that while I’m communicating with the world via Facebook or just surfing the web whole hours will just disappear without my knowledge. Not only that, but so many of the things people are rushing to do are actually pointless in the grand scheme of things; there are only so many times someone should look to see if someone else has changed their Facebook status.
I feel that when one devotes themselves to other, more productive tasks, than time ceases to just evaporate. For example, last spring I went to work on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico to help build a walkway for the elderly. I was totally cut off from the rest of the world and had very little technology with me. Everyday I would go down my list of tasks and knock them off one by one without ever really feeling rushed for time; it was as if time itself had slowed down. The whole week I was there felt like an eternity, things that had been done just days earlier felt as if they had been done weeks, even months prior. When I got back home to the technological world, however, the change in time was beyond obvious. Entire days began to just zoom by without me really getting anything done. In the end, it was clear that technology and a constant need to be ‘in the know’ and ‘up to date’ was causing all this time to zip by. It brought up an interesting question: With all of this technology and all of these means of communication, are we always better off?
Sep 19, 2010 @ 22:58:39
Vincent: I GREATLY, greatly appreciate this strand of discussion on (and examples of) experiences of participation ‘in the world’ and related ‘efficiency’,a nd the way you express the dilemma (see also Thomas’ comment, and others): I see a concrete, big research issue arising from this particular idea.
Sep 19, 2010 @ 21:32:39
Hi Amelia,
I’m in one of Minna’s Intro to Communications classes and am really glad we read this post. Digital living completely rules our lives, and we’re so immersed in it today that we don’t even realize we’re living it until someone points it out. Technological communication defines my everyday living. Texting about meal-times, checking new Facebook wall posts and pictures, Skyping with friends and family, these all influence my daily life. I think that the digital world is constantly in motion and perpetually changing, and it is important to keep up with the developments. Otherwise, people become unintentionally disconnected with close friends and even family. However, keeping control on the amount of technological usage is also key because then people could, possibly, literally not be able to survive without their cell phones and the Internet.
I completely agree with your point that digital living seems to make time move faster; in our era of instant gratification, nothing is fast enough. However, I think it is also true that technology can make life move slower, in a detrimental way. In my experience, spending three hours in front of the television or a computer screen tends to make my life stretch out and seem like six hours. But when I was at home for the summer, I was inclined to go outside on the hammock, walk my dog, go for bike rides, and hang out with friends without technology (i.e. visiting monuments, having picnics). I think this is because I subconsciously realized that summer was vacation time, and for me, vacation means not too intense Internet or cell phone usage. At school, however, I tend to be on the computer more and texting all the time because people I know have wall posts and send texts that I feel demand an immediate response.
I think that certain types of communication make time seem to move faster, for example talking on video chat or Skype chatting, seems to make time move faster because one is actively talking to another person, but texting or Facebook wall-to-walls almost make time move slower because there’s not an immediate response, or that instant gratification that rules today’s society.
This topic should be researched experimentally in the ways that other people have already stated, such as seeing how students in high school and college, businessmen, etc., would cope without instant communication for a short period of time. It’s unfortunate, and I agree that everyone should try, for themselves and not as part of an experiment, for at least one week a year to “unplug” and detox from digital living.
Thanks for posting!
Sep 19, 2010 @ 23:01:26
Katie, many good points, but most importantly: you made me make a decision regarding our next position paper (you made me change its topic). In some courses I ask people keep a media diary for a day. We’ll try a media diet for a day and report back in the next position paper!
Sep 20, 2010 @ 03:56:37
Amelia, I am also a student in Minna’s Intro to Communication and Media Studies class, and I thought this blog was really interesting and thought-provoking!
It’s very interesting to me the way time and the media coincide. It seems to me that every company is striving towards making things faster, an aspect which I find prevalent in the way people see America’s values. One of the interesting things about our technological advancements in making things easier and faster to use (touch screen phones, 3G wireless internet, etc.) is that it allots time to do many other things, which is potentially why people are always striving to do more and more, hence the rise in anxiety and, as your mother put it, the reason why “[we] seem to be much busier today than people where [back] then.”
The theory you mentioned about time and one’s impact on the environment is very interesting to me. It seems that one has more time to do “extra” things, such as recycle and care for the environment if that is your prerogative, when one can accomplish the things that are necessary to accomplish quickly and efficiently.
The way I primarily communicate is through text messaging, Ichat (AIM for Macs), Facebook, and face-to-face (more frequently since I have been at school). Texting certainly makes talking easier and faster, but I actually think calling is faster if I have a lot to say, (for instance, when I want to talk to my parents or my boyfriend, I generally call because it’s easier to have a conversation about something where there is a lot to say), because I talk faster than I type. Because, in this age, I am able to multitask and accomplish many things within the day with the efficient, fast way to communicate and do many things in general, I expect to have a lot of time to accomplish necessities on top of having free time to myself on a daily basis.
This topic of time and communication could be researched through surveys on how people use their time, what they expect to be able to accomplish in that time, etc. Also, ethnography in general, where the surveyors participate in their own survey to add more perspectives to the research, would help because it brings the perspectives of those who wrote the surveys themselves as well as those being surveyed to see how alike or different people view communication and how it contributes to the use of their time. Perhaps it would provide insight as to whether or not we spend too much time communicating now? Or not enough time?
On a side note, to take the opposing side of this “digital time” discussion, it seems that even though our faster technology and ways of communicating have given us ample time to complete things and more time to do other things, it also seems that Facebook and cellphones are taking up a lot of our time as well! We spend much more time communicating now (in my opinion) then people did, say, back in our parents’ days. Also, personally speaking, I waste a lot of time checking my Facebook and looking through old text messages on my phone, probably a lot more time then I should! So there are potential reverse effects of this multiplicity of ways to communicate and access communication, but I know I would never give up my cellphone or Facebook!
– Alyssa
Sep 20, 2010 @ 08:08:39
Alyssa, many relevant points, but you made me think, in particular, what different people would consider ‘enough time’ and ‘not enough time’ with digital devices, regarding efficiency… Do different groups of people (most likely) have very different ideas about that? Ethnography would be a great way to explore the questions you raise. Just a little note on terminology: usually, the term survey pertains to questionnaires and such, whereas ethnography is more qualitative; it utilizes small group and individual f2f interviews, participatory observation and such.
Sep 20, 2010 @ 03:57:29
Hi Amelia,
I’m a student at Minna’s Communications class. I really enjoyed reading your blog. You bring up very interesting points. Digital time has made everything faster so we have more time during the day to do other things. But that extra time most often turns to wasted time. Instead of hanging out with a friend or doing something creative and productive, we choose to update our Twitter accounts and/or use Facebook. I honestly believe that these “social” websites could never substitute a face to face conversation, and can never create or even maintain a quality relationship.
I think your example of what Mark might do with 30 minutes compared to the “typical American” supports my argument. Although Mark doesn’t have time to e-mail his friend and read online headlines, the way he spends his 30 minutes is not only better for the environment, as you pointed out, but also better for his well-being. It’s almost as if many of us are trading peace-of-mind, creativity, and happiness for more texting, more twitter(ing?) and more wasteful activity the digital world has provided us. I can almost certainly say that everyone I know that is constantly on twitter, Facebook, and texting is also stressed and overwhelmed.
I always feel like time flies when I am removed from the digital world. Just the other day I was stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge. My friends and I had a pleasant conversation about everything imaginable and once we got through traffic and looked at the time we noticed that three hours had passed. If I had spent that time just texting, it would have probably felt like I was stuck in traffic for days. I also went on a camping trip where all of my electronics were removed. At first I was really upset but 2 hours into the first day, I was extremely happy and already considering living there forever. I get a real sense of self and community when I am removed from the digital world. If I had access to the internet, I know I would not have enjoyed the trip. I guess it varies person to person but for me, time flies when I am away from all these 1’s and 0’s.
Sep 20, 2010 @ 08:02:02
Interesting, Chabelly: You get a real sense of self and community when off digital communication, while, as you insinuate, we are marketed the idea of FB and the like as ways of being able to express ourselves (‘profiles’) and to keep in touch with our communities…
Sep 20, 2010 @ 18:17:02
Hi Ameilia!
I am a student in Minna’s intro to communication class. I found your blog quit inspiring. I never really thought about “digital time” and the effects of it. Its amazing that it took Mike so long to make a cup of tea, when it is instant for our generation. I bet Mike enjoyed his tea a lot more though since he put so much work into it. We are so use to everything being instantaneous that we take for granted how digital time has changed the world. A conversation with anyone around the world is just a click away. Does digital time make the value of these relationships increase or decrease? Although it is wonderful to be able to talk to friends and family at any time so easily does it make it less special? In the old days writing letters was the only form of communication. It was personal and exciting to send and receive mail. Everything seemed to be appreciated more before technology. More time an effort was put into the little things which seemed to make them more special. Technology seems to be a double edge sword at times. People think that digital time and technology makes the world a easier better place but after reading your story I have a different outlook on the topic. Digital time causes stress on people in many different ways. Your grandmother had a point, life was probably much simpler and less hectic when she grew up. Having fun wasent video games and tv, it was using the imagination. Technology has sped up time but slowed down the motivation people have and makes them lazy. But don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t be able to go a week without my blackberry or laptop :)!! Sorry if i rambled in this comment I have never blogged before!
Sep 20, 2010 @ 18:30:17
Christina: No worries about rambling, most bloggers do 🙂 Others have addressed this issue too, but your post, specifically, made me think about time and the value of relationships — thank you for that! We’ll be discussing theories about communication and relationships in the coming sessions (Fri, Tue) and you bring up an interesting dilemma: Does the instant, quasi-impersonal digital communication impact they way we value some/all relationships (think of text message break-ups…)? Let’s continue on this theme in the sessions to come!
Sep 20, 2010 @ 18:53:19
Dear Amelia,
I am also one of Minna’s students. I have been thinking alot about how fast life can be with technology over the weekend. You are right, time goes by very quickly when people are emailing, texting, faxing and so on. I am not going to lie, I rely on technology ALL THE TIME. With technology, my life spins around like a merry go round because time goes by that quick whether I email, or text, or even email a paper through my cell phone. It is crazy how society relies on technology now, we use it as a necessity. I feel I always need to carry my cell phone with me at all times to keep my mom posted on where I’m at, who I’m with and what time am I coming home. In a matter of seconds my mom will receive a text from me about my updates. I do not call people as much anymore, I just text or email, or use the ever so popular Facebook. Communicating now a days is so fast and instant. I no longer send a post card to my cousin Maylean in San Diego, I just post up something on her wall on Facebook and she will immediately respond back to me.
Now that I rely on technology so much, I expect things to be done quickly. If I download music or send an email and it takes a long time, and especially when I try to get on a website and it takes forever to load, I get really frustrated. I have gotten accustomed to a fast pasting lifestyle, and it’s a shame because I do take advantage of technology now. I multitask by blasting my ipod, updating my Facebook status, texting my friends from school, while trying to send a paper to my professor. Technology has corrupted alot of us because we want everything to happen right away. We forget that time is precious and valuable especially when all these cool touch phones and high tech gadgets are coming out to do unnecessary things for us in a matter of minutes…even seconds!
I think a way to research this topic is giving out a survey to college students asking them how often they BBM or tweet or use facebook in a day. Or there should a group to ask a number of students to voluntarily show their phone bills and come up statistics of how much they use they receive and send text messages. And as other bloggers had mentioned, I think it would rather be an interesting experiment to take a group of students and ban them from using any form of technology for a month, to see how they will cope without their Blackberrries, and Iphones, and how they can get a hold of people and also how would they get their school work done. If I were to participate in such an experiment like that ( which I would not even attempt to lol) my world will just slow down and I would probably go crazy. It’s a shame for me to admit that, but unfortunately I feel I have to live in a fast pasting life.
Reading your blog, however, did made me think alot about the use of technology differently, I and actually do agree with you Amelia =)
Sep 20, 2010 @ 19:19:46
Ashley: I LOVE to read in your post (as in others’) how A’s blog entry made you think, and perhaps differently than you had previously. (You know I’m obsessed by the concept of critical thinking!) Valid point about the type/s of research — and sorry to say but your next position paper will be about YOU being on a media diet for a day (well, I’d like everyone to fast, but I’ll ask you to at least restrict your media use as much as you can).
Sep 21, 2010 @ 03:35:10
The next position paper sounds like a really tough challenge but I think one day will not hurt, lol, se you tommorow at class.
– Ashley =)
Sep 20, 2010 @ 21:42:48
Amelia,
Hello, my name is Quetzalli Torres and I am a student in Minna’s Communications class. You raise some interesting points regarding the relationship between digital time and our impact on the environment. Rather than beat a dead horse, I would like to share my own take on the impact of digital time. But first, I will address the ways in which I experience digital time.
As we all know, there are myriad ways of staying in contact with people. Email allows us to carry out a conversation throughout a day (all depending on how often one checks one’s email). More amazingly, text messaging and websites such as Facebook and Twitter allow us to tell people what we are doing as we are doing it! For the most part, i send out at least one or two text messages a minute, so it is fair to say that I am always mid-conversation with somebody. In regards to my email, I check it hourly. I used to Twitter, but I became sick of it, as I realized that I didn’t necessarily want to know what people were doing every hour, nor did I necessarily want others to know exactly what I was doing. I approved of digital time to a point, beyond which I saw speeding up of time as a hindrance if people got too wrapped up in the many forms of communicating.
Once upon a time, it was a big time to write somebody. In fact, a suitor had to ask for permission to write to a woman. Each letter sent had a great deal o meaning behind it, more than anybody in our age has experiences. With the increased volume and frequency of messages sent between people, theres is an inverse relationship with the meaning behind the messages being sent. Each message becomes cheap and quickly forgotten. While in the past each letter may be treasured, digital time does not adequately for such feelings as digital time has sped up the time we have to react to a message.
The best ways to study these effects would be to use interpretative methods, of which I would suggest ethnography. Objective studies that would result in graphs and numbers would not have the same effect in studying the reasons why or how. One interested at looking at the results of digital time might look at the content being communicated at high speeds and the types of responses (including intensity of emotion) that are aroused by each message.
As a supplement to what I have written i have included a link to the lyrics to a song from one of my favorite bands (Arcade Fire) that touches upon the disappearance of letter writing.
http://www.songlyrics.com/arcade-fire/we-used-to-wait-lyrics/
Thanks for your thoughts on digital time.
Quetzalli Torres
Sep 20, 2010 @ 21:54:19
Quetzalli: A perfect comment re: research — a wonderful reference to Arcade Fire! I’d be interested to know how exactly you became to the threshold with ‘digital time’ — you decided to participate that much but not more… Was there a specific, ‘significant event’, as some sociologist would call it? Thank you for your creative comment!
Sep 20, 2010 @ 23:32:33
Amelia,
I must agree that digital time, or rather the speed and ease that comes with digital communication, affects how time seems to pass in our everyday lives. It is so easy to lose track of time while watching a video on Hulu or reading the latest celebrity gossip. I’ve become accustomed to the speed that accompanies digital communication, and I now expect that speed in everything. I get incredibly impatient when it takes more than a couple seconds for a photo to load on facebook, ironically calling the internet slow. If someone doesn’t answer their phone right away, I’m undoubtedly frustrated. Now that I have experienced digital speed, I always want it. This speed therefore becomes a way of life and society as a whole moves at a rapid pace.
We are not just losing time of day though, with the way that experiences fly by. We are also losing valuable time with ourselves, with friends, family, and even strangers. Through technology, we have the ability to explore and communicate with the entire world via the tiny search box on the Google home page. With all of that sitting in front of me, with so much knowledge and potential at my finger tips, I’m always on the computer. Maybe I am shopping online, maybe I am “stalking” people on facebook, or e-mailing an old friend. But by quickly reading the reviews then purchasing that book online, I miss the human interaction I would have if I went to a Barnes and Noble and asked for a recommendation. By looking people up on facebook, I no longer need to meet them face to face to get a first impression. And with all of this internet searching going on, I rarely take time to reflect on my own self, meditate. With digital communication, it seems I am not just losing time of day but also real communication; I’m losing face time with friends, strangers, and myself. Relationships and interactions are going down the drain in favor of speedy convenience.
And so we see Mark, a businessman, give up his money and technology to get back to the basics, to reconnect with himself and the world that he lives in. But instead he is isolated from the world. He lives like it is 1750, which is not at all practical in our 2010 world. We learn through his experience that these days, we can’t have it both ways. We cannot live a life of successful business without the fast paced digital communication, nor can we preserve perfect communication with the use of digital communication. In order to progress in society, one must submit to the modern conveniences of digital communication even if that means sacrificing face time.
This begs the question, as others have already asked, is society and technology headed in the right direction? Though only the test of time can answer that question for us, we can ask other questions and experiment and ethnography to find our answers. For instance, how is the loss of face time affecting relationships? We can experiment by collecting pairs of best friends. A couple pairs of friends will only communicate via text, other pairs will only communicate in person, other pairs will communicate with all modern forms of communication. How will the friendships be affected? Is digital communication really damaging healthy relationships, or is it just creating bad relationships?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 00:56:34
Amy: Your comment “now that I’ve experienced it I always want it” really hit home. This is a fundamental question: WHY do we want it, and not the opposite? Why is ‘instant gratification’, in a broad sense, the desired mode of being? Why don’t we instinctively yearn for slower pace? Is the desire for speed ‘socially constructed’ or somehow ‘hardwired’ 🙂 in us?
Sep 20, 2010 @ 23:33:29
Hi Amelia,
I have never thought of time as having a correlation with one’s impact on the environment, but in all the instances that I can think of in which I’ve been more connected with nature time definitely felt much slower. On a weeklong backpacking trip in the mountains, I had no connection to the outside world, and nothing more technologically advanced than a flashlight. We washed in rivers and carried all of our clothes and supplies on our backs. I was given no itinerary and no expectation of goals to be fulfilled. We hiked all day, set up tents, ate, and slept under the stars. Days felt fuller and there was a definite change in how I perceived time when I got back home.
Perhaps conversely, I never hear anybody talking about how smartphones allow people to make better use of their time, but I find that this is very true for me. The fact that all my modes of electronic communication are compiled into one apparatus makes my life a lot easier. Because I’m connected/ available at all times, I get all notifications and messages in real time, which releases me from many different cages. Now when I use the computer I don’t refresh my email every other minute, looking for emailed facebook notifications or fresh emails. I am more focused and more at peace because of the knowledge that my phone will let me know if anything pertaining to me/ directly at me is happening.
While people might say that dividing ones attention between multiple tasks can decrease one’s efficiency, I think that this is the lesser of 2 evils. I spend way less time wasting my time and spend that newfound time on various things with better focus and way less anxiety. I don’t really go on facebook, and the different forms of communication I engage in, email, text, BBM, etc. are now given less than a minute of my time as they come, broken up throughout the day. The phenomenon of the passage of time could be researched through ethnography. Different age groups and different areas of work necessitate different modes of communication, and spend varying amounts of time communicating. It would be interesting to see how different groups’ relationship with time and how they would function or use their time without their various modes of electronic communication.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 00:41:55
Elaine: The generational question is SO interesting, thank you for bringing that up. It may seem self-evident (younger people are more avid and intense tech users…) but not necessarily. And even if a 70-year-old would be ‘living in digital time’ (my dad, for instance, is pretty much doing that) how do his/her experiences of other kinds of time, in the past, shape his/her present ways of participating digitally. My dad started his work life during the time when in Finland, most regular businesses and offices were closed only for Sunday (so no weekends). He says he feels that there was so much time because work and leisure time were much more clearly divided. So although he officially worked more, when he was off, no work. Now we’re constantly ‘on duty’, it seems.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 00:23:23
Hi Amelia,
I am in one of Minna’s Intro to Communications and Media Studies classes and was assigned to read this blog as our assignment. I think that the post is incredibly insightful and and brings up a valid point about the digitalized world we live in. I also thought that it was interesting to follow the differences among the generations. The way we live today is completely different from the way any previous generation has lived. A world in which technology is easily accessible and constantly moving forward, naturally lends itself to increased differences with past generations. In this day and age, technology is everywhere we look; and the most prominent forms of technology seem to be advancements in communication. The most prominent examples are Facebook and Twitter; whole web domains donated to the idea of helping people to communicate with each other constantly. Even video conferencing that has trans-continental capabilities. Everyone can constantly be in communication with the rest of the world and its as simple as logging onto a computer. However, the digitalizing affect of all this technology can easily be seen by those who are not part of this generation.
I think that the point you make by including your mother and your grandmother into the story is a very prevalent point. It is possible to say that in this digitalizing era, that people are in greater communication with each other, but what does it say about time? What is does say about time, as your family has observed, has changed. Family time is no longer what it once was. Instead of taking time out of a work schedule or time out from certain activities, we now take time out of communicating to a certain degree. The times I return home from college to visit my family are great, but they also come at a price. Although I leave my laptop at school, I am still incessantly on the computer at home, constantly checking email, Facebook, and Twitter. I find that often, the only time I am not texting friends is when I have meals at home. At school, no one cares if you are having dinner with them and texting all the while; it is impersonal. However, the family still is personal. We still make time for our family I believe, but what we take time out of different things.
Ultimately, what I am saying is that, in a world in which time is constantly moving faster as result of mass communication, family coming together and making time for each other is still as important as it has been in the past. As a result of our engagement in mass communication forums such as Facebook, Twitter, and even in slightly more personal devices such as cell phones, we tend to lose track of time because it is moving so quickly. Everything in our lives is constantly in motion, and I believe that is the reason that the businessman in the story sees his life slow down when he goes into a natural environment. For most though, that is not plausible, so i simply propose a return to family time as a means of slowing down the whirlwind pace we live in as a result of a digitalized world.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 12:21:39
Joe: Your comment expands nicely on the issue of digital time and relationships — and appropriate modes of communication with different groups close to you. Thanks! I’m always, for obvious reasons, thinking this regarding the classroom situation. What do you think about that? Should that time be devoted to learning without gadgets?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 00:51:10
Amelia,
Hi! I’m Devon… also a student in Minna’s Intro Comm & Media Studies class.
I believe this idea that the current generation has a new relationship with time is a very innovative thought. The majority of people weaving in and out of the social and working worlds are constantly interacting with a piece of technology… we are all in constant communication through e-mails, texts, phone calls, Facebook, blogs, and more. The list is endless! It’s fascinating to me as a student to hear how often people (including me) complain about not having enough time to relax as they are drowning in mountains of schoolwork, yet they still always find time to squeeze in that extra Facebook comment or text to a friend. The internet is such a temptress! It draws you in and refuses to release you, as a result, seconds… minutes… hours that you so anxiously knew you didn’t have to spare in the first place have been wasted mindlessly clicking through pictures and checking hardly urgent e-mails.
It’s certainly strange how quickly these technological forms of communication have slipped in to the necessity category within the lives of so many people, particularly for those in my age group. My question is… has the desire to stay connected in a web of perpetual communication, content sharing, and general interaction with others become a top priority? A priority so high on the list that prior “to-dos” can be completely (though temporarily) forgotten as soon as a computer or cell phone screen is placed too close to the vulnerable communication addict within us?
My first thought is that it has the most to do with escapism. The way I personally chose to communicate defines how I spend my time through out my day in many ways. Primarily, I see any chance to communicate as mini vacation from something routine I was previously engaged in, and in invitation into something new and interesting that might re-fuel me to return back to the ho-hum task when I’m ready. Skype- dates with friends, texting my boyfriend, a phone call to mom, an e-mail to an old teacher that inspired me in high school… all of these options allow me to escape out of a bind and into a relaxed and pleasant state. I will always take time out of my day to communicate with the people I care about. The key is understanding how to take responsibility for the time you have, managing your work carefully enough that you know exactly the time window you can allow yourself to take a break and check in with others.
Texting is probably the lowest stakes popular form of communication popularized by todays youth, as most of us are so used to the act that we can text very quickly without even looking down at the keyboard. I almost can’t count texting as a waste of time, because if one becomes a skilled enough text-artist to multi-task texting with whatever else they are supposed to be doing (besides things that NEED 100% of your attention, like driving and such..) then it is almost as if the texting does not cause you to become off track what so ever. I think Facebook, chatting and e-mail are the real time suckers of the bunch.
All of these forms of communication depress me a bit… don’t get me wrong, I’m very thankful to live in a time where technology provides me with a hundred different ways to get in touch with the people I love most. I am disappointed, just as many others are, with the lack of personal connection involved in these forms of communication. I feel we’ve all become so busy that it’s much easier to spend our time shooting a quick text to family and friends rather than calling each one up separately and planning a specific date and time to meet in person and catch up. It’s like killing 12 birds with one stone. There’s nothing very caring about it… but because it’s become so normal in our day to day lives, we still find little texts, comments and e-mails to be meaningful. It isn’t until we finally go out to lunch with that person, meet up with them to take a walk, or sit down and have any kind of an in person chat that we remember the true value of face to face interaction.
This would be a very interesting topic to research. I think there are both qualitative and quantitative ways to go about this. Firstly, it might be interesting to send out a massive survey concerning peoples day to day use of technology for communication, how much time is spent per day, what types of communication are being used etc. just to get a general consensus of the public’s use of communication. Secondly, focus groups including people gathered with others of their same age, gender, class, etc. and then subsequently being interviewed in regards to their technology use for communication could tell us a lot about trends within the field, how communication through technology affects all of us on a day to day basis, who’s time it effects the strongest in our society.. questions such as this.
Sorry this is so long! I just kind of got rolling on the topic 🙂 Can’t wait to discuss more in class.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 13:26:26
Devon: A Good point (among many others) about different fors of communication… It made me think of a map, matrix or scale of sorts in which diffenet forms could be positioned, depending on their ‘time consuming/time experience’ factor… Certainly relevant observations on how to go about researching the question. As you can imagine, plenty of quantitative data exists, and here’s one great source re: a project that mostly utilized questionnaire surveys: http://pewinternet.org/
Sep 21, 2010 @ 01:00:54
Amelia,
I am one of Minna’s students in Intro to Communications and Media Studies, and I found your blog post to be quite intriguing and refreshing at that. As a person who is addicted to all things technologically inclined like my Blackberry, MacBook, iPod, and Navigational System, I found through your entry that I am without a doubt part of the mass influx of people that have been essentially sucked into the world of digital time! I have come to realize that all things scheduled: events, classes, work, and items on my to-do list are constantly buzzing my handheld to REMIND me of what exactly is going on in my life. This brought me to the realization that your mother’s sharing of how life was in the 1950’s is so vastly different today. The concept of digital time is so complex and fast-paced, which brings a feeling of stress to the people affected by it. This stress is then simplified and lessened through devices like the Blackberry or iPhone to properly manage those “hectic schedules” or “back to back meetings.”
It is sad to say but I know I would be completely lost without my Blackberry. From telling me that I have work in 15 minutes to reminding me of a long term assignment I should be starting on, it has succeeded in taking over my life. Socially, I am able to post pictures to the various websites I participate in (Facebook, Twitter etc.) to keep people that know me or want to know me updated on what goes on in my life. Though I am not actually speaking with these people, I have come to find that this has become one of my main forms of communication with the outside world while I am away from them or doing things without them. On an even more pitiful note, I anxiously await someone’s comment or reply to my postings to feel that technological attention that many people seek.
In earlier times (before the technology craze), paying attention to one’s children and spending time with them was a solid form of communication. Today, I keep in touch with my father via Skype, Blackberry Messenger (an instant messaging for Blackberry devices), and e-mail. This is the case because of his busy work schedule conflicting with my school schedule and lack of being home. On a simpler note, we just do not have the TIME. As sad as it is to say – without technology, my relationship with my father would not be half as strong as it is.
If I woke up tomorrow to find myself in the middle of Nebraska on a farm, I am one hundred percent certain that I would not know what to do with myself. After spending about an hour having a personal panic attack over the lack in cell service/WiFi to go on the internet, I would probably end up very lonely. This brings me to the conclusion that the majority of my relationships in life are in fact via messages, e-mails, and the occasional voicemail. Your blog post has inspired me to work on the more personal relationships with face to face communication. I hope to find a nice balance between the two sides eventually, and come to an equilibrium with digital time and regular time (time spent with others, personal interaction etc.). I can bet that my stress levels will decrease severely!
Sep 21, 2010 @ 13:31:25
Kyle: a lovely personal, humorous reflection. Also, you make the argument, contratry to a couple of other commentators here, that tech can actually strengthen relationships, even with your close family members. And guess what: you’ll experience how to be disconnected for our position paper 2!
Sep 21, 2010 @ 01:02:07
Dear Amelia,
I am also a student in Minna’s communication studies class, and, like the vast majority of my peers, a self-professed facebook addict. Along with the rest of my generation, I spend many of my days texting, facebooking, and clicking away the hours. But what your blog post immediately brought to mind was my mother’s newfound and already serious addiction to her ipad. Almost every single night when I am home I inevitably hear her nightly call down to my father, “Rob……? Can you bring me my ipad?” Though technology addiction is typically attributed to the younger generation these days, when I see my mother clutch the ipad to her chest like someone would clutch a newborn child, I see that this is not necessarily the case. Technology has become not necessarily about convenience and efficiency, but about labels. We are always rushing to get the newest, fastest, 2.0 version of the technological devices we already have, thrusting the old versions away as soon as the next best thing appears. Does the Ipad’s appeal come from its genuine efficiency and usefulness, or is it that little signature that follows all emails, proclaiming “sent from my Ipad,” that makes it so desirable?
What I have begun to wonder is whether is it the object of “the Ipad” itself that causes such an addiction to take root, or whether the addicting power is, in fact, the constant communication that the device allows. As a worrying mother, the ipad allows her to be plugged in at all times, in tune with the world, her schedule, and the whereabouts of her children, among other things. While I used to see her positioned for long hours at the kitchen table writing in her planner and making phone calls, I now see her whipping off Ipad emails in a matter of minutes. We know that the human race craves and needs communication and connection, and the wonders of technology have made constant and instant communication possible. It’s come to the point that when we are cut off from communicative devices, we can feel an actual sense of loss and disconnect with the world. I can be completely honest in saying that when my phone dies, I feel like a very small part of me dies along with it–the part that needs connection at every moment. I don’t think this dependence on technology is a necessarily a bad thing. I think when humans have something to connect to, we find solace. Additionally, the internet gives a voice to the meek and to the youth that has not existed in years past. People who are afraid to speak up and make changes can now do that, instantly and quickly, through the channel of technology. Technology gives a voice to anyone who is willing to be heard, and can get that message across faster and further than through any other medium. This recently generated, sped-up world allows us to advance . Many argue that our technologies rob us of our time, and that most of our time spent “plugged in” is worthless. The truth of it is, our high-speed internet driven lives give us more time, because we can accomplish tasks much more quickly. We just need to learn how to use that time well, and use the internet as a positive tool and not a distraction. I don’t believe that a Amazon Kindle will ever replace a library, or that my mother will adopt her Ipad as part of the family. We will keep our simple pleasures, as they are just as essential to our success as human beings as our new gadgets have come to be.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 13:45:54
Lauren: I greatly appreciated your comment about the democratizing power of the Internet — that surely is true (in terms of mass appeal, we do know that only handful of sites dominate and attract most of the traffic, but in terms of interpersonal communication, and subgroups, certainly!) As for the allure of the IPad: It would be a great research question. Probably both the connectedness AND usability of the device, but to what extent, in what ratio?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 01:05:48
Amelia, I, like many of my peers, also agree with everything that you have pointed out in your blog. The concept of time is changing and is dictated by the increasing forms of communication that we all choose to immerse ourselves. Today alone I woke up to an alarm on my phone, texted my friend about an assignment on the way to class, checked my facebook and emails (a number of times I will keep to myself to maintain an ounce of dignity…) and called my brother (3 times). Oh, and I also called my mom. Furthermore, when she did not answer said phone call I proceeded to have an internal hissy fit. Which brings me to my point: we live in a time where the majority of the time, time itself is valued according to our perceived benefits of instant gratification.
This idea has been on my mind on and off since first semester of my freshman year when I attended a lecture at the Lincoln center Campus called “Sex and the Soul.” The lecture was based around Donna Freita’s book of the same name. She actually wrote the book using a number of the research methods we have been discussing in class including interviews, surveys, and specific ethnographies on students from different schools and of different demographics. I acknowledge that the lecture itself intended to explore the intersection of spiritual longings and sexual freedom that many students find themselves in college, but I was most intrigued by how she categorized my generation as consumed by the “hook up culture.” As a bit of a romantic myself I found this piece of information quite disheartening. However it has lead me to question the implications and origins concerning this categorization. Each time I let my mind peruse this subject, I find myself dwelling on instant gratification.
I was returning from a concert late last Wednesday night and I was on the train with my room mate and a girl I had just been introduced to that night who has quickly become my friend (in less then a week we have exchanged numbers and become friends on facebook DIGITAL TIME AND COMMUNICATION IN ACTION) when I remembered the lecture. I brought up the “hook-up culture” in the context of a conversation that dealt with boys and how different the “game” is in college. We all agreed that we are in fact in a “hook-up” centered culture whether we like it or not. The relationships we build ignore the past traditions of courtship that often took weeks just to set up a date. They now lean towards the fast-paced “hook-ups” which are only evidenced by the notification of a new friend request on facebook or an asinine text-message conversation that happens while simultaneously checking emails and catching up with friends in the cafeteria. Even more startling is the number of times people talk about how they literally “hooked-up” before even exchanging information. Talk about too fast.
What does this observation actually mean? It means that digital/fast time is not only negatively impacting the environment, or as Jacqueline Tozzi pointed out our health, it is also negatively impacting relationships and our ability to sustain and maintain such relationships, specifically ones of the romantic sort.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 13:49:00
Emily: Yet another observant comment about digital time and relationships — extremely relevant regarding our discussions on theories of relationships and communication. We’ll use the topic of fast food-hook-up relationship culture in our discussions!
Sep 21, 2010 @ 01:07:38
Hi Amelia,
Like many of the entries prior to this one, I, too, am a student from Minna’s Intro to Communication and Media Studies class. Your article on digital time stroke me as enlightening. Communication has become a mass usage of electronic devices, whether it may be through text messages or social networking sites. When I go on my computer, probably one of the first things I do are check my facebook, personal email, fordham email, and then tumblr. It’s odd how much we rely on technology without even being able to realize it sometimes. Like most teenage girls, I check my phone every so often to see if I have that “new text message” notification on the top left corner of my phone. I rely too much on these technological advances that it is difficult to remember a time when these devices weren’t a part of our daily routine. Because of technology, a sense of impatience has been stored in me. I expect everything to be quicker than it should. I personally do not even like turning my computer off because that it entails waiting for my computer to load while it turns on. Technology has given me a different perception of time.
When we are stripped of our everyday electronic devices, time seems to move in a slower motion. Like when we anticipate time without technology, time moves differently then when we are engaged in technology. Mark took up a challenge when he disowned all forms of technology for a year and lived without money. Everything took longer than it would in the 21st century but he said he found joy in it. Does time have a direct relationship with impact on the environment? Mark’s moneyless life seems to tell us it does.The more time you spend on something, the more you start to appreciate your surroundings including the environment. It’s ironic that more advanced technology with the purpose of making someone’s life more simple is being created but it is disconnecting that person from nature. The more consumed we get with technology, the more we start to lose the reality of nature and our surroundings.Time is perceived in a different form when technology is put into the picture.
A method that can be used to research this topic more in depth would be to do the obvious. Obtain groups of people that range in age, gender, and location and leave them to have no access to any type of unnecessary technology such as facebook, email, cellphones, and video games. What will this do to each individual? Does the age, gender and location greatly factor into this? How will one manage to contact others and to each other? Will this ultimately damage proper face to face communication? It’s funny to think that there was a time when blackberries, iphones, video game consoles, facebook, and email didn’t exist. Where has time gone?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:08:01
Stephanie: quite so, re: your research design. And you write: “It’s funny to think that there was a time when blackberries, iphones, video game consoles, facebook, and email didn’t exist. Where has time gone?” Good comment, as well — it wasn’t that long ago when they didn’t exist. FB was founded in 2004. Two years ago my senior colleagues still made fun of my interest in researching FB (“it’s just a fad for college kids”). Your comment points out how quickly these forms of comm have taken over our lives.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 01:55:09
My day starts at 5:27 every morning. In a blink of an eye it is 9:30 and it is time for bed. The 16 hours that I am awake are filled with walking approx 45mins of walking from “A” to “B”, 7 hrs in the gym (the joys of college athletics) 7 hours attributed to academics (class/study hall). I usually have an hour of free time. With this kind of schedule (and the kind that I assume most college students have) I am interested in how my peers communicate.
I find anyway to talk to my friends and family, and find myself on Facebook more than anything else (to the point where I wasted so much time on my profile that it is past my “bed time” now). After brushing my teeth and washing my face I check my Facebook and Twitter account. I respond to messages while I am walking to the gym. Walking to class (and sometimes during) I am going through my emails and again through my Facebook for the fifth or six time, stalking others profiles and going though pictures. With the hour of free time I am on the phone with my mother or a few friends from out of state. I can relate to Darryl comment on how fast time flies when we are sitting with teammates in the cafeteria. There just does not seem to be enough time in the day. Especially given how addicting these networking websites, YouTube and even texting can be.
I would be interested to compare other student’s schedules and what the correlation between the amounts of free time they have to the amount of time they spend using communication mediums.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:11:44
Kaitlyn: Thanks for walking us through your media day! A good illustration of time and daily routines; and where digital communication fits in and how it belongs to the routines, not (only) to specific moments when we NEED to communicate.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 02:10:13
Hi Amelia,
My name is Koreena Nazir and I am a student from Minna’s Intro to Communication and Media Studies class. You made some interesting points about living in this new digital age and I completely agree with you. After reading about Mark’s separation from money, I tried to imagine myself without the things I use on a regular basis and it seemed absolutely impossible. It made me sad to see how much of my life revolves around technology. Being born and raised in New York this is only natural to me. I am surrounded by people who are always thinking of new ways to make society a faster, stronger, and better place. Most people have embraced the future of technology and forgotten how to do things the old fashioned way. I include myself in this cultural phenomenon, as soon as I wake up I run to check my email and my blackberry for any missed calls or text messages. However my biggest disappointment was all the time that I wasted. I could have been doing so many other productive things with my life, such as reading a book, spending time with my family, or writing a paper, instead I chose roaming the internet.
Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have allowed millions of people to communicate with each other without seeing the person face to face. When I had a Facebook there were all kinds of features that were available from posting photos, changing statuses, joining groups, commenting on a friend’s wall and much more. I would log on to my account during my lunch break at work and I would fail to realize how much of my time this website would consume. About a year ago I decided to delete my Facebook account. I didn’t feel like wasting any more of my valuable time. I got more of my homework done and rather than chatting with a friend online I saw them in person. Although there were some downsides for getting rid of my profile, I still felt liberated.
As you know I am not the only college student who has a Facebook. Researchers should conduct an experiment that involves every student from Fordham University to de- activate their Facebook for one week. It would be interesting to see how they react to the withdrawal of technology and what they would do with their down time.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:23:37
Koreena: Your decision to go off FB is very interesting! I recently read about it in NYT, and it seems this kind of countertrend might be developing… 🙂 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/is-there-life-after-facebook/?scp=2&sq=giving%20up%20facebook&st=Search
Sep 21, 2010 @ 02:38:44
Amelia,
I’m also a student in one of Minna’s Intro to Communications and Media Studies classes and as a matter of fact, i started reading this blog entry while being guilty of time maximization as well. At our university there is a shuttle service that provides students travel between Manhattan and the Bronx. The interesting thing is that these vans actually provide students with unlimited public access to a mobile hot spot wi-fi connection throughout the journey. So as i was reading your powerfully accurate entry and writing up a response of my thoughts i was traveling further away. I had never really taken the time to stop and realize just how strange of a concept that is, and just how alien it would sound to people twenty years ago. To think i could be writing the response to an assignment and be handing it in while traveling in the opposite direction and no outside parties hand delivering it for me. I could be physically walking away and sending it as i progress. These ideas go so unnoticed with our generation because we’re so acclimated to them, to the point where we are practically numb of them. It’s not that I’m frightened by that fact, however i do agree that everything would be ‘healthier’ as others had mentioned if life were just able to be taken back to it’s original tempo. Somewhere along the lines, we got too excited with speed and productivity that efficiency replaced serenity and personal enjoyment. Life is short enough as it is, do we really need to be speeding up our evenings and days by ‘stumbling’ or ‘surfing’ on the web all the time? Would it really be so bad if we actually took the time to go outside and lay down in the sun and really feel every minute of the hour instead of trying to, for a lack of better term, kill all our time? What small steps we can take towards calming down and enjoying key elements of an analog lifestyle can help us get over our technological numbness and the culture shock of speed and efficiency being the answer to everything.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:32:27
Matthew: A couple of others have noted this too (e.g. Stephanie a few comments ‘before’ you), but your post illustrates the fundamental change in our (work) culture so well. I was picturing a short film about this assignment — 200 yrs ago, 100 yrs, 1950s, 1980s, now. How different the process of composing and submitting the assignment would be, in terms of time and effort. But what remains the same?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 02:48:54
Amelia, I found your post very interesting. It articulated many moments I have felt myself, but have not been able to describe. It is really amazing to think about how much time people spend communicating via technology vs. communicating face to face. I am ashamed to admit that I probably spend more hours each day commenting my friends’ facebook pages, sending text messages, and checking emails than I spend actually interacting with other people through verbal communication. When you think about it, it takes much longer to type out a message than it does to simply say it. Think about how many times we hit the backspace key midway through a sentence in order to re-phrase something or correct the spelling of a word. I have probably spent several hours of my life with my finger hitting the backspace key. I find that, especially when I’m using the internet, technology bombards me with so much information at one time that it takes a much longer time for my brain to processes everything that there is to think about. Hence, time seems to go much faster than when I am focusing my thoughts to completing a task thoroughly without help from technology.
It would be interesting to do a study to see how long it would take a group of students to write a short research paper as they normally would vs. how long it would take a group of students to write a research paper without using any technology. The first group would use the internet to conduct research and be able to type the response. They would also have their cell phones on them and possibly music on in the background. They would also be free to check emails or go on facebook whenever they felt so inclined. The second group would conduct all research using books and magazines in the library, and they would hand write their responses. This group would not be allowed to have their cell phones, and they would not be allowed any background noise. Neither group could know they were being timed because this would surely effect the amount of times they would get distracted. I would estimate that even though technology was designed to facilitate research, I believe it would take the first group longer, on average, to complete the research paper because the second group would be able to focus more easily without the overload of information. Perhaps the ideal way to write a research paper would be a healthy merge of the two methods.
The fact that technology makes information more conveniently accessible may not always be a blessing for our fast-paced society. I think that as a result, people have a much more difficult time interacting with other people on a personal level. We become so concerned about our “digital image” in a way. For instance, some people are more concerned about how they sound in an email, text message, facebook status, etc. than how they present themselves in person. I believe that partially withdrawing from digital time would allow people to draw stronger ties with people they actually see and talk to everyday (such as family, close friends, teachers), even if it compromises the strenuous relationships with those they interact with via technology. If people were to become more focused on spending their time with those immediately around them, they would be more conscientious of how much time they spent searching on the world wide web.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:36:28
Zoe: Excellent! I just responded to Matthew and then read your suggestion for the research experiment: It would actually simulate something of the short film scenes I was envisioning… And yes, of course one concern (or: point of curiosity) is what these digital forms and means of communication do to our f2f communication in the long run.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 03:03:28
Hi Amelia,
I, too, am a student in one of Minna’s communications classes and I am very happy that she showed us your post. Your insight regarding the concept of digital time and the way that people today are so greatly affected by digital communication was very eye-opening. Oftentimes I am alarmed by how much technology infiltrates not only my daily life, but the lives of all of the people around me; everywhere I look there’s someone texting away on a Blackberry or chatting on an iPhone and at any given time there are millions of kids my age online tweeting, updating their Facebook statuses or blogging.
The forms of communication that I engage in whether they be BBMs, posts on a friends’ Facebook wall, text messages, e-mails or the like seem to be a double-edged sword. Though there are so many outlets for communication and staying in touch with family and peers, all of these forms are immensely casual. Though BBMing a friend on my Blackberry contact list is convenient and fast, it completely pales in comparison to actually spending time with that person, and though texting is instant it is entirely informal and I often find myself unable to properly convey what I want to say which makes me wonder if what we gain by saving time is enough to reconcile what we lose in terms of expression.
I feel that this question coincides with your example of Mark’s life cut off from the digital and monetary world. When he says that “It’s all worth it in the end because the feeling of liberation and connection with nature it has afforded me more than compensates for the minor inconveniences” I can’t help but think that all of the fast forms of communication we are able to employ may connect us to other people but ultimately disconnects us from the environment and diminishes the integrity of our relationships and daily lives. The more we cram into the time we have in a day, the less time we spend just enjoying what’s around us.
I think that an interesting way to research the effect of digital media on college students would be to conduct a survey that asks them how many texts and BBMs they send in a day as well as how many times they log on to their Facebooks a day and how much time they spend on the site after they’ve logged in. In addition it would be interesting to see how much time the average student spends outdoors versus the time he or she spends in front of a screen. I bet the results would be astounding – I myself can’t even bring myself to think about how many hours I spend each day staring at my phone or computer. In addition I think that a textual analysis of texted conversations would be an interesting research angle in order to analyze the way conversations are de-formalized.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing your insights. I never really thought of time as being so largely impacted by our digital dependence and it will definitely make me think twice next time I prepare to waste an hour on Facebook.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:53:53
Hannah: Yes, you express very well (as others in this thread have, too) the concern about the possible erosion of relationships. In addition, your comment highlights the idea what some have called the ‘me-centrism’ of our current world defined by digital means of communication. Indeed, we focus very much on our BBerries instead of observing our surroundings; we spend time on our FB profiles…
Sep 21, 2010 @ 03:23:34
Amelia:
This is a very thought-provoking and insightful post. Like most of the commenters, I am also one of Minna’s communication students. I feel that my life revolves around communicating with others, in an ever increasing way, and certainly more than it did just a few years ago. I’m not sure how efficient always being “plugged in” is. There have been times when I have missed important e-mails or missed out on important events in my friends’ and family’s lives because I didn’t have access to a computer or my facebook account was deactivated.
I’m not sure if anyone above has mentioned this but I think our constant need for communication creates a false sense of busyness. Like others have alluded, unplugging from our computers would likely lead to more free time, even though that’s what we turn to during our free time. In the film Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character says that “moving is living”. I think that relates to the sense we get from communicating. It may seem like a stretch, but I wouldn’t be all that surprised if people agreed with me that if we aren’t in constant contact, we feel like we are missing out on a bit of our existence. (Doesn’t anyone else feel less self-confident when they don’t get notifications or texts?) On the occasions I do unplug, turn off my laptop and hide it away in its case (and I really am trying to make an effort), it isn’t long before I feel bored. Time seems to stretch out before me and I feel an itch to check what’s going on in the world out there. Or to see if someone responded to my last e-mail or whatever, and then I’m sucked back in.
Even though I would say facebook and texting are the media I use the most to communicate, I still appreciate a long phone call. Even better, an actual hand-written letter. Those are more time-consuming, and that’s probably why I value them more. It involves more effort, which I find important during this time of ultra-efficiency, instant gratification, and short attention spans.
On another note, as I’ve grown older, I feel as if time goes by quicker and quicker. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I’ve already spent a year at college. My parents have said that it’s part of the whole “getting older” thing, but I can’t help wondering if things are speeding up because the pace of our lives and our communication is speeding up. I hate to use another quote, but Annie Dillard said that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” It only makes sense that this applies to how we pace ourselves as well.
Since we have so many resources at our disposal, there are numerous ways to explore the connection between technology, communication, and time. Surveys would be great: how do people keep in touch? Which methods do they choose to share intimate/delicate/important information? Does technology really improve efficiency? How does the use of technology affect attention spans? Stress levels? This can be approached through various angles.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:56:59
Sarah: Fantastic quotes! And an insightful entry all in all. A few people have addressed the idea of efficiency and digital time, and your point is highly relevant in that context: We’re efficient, we’re so busy, we’re important…
Sep 21, 2010 @ 04:30:36
Hey Amelia,
No surprise here, but I am also a student in Minna’s Introduction to Communications and Media Studies class. First of all, this is probably the most interesting assignment I’ve ever been given as a student. I’m fascinated that I am actually blogging for homework! We had the choice of either submitting a printed one page response paper or leaving a comment on your blog, and strangely enough I made the decision to blog using your theory about digital time. I knew that if I sat here with Microsoft Word open, I would most likely procrastinate and probably stare at a blank document for awhile before I even knew how to begin. However, the fact that I can actually submit my homework through a comment box will make time seemingly (if not literally) go by much quicker. Let me explain. I use these comment boxes daily for my own entertainment to satisfy my own Facebook/digital communication addiction. Using Facebook is the number one way I amuse myself and pass time throughout the day, whether it be between, or even during, those classes that never seem to end. In other words, and not to put it bluntly, but I’d never open Microsoft Word and write a response paper for fun. The fact that I can casually comment your blog and not wrack my brain for the correct academic way of expressing my opinions is going to make this assignment go much faster than if I had chosen to write a response paper.
Moving on. I thought you had a very valid point in your blog and that you presented it in such a way that everyone could relate to how you felt. As stated before, I agree with you that digital use causes our “real,” or “clock,” time to pass much faster than if we had to live like Mark (or at least most of the time.) I believe that it only seems to go faster if we receive instant satisfaction (or at least for me.) If I am trying to communicate with someone via text message and they are taking longer to respond than I’d hope, it could feel like an eternity between the actual communicating that is being done. However, if I am skyping with my best friend (which is always instantly satisfying,) I often lose track of the time and am surprised when I finally look at the clock and realize it’s been over an hour. The passing of time could go the opposite way, too, though. Have you ever been so deep in conversation face-to-face with someone, and time seems to literally fly by? In that case, our intellect or emotions were the causes of the quick passing of time as opposed to digital tasking. However, it seems that this doesn’t happen as often as it may have in previous generations. Today, technology seems to be the means by which a large majority of communication that takes place. There are many advantages to this, such as always being able to initiate communication with practically anyone in the world or being able to respond to an important e-mail instantly. However, one loses the intimacy that he or she feels when he or she speaks with someone face-to-face. In my experience, I have always felt more satisfied when I resolved a problem or gotten a point across by communicating personally instead of digitally, but that’s just me. I guess it depends on the person, and nobody is to say which way of communicating is actually better. It would, however, be interesting to research what kind of communication our generation prefers today, regardless of how much time seems to be saved using virtual/digital communication most of the time. I’m sure everyone could agree that time flying by isn’t always a blessing (but in this homework assignment case, it certainly is!) As a matter of fact, often times it is not. This may be kind of deep for a blog comment, but I once heard a quote: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” There is too much to do in a day, too many ideas to create, and too much to marvel at in a lifetime to waste all of your time staring at glowing technological screens all day attempting to make time go faster. Granted, time will indeed go faster, but that isn’t always what a person should strive for.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 18:02:23
Amanda: Poignant research idea — digital media use vs. preferred modes of communication of your generation (would people really still *prefer* f2f, although they love texting and IM; how much is habitual…). I was also delighted to read that you enjoyed this assignment. I personally like the blog because it’s informal, brief, somehow dialogical; yet it’s written. One needs to think a bit to formulate the core idea but isn’t locked into the conventional form of a scholarly paper.
That said, I think this form serves us well in terms of short commentaries and position papers; real research papers are another matter 🙂
Sep 21, 2010 @ 04:44:11
Hi Amelia,
It was such a pleasure reading your blog entry and it is a relief to know that there are people out there as yourself that are entertaining the thought between time and technology in modern society. I am a student in Minna’s class as well and am excited to take part in this discussion.
Born and raised in NYC I am very familiar with what is a fast paced society. I’m guilty of spending my time on Facebook, googling everything, reading magazines and newspapers and watching TV. Although I spend my time accordingly, I am at least content that I am not obsessed with texting as I prefer calling someone or meeting them for a cup of coffee. I feel as if our tendency to send and receive quick messages has made us more cold hearted and thoughtless beings. Our dependency on the internet for example has even caused us to lack skill in certain areas. Some people can’t even use the tangible dictionary correctly.
We accelerate and manipulate time to the fullest extent without considering the consequences. Time is so precious and it creeps up on us. Before you know it we have no idea how we spent our time in this world. I was very fortunate to learn the significance of time when I took a trip upstate with my Global Awareness class in HS. We were not allowed to use our cell phones and had no access to computers or TVs as we spent our days learning about our environment. For a mere week I knew nothing about the outside world. At first I felt a technological and media itch but afterwards I was ok. I felt free from social and technological constraint as I focused on the nature around me. I vividly remember walking with ease as I was roofed by stars. Eventually on my train ride home I had to pick up the pace to keep up with the city rush. Although I rush from time to time as a city girl, I remind myself to walk a little slower and as a result NY taxi cabs honk at me to walk faster. Meanwhile I smile inside and think to myself “this beats Facebook.”
The ethnography approach we learned of in class works best when conducting this research. It is important to learn why people spend their time the way they do in order for one to evaluate their own meaning of time and look for alternatives.
We cannot simply oppose digital time. Look at all the advantages we’ve gained. It has connected us beyond borders as one can Skype a friend oceans away and even blog. I mean look at how we all managed to speak about such a topic by connecting to the World Wide Web.
Our technological advancement is a part of our social evolution as humans. Is it wrong to continue evolving as a society, when do we stop?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 19:46:28
Angelina: Very true — we can’t oppose or completely stop current developments. Will ‘being disconnected’ become a special luxury and/or a major achievement (I’ve followed online discussions on comm technology where people proudly note how they forgot their phone in the hotelroom when travelling and didn’t even notice it until several hours later); now it seems to be a special educational/pedagocial tool (your global awareness class, our class)…
Sep 21, 2010 @ 04:50:48
Hi Amelia,
Your views on modern communication interested me greatly. It seems that every second of every day is rushed. Your grandmother was correct when she said that she found the pace of today to be a lot busier than before. Technology has made is so easy to connect to the world around us, which is both a gift and a curse. The accessibility of communication is a gift in the sense that it allows a person to network and share ideas from virtually anywhere. On the other side of the coin, sometimes people become too reliant on this accessibility or even addicted. When I use the computer, I’m checking e-mails, making sure my homework is done and occasionally checking my Facebook. I’m thankful for the numerous ways of communicating but I’ve also come to realize that the more I take advantage of these methods, the less time I have. In the past, people used slower ways of reaching each other and as time moved on so did the means of communication. Somewhere during all these advancements we lost ourselves in a system we created.
We live in a culture of instant gratification, myself included. Going a day without using one of the speedy ways of communication seems nearly impossible. On any given day I’m instant messaging, texting, posting on my blog, talking on the phone, emailing or even poking on Facebook. This is a world of immediate access. The absence of this access leaves a terribly wide void. Mark the businessman surely had a lot of adjusting to do when he cut off contact. While it is true that doing one task at a time is rewarding, in today’s world there is no time. One way we could analyze this is having a survey taken on how much time people multi-task vs. how long it would take to accomplish these things one at a time. If I were to be stripped of all these forms of communication, time would seem to stand still. As a culture, we’ve grown so used to multi-tasking that doing one thing at a time seems almost foreign.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 20:58:45
Brandon: You and Julia (see her post a couple of entries ‘below’ you) address the important issue of ‘double fast time’: We do not only communicate faster, but also perform many tasks (and communicate/consume communication) simultaneously. Important topic for research indeed! And interesting to see how people would do things in a linear manner, one by one, vs. according to the ‘networked’, simultaneous model…
Sep 21, 2010 @ 04:51:47
Amelia,
As a student in Mimmi’s Intro to Communications class, I began to read this with the typical student approach: read through it and summarize the main ideas and concepts. As I continued further in the article I discovered that this article applies to our generation of Facebook pages, emails, and tweets where we expose our personal lives in such a short periods of time. These social mediums have changed our interpretation of our environment and thus our grasp of time. Due to the convenience and speed of these communication methods we have become busy bodies because we have
In my life I can see this digital time concept vividly. Even as I write this blog entry I have two other tabs dedicated to my Facebook page and email open alongside this one. These multiple tabs just compile on my agenda and just increase my stress levels. In the past students would do their homework on a typewriter and were only distracted by the occasional phone call, but today there is a cornucopia of distractions that arise from the internet. Sometimes I feel an urge to escape this tightly knit web of information. This wish came true when I visited my uncle’s cabin in the mountains of upstate New York. I soon began to regret my wish. Time never seemed to move so slowly. Without the comforts of my cybernetic distractions hours dragged, and i felt isolated from the rest of the world. When I came back from that trip I felt at bliss with my technological surroundings.
Although there are many positive effects from these new outlets of communication, there can also be some negative as seen in your article.Communication through mediums such as facebook usually lose their personal as compared to a letter. The letter shows a physical entity that can be felt unlike a facebook/text message that is most likely deleted after a few days. The digital time aspect is addressed very well in your article. How is much of my time is actually used for communicating through the actual world of conversing and sharing emotions visually and not through displays of emotions involving constructed smiley faces. The ratio between the cyber and organic forms of communication have started to favor the cyber and turning our youth (including myself) into less articulate tech savvy drones.
In spite of these negatives I happily continue to use these mediums both to express my own feelings and to observe others. This aspect of human nature could be studied and researched in many ways. The most logical method of study is ethnography, where there is a participant and a observer. This qualitative method of research could be used to examine time management by teenagers who are surrounded by digital outlets of communication. If I was the subject of this study the observer would realize that I use a myriad of outlets in a matter of seconds. In one instant I’ll be on facebook on my phone, and in the next 10 seconds I’ll be sending an email. This busyness in a such short matter of time exemplifies the true meaning of a modern day New York minute.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 21:05:00
Miguel: Good to read about your ‘cabin experience’ — many other commentators seem to have found bliss without communication tools (but they still stay hooked), for you it was the opposite experience.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 05:14:07
Amelia, your post has certainly created some critical thinking! A student in Minna’s Introduction to Communication and Media Studies class, I am constantly connected to the lives of my peers and the outside world. I often fail to realize just how much time I spend emerged in technological communication, until I look at the clock hours later and become conscious of the amount of time I had just used up. Despite my knowledge that technology eats up a great portion of my day, it is difficult for me to fight the urge to check my Facebook and phone, update my Twitter, send out an email, or reply to a text message. I certainly agree that my ability to stay in touch with my community is easy and oftentimes entertaining. However, sometimes I feel suffocated and distracted. Some days, I find myself praying that I find my email inbox empty or that I have received no text messages so I HAVE to do something else, something productive like go to the gym, get schoolwork done, read a book for pleasure, or have a face-to-face conversation with a friend for a change. Ultimately, while digital communication has allowed me to multitask and maintain my social web, it can be exhausting and overwhelming trying to keep up at times. What I usually see as a convenience, I sometimes see as an inconvenience.
This past summer, I lived at the beach in a tiny apartment with my sister. We were without television, Internet, and sufficient phone service for the whole summer. At first, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had all of this extra time that I would have normally spent in the digital world, and I was constantly pacing back and forth, curious as to what my college classmates and friends back home were doing. Over time, however, I felt a small sense of relief and liberation. My days seemed longer, and I began finding different ways to occupy my time, immersing myself in other activities. I read books, wrote letters to friends, joined a beach volleyball team, worked, went running, and made myself dinner (and enjoyed every bite of it), all without the urge of checking my phone or surfing the Web.
It would be interesting to see if there was any correlation between stress levels, digital communication, and time. Does the length of time affect our desire to be connected to the technological world? As I noticed in my own example, when my forms of communication were no longer available, I got very anxious, only to eventually come to terms with the situation and feel a sort of satisfaction. Of course, when I returned to the fast-paced environment of college, I was also happy to once again be connected to my social network. For me, digital communication is both a positive and negative innovation as consumers use their time in both a productive and unproductive, beneficial and unbeneficial manner. I would certainly enjoy conducting an ethnographic process, analyzing feedback and opinions on this conflicting topic. I think a survey would also produce interesting results regarding the relationship between different age groups’ time spent communicating digitally and their physical and mental state.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 20:35:42
Betsy: A nice example! And you are certainly tapping into a big dilemma… See a couple of earlier posts about stress and technology; and Amelia’s link about health and technology (one of her responses). I’m not an expert but could imagine that effects of such drastic changes in communication habits might not show immediately, but accumulate over time. On the other hand, the study by the University of Maryland that I mentioned indeed reported increased levels of anxiety in college students when they were first deprived of comm tools and gadgets…
Sep 21, 2010 @ 05:22:37
I believe that the way in which we communicate reflects the extremely fast pace world we live in today, especially as young people. In college, we are trying to juggle and balance going to school, having a job, internships, extracurricular activies and so on and so forth that we need to constantly be on our phones or computers. Whether we are sending e-mails, making calls, sending text messages, or video chatting, we do it all for the sake of communicating with all of our peers from several different aspects of life on a limited amount of time. Our need to schedule things and not have the time to address all of our associates personally are just a couple of indicators that time is such a limited resource. Since time is not abundant and the professional world requires so much responsibility, the technology we have today is the only way in which we can possibly get things done in hours or days as apposed to weeks, months, or years. Also, even after our primes, when we settle into our careers as middle-aged professionals, we must continue to use the fastest form of technology in order to keep up with the changing world and competitive atmosphere. As the cliche goes, time flies, and technology helps combat the limited resource by making it possible to accomplish goals within a reasonable period.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 20:30:11
Michael: You are right, for sure. Again, I’m just wondering about this chicken and egg thing… Are we fast-paced because of technology or does technology respond to our economic contexts and cultural climates and their needs?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 06:04:50
Hi Amelia,
I really enjoyed your blog entry, it was incredibly interesting. I had never considered the correlation between time and technology, yet it is so true. Most of the time that is wasted (especially within the younger generation) is due to the different types of technology accessible. I think this is mostly due to our ability to multitask constantly. To be totally honest, I’m currently writing this entry, listening to music, hearing my roommate Skype with her boyfriend (who, by the way, lives in England, another interesting consequence of the growth of digital media) and occasionally intervening in their conversation, and doing unimportant cyber-stalking on Facebook. I’ve been doing this for approximately the last hour, which is truly kind of ridiculous when you think about it. But since I have so many different ways to occupy my time without leaving my computer screen, time passes so much faster, and I lose all concept of it. Another interesting aspect of this phenomenon is the fact that we are guilty of this multitasking in the first place. None of the many tasks I am performing are incapable of attracting and maintaining my attention and interest, yet I cannot resist doing fifteen different tasks at once. Could this multitasking be attributed to the fact that digital media causes, as I previously stated, time to race by at an unnatural speed, and we feel forced to multitask in order to finish all we need to do? Or maybe our overly busy schedules, a recently new societal norm as pointed out in your entry, is what causes us to multitask.
I think it would be interesting to experiment with people’s dependency on multitasking, as I think this is one of the most compelling and consequential factors and/or results (could potentially be regarded as either or both) of the idea of digital time versus realistic time. One could potentially require their subjects not to multitask for a certain amount of time, but rather have them complete all of their tasks separately and distinctly. In my opinion, this might lead to time seeming to move more slowly, and also may enable the subjects to complete their tasks more efficiently.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 20:27:09
Julia: Multitasking — absolutely! I’m sure the specific focus on multitasking would be of great interest for both socio-psycholological approaches, as well as more management-oriented organizational communication scholars. Personally, I’ve also often wondered whether some personality types (=people) are more naturally inclined in succeeding with multitasking than others. We do know that people do have different ways of learning, for instance, some more inherent, some due to one’s living environment, and so on. And so, I’m wondering whether our hyper-multitasking culture actually puts some of us in a very disadvantageous position — us who are more naturally inclined to really focus on a matter, one by one.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 06:50:54
Hello Amelia,
I am a student in one of Minna’s Intro to Communications and Media Studies classes. Before reading your blog, the topics of communication and time kept me up until 5 AM last night. The thing is that I have a younger sister who is essentially in a school for delinquents all the way in Arizona and one of the requirements of this school is that she has to write a letter addressed home at least once a week in English (My sister doesn’t know how to write in Chinese). My parents cannot read or write in the English language so the role of writing letter responses naturally fall on me; the older brother.
As I continued to write back to my sister, I gradually grew annoyed at the fact that I had to spend time out of my day to write back to my sister. I wondered to myself why would my sister’s school give such an annoying requirement when all it takes to communicate is one phone call. I thought to myself, phone calls would be so much faster as well as efficient. It would save me so much time that could be used for other purposes.
As the night went on, I realized that in our world today where digital time rules our fast paced lives, we often forget about the important things. Technology gives us “shortcuts” (like talking to a person a thousand miles away through the phone instead of in person), but it cuts away at many valuable experiences. By going through the task of preparing a letter response to my sister, I was showing her how much I cared because of time input. It wouldn’t be just a few quick words over the phone although sometimes that’s nice too.
The more I thought about this subject that night, the more I realized how much communication affected the time I had to do the things I wanted. For example, why phone call one person when you can converse with multiple people through text. Another thing was facebooking which has become a time-consuming routine in my daily activities. Instead, I should be out and about try to get to know people in person. Technology has helped us further enable communication but at the same time, it has also disabled us. If we were to only rely on facebook profiles, we would never really get the know the person because these profiles are the images we want to show others, and not necessarily the real us.
One way to do research would be to take a random amount of college students and strip them of their modern communication devices. When this happens, how will they respond to their environment? How will this affect their academics? How will this affect their communication with other people? How will this affect their perception of time?
I hope I didn’t ramble too much! First time blogger.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 19:32:11
Homon: A wonderful personal story about digital time and family relationships. There are a couple of other stories like that in this blog — and I’d love to discuss these futher in the coming sessions on communication and building/maintaining relationships.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 12:17:59
Amelia,
Great post! Your questions about digital media and its relation to time are extremely interesting; I hope that this subject will be researched more thoroughly in the future. I’m a student in Minna’s Communications and Media Studies class, and I, like many who have posted before me, couldn’t agree more about the sensation of time flying by with digital distractions and electronic multi-tasking. In your post, you argue that, “there is perhaps a relationship between time and one’s impact on the environment.” In my opinion, this hypothesis could be taken to an even broader level; there is a set relationship between perceived time while living simply and time living submerged in complex digital media. While of course environmental responsibility is one way to remove oneself from the snares of digital time, we can also simply refuse to participate in excessive email, constant digital accessibility, and even the Internet. Without these burdens, life truly does tend to slow down. For some, this change of pace is welcome and appreciated on every level. But if we make this change permanently, who is to say that we wont become bored after a few days, weeks, or months? I believe that we have set up the so called “fast lane” because deep down, many of us love the sense of accomplishment and competition that comes with it. Regardless, this would be a very interesting subject to pursue further.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 19:27:18
Ethan: Exactly. I commented already to a couple of other comments but this IS indeed the fundamental question: Why do we buy into Fast Time? Is it inherent in us — to desire faster-paced living, more concrete accomplishments — and/or is is ‘sold’ to us via our communication/media culture?
Sep 21, 2010 @ 14:51:01
“Time flies when you’re having fun.” That was one phrase I heard and used over and over when I was much younger. Personally i still agree with it to some extent. Of course like everyone else in my generation I spend an unprecedented amount of time using the internet to find information and communicate. But I don’t think digital communication is necessarily the only reason time is speeding. I think its simply communicating in general, along with other factors, that cause this effect, and digital communication just makes sharing information easier.
When we communicate, whether through digital means or not, our brains are busy sending signals back and forth probably more than usual. When we talk to someone we think of what he or she is saying while creating a response of our own. When we are online or texting we can communicate while navigating webpages, talking to someone else, etc. Also most digital communication requires us to use our fingers instead of our mouths, making our brains busier. When our brain activity increases time moves faster because we are too focused to be aware of anything else.
New communication methods, internet, cell phones, etc, allow for multitasking. Which explains why members of older generations feel we move so quickly. Instead of waiting for people to respond, by mail or by phone, we can tell them what we think instantly. Also we can do this to many people at once. Multitasking allows us to fit more activities into our daily schedule. Rather than having to wait until after you finish a certain task to do the next one we do many at once creating more work for our brain. Asking a professor about a paper assignment, checking your mail, and buying clothes not only take less time, but you don’t have to get out of your chair!
My environment also changes how I perceive time. Whenever I’m in a new place for the first time, for example the first day of freshman year, a day seems to go on forever. The new environment causes me to take more time getting used to where I am and how things work. Eventually I become familiar with my surroundings and each day goes faster because the new became old. Communicating is such a natural and common part of human life that nothing new needs to be understood making time speed up. I suspect that the “Freeconomic” frontiersman Mark began to experience a similar effect once the first day became the first week and daily routine became customary.
Even though digital communication allows for multitasking and instant communication, it isn’t the only reason for explaining why we experience a changed perception of time. But of all of the reasons I gave digital communication seems to help speed time the most.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 19:21:47
Markian: A good reminder of the contextual factors re: time, about things familiar and routine-like vs. new.
Also, your views prompted me to think of neuro science and how I personally need to look into studies done in that field re: tech use and brain activity. I’m sure those scientists are busy trying to figure out our digital time form that perspective!
Sep 21, 2010 @ 16:07:53
Hi Amelia,
I am also a student in Minna’s class and I enjoyed your post and I agree. I know that my daily routine definitely starts and ends with me on my computer checking my facebook and e-mail and ends in the exact same way. I can’t forget to mention the constant checking of my blackberry throughout the day, almost like a tick that I have. I’m always in constant contact with my friends from home through bbm and I sometimes wonder how close we would still be if we did not have that medium to stay in constant contact with each other.
Since its such a huge part of every day life, especially here in New York, its sometimes hard for us to even see how fast time is moving for all of us here. For me, I didn’t realize until I was in Ireland this past summer and I could not use my phone because of the outrageous charges. I had it with me, turned off, in my suitcase for the entire ten days but I found myself constantly reaching for a phone that wasn’t there and feeling extremely disconnected. It felt like time was dragging and I had nothing to do (internet connection was also bad and it was rare to get any at all) and for the first few days being there I was lost. Then I got used to the feeling and realized how nice it was. I sat outside and read books and thought my thoughts without interruption and just sat with nature and loved it. I vowed to myself to be less connected to my phone and to facebook, but I’m afraid without being forced to get rid of them, I failed at detoxing. My friends and I also vowed to write letters to each other this year. Its the third or fourth week of classes and none of us have written a letter, or even exchanged addresses for that matter. I’ve also found, for myself at least, that not only does time move faster, but I feel as though I am always multitasking. I always have at least 3 tabs open on my browser, AIM and Skype open while listening to i-Tunes and writing a paper. I find that when I’m only using one thing at a time, I get bored and feel as though time is moving too slowly.
To study this, I think that an interpretive method should be used. The best way, as some others have mentioned would probably be an ethnography. To stay with people and observe their technological habits from when they wake up until they go to sleep to observe how much technology is used, and the persons reaction to it not being used. For example, how immediately does a person go to their computer once they walk in the door, etc. You could probably also do a survey to get more concrete answers on these topics, such as number of hours per day on the computer and ratings of anxiousness when its not being used.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 19:11:09
Julie: Right on about the research approach! And thank you for sharing your detox experiences. Very useful for our next assignment 🙂
Sep 21, 2010 @ 16:59:12
Amelia, this post provides an excellent starting point for a fantastic research project. As the world evolves, it does so in such a way that we hardly notice how much of an impact a small upgrade in technology really is. For example, when the iPod came out it was the hot item on everyones list, given half a year the iPod has become so commonplace that the people that do not have one are looked at strangely. Technology has become its own entity, and it is so enculturated in our lives that one can say it is beginning to take over. The story of your grandmother is one that i can easily relate to, as my grandmother, who still continues to do most things from scratch or by hand, cannot fathom the idea of a machine that does everything for you. Yes, her methods take longer, but the time she spends doing those chores ensures that it is done right and to her specifications.
Additionally I can relate to the reply left by Darryl, football camp provides us with almost a month with no off-campus communication. We wake up and the whole day is spent focusing on football, let me tell you those days last FOREVER! Yet, on sundays after our games, I lay in bed, maybe get a little homework done, but mostly just sit on my computer talking on facebook or texting people to see how their weekends went. Before I know it is 10 o’clock and i have to start getting ready for bed.
In todays world everything seems to be about instant gratification. We have smartphones so that we know EXACTLY when we get an e-mail; we have automated coffee pots that brew a cup of coffee every morning before we even wake up; further still, we have fast food, the epitomy of instant service. We casually walk into a McDonald’s or Burger King, and expect to be sitting down eating within 5 minutes or less. All of these inventions have fed into the addage, “Time is Money” and people have become so obsessive over wasting time that they strive to multi-task constantly. The problem with this hustle and bustle is that, I would imagine at least, people’s quality of life have decreased. People aren’t going out and enjoying the outdoors anymore. Funny enough, a perfect example of this: It was Christmas Eve, we were at my aunt and uncles house. When i walked through the door I noticed that the fireplace (which sits right next to the tv) was bare and the tv was on a channel that played a mock fire flickering. That was this channels sole purpose…a flickering fireplace. I couldn’t help but laugh, what happened to going out getting some wood outside and coming in and warming up to a real fire?
People have begun to lose that sense of achievement that is felt when you have worked hard and labored on something with your own two hands. We need to put down the smartphones, and maybe write a real letter to someone (think of how much more special that message will be when it is hand-written). Drop the iPod’s and go see the musicians perform live. Above anything else, at least enjoy the day for 5 minutes before your head returns to that e-mail you have to finish, or that text you just recieved.
Im sure the experiment has been done before , but a perfect way to test how much technology effects us would be to remove all devices from a test group (college students would be perfect, given the environment) and note the key changes that are experienced. Friendships, sleep patterns, grades, physical activity level, all things that have potential to become better and in doing so increase the persons life quality. I am however not psychologist or sociologist so these are merely my assumptions, but I think everyone should remove themselves from their normal monotonous routine and do something active without technology. Marks story is an incredible one, and one that many should look into, I personally feel that what he did would be alot of fun, and potentially life-altering. Amelia, thank you for this post as it really got me thinking about alot of things in my life.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 19:07:17
Jon: I’m delighted about the fireplace story. What a metaphor for one outlook on digital living — are we deprived from the warmth that non-mediated fire/communication could provide?
Good points, too, about manual labour: Check out this NYT Magazine article claiming that we’ve again become fascinated with such work, mainly because we are so removed from it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1
Sep 21, 2010 @ 17:45:53
Hi Amelia,
I am also in one of Minna’s Intro to Communication classes assigned to read this blog post and respond. I completely agree with what you have stated about digital time and how it has grown to impact our day-to-day lives. Just during the course of my day today I have encountered countless examples of new technologies saving time and energy for people as well as creating time for them to fit more into their days. There seem to be both benefits and disadvantages however. Today while walking back from class I tweeted about something I found funny in my day. Later I met up with my friend and when I remembered and began to tell him the story he replied that he had already read about it on Twitter. I suppose it saved me the effort and time of telling him but it also made me lose out on the experience of telling him the story and seeing his reaction first hand. On the other hand a perfect example of digital resources saving time and energy is the very existence of this assignment. Blog posting is a quick, organized, and efficient way of getting a point across and without the need to print out an official paper I am saving the time it would take to get to the library as well as the paper and ink it takes to print.
The way time goes by is completely different using electronics then the way it goes by without them. When I sit at night browsing through Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts I find that my night just seems to fly by. Even when sitting on my computer attempting to start an essay, there is something about being in front of a laptop with so many opportunities for distraction that seems to make my valuable time disappear.
Much like many of my classmates, the minute I wake up in the morning (When I’m not rushing to class) I turn on my computer and check myfordham account, Facebook, and turn on my instant messenger. Many times I do not even have a purpose to turn on all of these things and it is solely out of instinct. I know that there is a possibility that someone has tried to communicate with me and I do not want to miss the message. I find myself constantly refreshing the browser desperately searching for someone to communicate to. With this strong desire and compulsiveness to communicate with one another it would seem as if technology is bringing people closer together, however that is not always the case. Even while walking to class I see more and more people walking with their cell phones out or iPods on rather than talking with their classmates walking right beside them. I’m not sure that we have figured out how to correctly balance who to communicate with and when. Often times during family or friend functions someone will be glued to their blackberry constantly checking emails or sending messages. I feel as if the time spent with others while also spending time in the digital world cheapens the moments that you are living.
The best way to study the effects of the digital world on our society is to simply remove it all together. Studying the reactions of different age groups when set on a media diet could show how dependent we really are on our electronics. Separating the subjects into groups of different ages or sexes could tell a lot about the way each generation and gender rely on communication through technology. I hope I did this correctly! Blogging with a purpose is an entirely new idea for me.
Sep 21, 2010 @ 18:16:16
Rachel: Yes, good point, perhaps we are currently in the stage with digital time and means of communication where things have developed very fast, and we’ve embraced those developments with great enthusiasm (aided with marketers) but in fact we’ll be looking for that right balance between mediated and f2f comm in the coming years (months… days…)
Sep 21, 2010 @ 21:29:45
Sep 21, 2010 @ 21:51:11
Dear Amelia,
I am a student in Minna Aslama’s Communication and Media Studies class and a first time blogger! While reading your blog, I found that there have been times that I have also thought of the different ways that technology is saving our time while wasting our time, at the same time. I have found out that you are fine without these time wasters (cell phones, ipods, Facebook, video games, etc.), but once you get them, you NEED them in order to function (or so you think).
I was one of the last kids in my class in to get a cell phone. It wasn’t until the beginning of Sophomore year that my parents got me one. I just thought I didn’t need one. After about a month with a cell phone, I remember thinking how I managed without it. How did i communicate with everyone? And then there was a time when my cell phone broke and I was phone-less for about 2 weeks. I found it to be a much less stressful and more enjoyable time than having a phone and always wondering if you got that text you were waiting for or waiting for your friend to call you back. I almost didn’t want to get a new phone, but I did.
For me, my phone doesn’t take up as much time as video games or facebook do. When I get into a video game, it really takes up a lot of my time. Not just the playing it (which makes an hour of playing feel like 15 minutes) but also the thinking and “daydreaming” about it. I would often find myself playing the game in my head instead of listening to my science teacher explain what would be on the test the next day (which I probably wouldn’t study enough for because I would be playing that stupid game for way too long). You really lose your concept of time when playing video games or stalking Facebook. It takes over your life.
I was trying to think of a better experiment for studying the effects of these technological time wasters, but the only one that would really get the job done in my mind would be to wipe out technology altogether, or at least just the mobile and entertainment technology such as cell phones, video games, ipods, television, and computers. This way there will be no distractions (or phone bills), and I believe it will be a much simpler way of living.
Thanks Amelia. Very interesting topic and ideas.
Sep 22, 2010 @ 16:15:42
Thank you Leo, the first time blogger, a nice post! No one has really written about gaming yet — but it is indeed one of the main digital uses of time (so to speak) and a huge business. I found it really interesting and observant from you to discuss how playing, an enormously intensive activity, or Facebooking (an intensely social and personal activity), make your thoughts crowded even when you’re doing something completely different…
Jan 26, 2011 @ 11:58:56
Hi! great stories throughout the blog. Really inspiring. I had a discussion with some colleges about digital “time” communication through the calendar, gmail calendar. It is boring. It is rigid,ugly, mean. It tricks us to believe that time is pieces of hours that we can squeeze things into…
Jan 26, 2011 @ 14:31:24
Hi! Thank you for your comment! That’s an interesting question – digital time through the calender. Hours or days or months as boxes or rectangles. On the opposite spectrum environmentalist Bill McKibben has a nice description of the fluidity of time in his book “The Age of Missing Information”. He talks about sitting for a day without a clock observing the changes in the light and noticing that there isn’t just a different between 8am and 9am, but many subtle shifts in light, shadow, nature in between. He compares this to how time feels and appears when watching TV.
Oct 02, 2012 @ 12:14:48