Vice President of Newfangled.com, Writer for PRINT and F+W Media, blogger, infrequent designer, reader, science fiction enthusiast...

April 7th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 6

10 notes |#

“Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.” (James Gleick, Faster, 286)

…which is probably why futurism is dying right now. But I should probably qualify that, because words like future and futurism seem to be used all the time. The kind of futurism I’m talking about is the kind that involves imagination of the long-term variety, not the kind that involves relatively short-term predictions of things with relatively short-term impact—things like who will seek the Republican nomination in 2012, what the next iPhone will look like, etc. I’m not the only one who feels this way; I posted back in October a short note about how we’re distracted by the now as a result of this kind of short-term futurism, which was actually just a “hear, hear” to Matthew Sheret’s post, The Future is a Blank Canvas Pinned to a Brick Wall. (Note to self: I need to get more creative with my blog post titles.) And Sheret’s post was really just a response to a quote from William Gibson.

In any case, my main point back then was this:

What’s happening, as far as I can tell, is that our imagination is being inhibited. We’re so focused on the now—that email, text message, instant message, Twitter DM or @, Facebook post, you know what I mean—that our sense of the “next” is being squeezed down to the momentary rather than something larger…there’s no data to prove this. But I do appeal to our ability to sense what is clearly happening. The reduction of the scope of our imagined future from years, to seasons, to moments. Sure, there could be other factors at play, such as loss of hope due to global conflict, economic collapse, environmental issues, general entropy, but amidst that is a significant shift in the pace of life that has stolen the quiet moment of reflection from us. (me, here)

This seems related, so… I was chatting with a colleague this morning about the various bad news (political/social strife, natural disasters, economic struggles, etc.) and he mentioned that there’s an old rule of thumb for stock traders—that 80% of people forget about news after 3 days, but then the rest forget after 21 days. Not exactly a long-term perspective. But given the volume of news today—the 24-hour news cycle—you can’t really blame us for dumping our news cache, can you?

Maybe it’s another one of those strange examples of existential time-dilation, related to what the Directorate of Time said about how “the more we have experienced, the faster time flows.” So the more we experience, even peripherally, the more distorted our sense of now, then, and later will be. Add to that the fact that we’re complicit in allowing rumors about possible entertainment gadgets (not to mention “reports” of such-and-such a celebrity being seen wearing something-or-other at someplace) to qualify as “news,” occupying the same level of importance as a dispatch from a war-torn country. If some guy’s musings about an unreleased cellphone’s feature set is news, then some kind of time-dilating, imagination-suppressing phenomenon must be to blame…

Posted at 8:00am and tagged with: time, seeing time, longreads, two column,.

April 5th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 4

8 notes |#

For those late to the free-association party, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 have been hastily dashed off to the web with little regard for coherency or an overall game plan. The nonsense continues here…

“You are aware that the director of the Directorate of Time is something of a philosopher. He has written, ‘We experience time intervals as much shorter than when we were young.’ He even has equations for this: ‘Delta t(s) ~ Delta Exp/Total Exp’ and ‘dt(s) ~ dt/t or integrated t(s) ~ In(t),’ by which he means, the more we have experienced, the faster time flows. Depressants like alcohol slow time, because the brain receives fewer inputs per second. You may feel, as so many do, that your life could be plotted on a scale where the years from age ten to age twenty seem as long (as eventful) as the years from age twenty to age forty or from forty to eighty. Exponential growth at its most damning. On this scale, the moment of birth is at negative infinity, and as for death…someone else might quote Woody Allen, but the director favors Epicurus: ‘Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’” (James Gleick, Faster, 279-280)

As soon as I turned 30, I began spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about how my perception of time has changed. In particular, I began noticing exactly what the Directorate of Time describes—that the decade from age 10 to 20 seemed far longer than the following one, which brought me to 30. In some ways, the changes in my life were equally intense in both decades. Between 10 and 20, one doubles one’s age, which in and of itself is significant and isn’t as quickly done in later years. But also, one goes from childhood to early adulthood, experiencing hormonal and brain chemistry changes that greatly affect one’s sense of self. In the next decade, I experienced much more circumstantial volatility, but I suppose my sense of self was a bit more consistent. In any case, the distortion makes 40 seem as if it’s far closer than 9 years from now.

Incidentally, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was recently interviewed on an episode of PRI’s To the Best of Our Knowledge on Memory, Mind & The Self about the role of memory in the development of selfhood in human beings:

“The critical thing in relation to human consciousness is not only the development of mind and the development of self, it’s the development of a self that has biographical characteristics. I think that that is really the passport into big-time consciousness of our kind. What you have there is the possibility of, of course, expanding memory so that it is not just a memory about categories of things, like say animals, mountains, and bodies of water and such, but also the possibility of having memories about specific individuals, specific events, including the events that have happened to you. Once you start having that kind of memory, then you have the possibility of creating some kind of record of what you have been. And eventually, once you get language, then you’re essentially creating the beginnings of culture.”

It seems that he is saying that one’s sense of distinction from other entities is the root of selfhood. I suppose that seems a bit obvious or circular, but it’s different from saying that one’s sense of self is (and always has been to humans) inherent to the experience of being alive. Damasio seems to be saying that our sense of self—the human sense of self—originates with our ability to recognize that we are not something else, that we have individuality in a categorical sense, before we had personality-individuality in the way we tend to see it today.

I wonder, back to Gleick’s passage (and my “I’m-30-now-and-running-out-of-time” feelings), whether my ability to forget enables the sense of time dilation the Directorate calculates. What might that dilation feel like (or would it exist at all) for a person with hyperthymesia? (Incidentally again, that same episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge includes an interview with Jill Price, a 46-year-old resident of New York who has forgotten virtually nothing since the age of 14, and whose case in particular led to the official diagnosis of hyperthymesia.) It’s tragic—the entry for Price notes that hyperthymesia is characterized by a propensity for “spending vast quantities of time thinking about one’s past,” which must be torturous given the detail available. Price confirms this in her interview, which makes me feel thankful for my smaller dispensation of torturous autobiographical recall…

Is anyone out there experiencing psychological time dilation…or perhaps real time dilation?

Posted at 7:41am and tagged with: seeing time, time, two column, longreads,.

April 4th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 3

7 notes |#

…Part 1 was on Sunday, and Part 2 this morning. I’m just going to keep going with this until I’m sick of it. First, another quote from James Gleick’s Faster…

“‘The historical record shows that humans have never, ever opted for slower,’ points out the historian Stephen Kern. We fool ourselves with false nostalgia—a nostalgia for what never was. Whenever we speed up the present, as a curious side-effect we slow down the past. ‘If a man travels to work on a horse for twenty years,’ Kern says, ‘and then an automobile is invented and he travels in it, the effect is both an acceleration and a slowing…That very acceleration transforms his former means of traveling into something it had never been—slow—whereas before it had been the fastest way to go.’ Until the futurist Filippo Marinetti began talking about speeding up rivers, ‘the Danube had never seemed so deliciously slow.’ Peering back through history, we see scenes in a kind of slow motion that did not exist then. We have invented it.” (277-278)

Sure, there’s a distortion of perception that happens when some new technology changes how we do things today and think about how we did them yesterday, but it’s not always just about speed. For instance, texting is not necessarily faster than a phone call. A text-based conversation could elapse over a longer period of time than a phone call, but it feels faster because we don’t have to focus on that conversation in the same way we do when we’re talking, live, over the phone. With texting, you can quickly send a message and then stop thinking about it until you receive a reply. Ultimately, it probably requires the same overall amount of attention, but in a less concentrated way. But texting is another available method that we didn’t have before. It gives us the choice of communicating one way rather than another. We once had only letters. Over time, our choices have multiplied: telegram, telephone, fax, email, instant message, text message, etc. I guess that means that, in light of Gleick’s passage, acceleration is one consideration and distribution is another.

The last part about speeding up rivers made me think about a slideshow I saw recently documenting Lost Rivers, which “depicts places poised between loss and beauty, acknowledging the price of urbanization while seeking to reclaim a sense of connection with these natural spaces.” It seems that attempting to “speed up rivers,” or in general, messing with nature to accelerate industry, is not a good idea…

But back again to slow, because the rivers made me think of the opening scene of Andrei Rublev, which depicts a group of 15th century Russian monks launching a hot air balloon. Some run along a river, making their way to the launch point. As the monks prepare, many references to time: Hold on a second. Come on, quick! Come on, fast! We won’t have enough time. Just a second. And then, spectacular footage shot from the balloon as it slowly crosses the landscape and eventually makes landfall near a horse—the contemporary vehicle of travel—by the river. Beautiful.

Posted at 9:18pm and tagged with: one column, seeing time, time, longreads,.

April 4th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 2

|#

(…my last post being Part 1. I grabbed several quotes from James Gleick’s book, Faster, as I flipped back through it the other night, which is where this assembling series is coming from…)

“Your sense of acceleration has not blinded you to the brevity of the present moment.” (273)

This is the first sentence of the last chapter, titled The End. I’m still not exactly sure what it means. Sometimes I feel quite the opposite—that much of what we do only makes sense given a denial of our transience on this planet (building projects, storing up wealth, the way we spend the time we do have, etc.). I’ve often had this realization while waiting on line in stores, where I’ll be looking around at the people around me and wondering, “what are we all doing here when we’re all going to die?” On the other hand, perhaps Gleick is right—that our ambitions and daily toil are also just as motivated by the awareness that we won’t be here forever, so the simple fact that we have desires validates what we are willing to do (standing on line, for example) to achieve them…

Meanwhile, last evening I watched (thanks to Frank’s recommendation) the first episode of Ways of Seeing, in which John Berger points out that the way we perceive a painting is changed by its surroundings—the sound around us when we’re looking at it, the wall behind it, whether it’s been reproduced and displayed somewhere else, etc. He meditates quite a bit on the pace of seeing, which caused me to marvel that even in our rushing about to do all we might do in life before we no longer have it, we still stop to look at things.

Then I thought, what if someone were to choose a painting, say for instance Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (Berger talks about it at length in the first episode) which has been placed in many different locations since it was first painted in the late 15th/early 16th century, and create a sonic story of its life so far? The image would never change, but the sound we hear would. Early in the piece, you might hear the echoing goings on of the Milan church for which it was painted. Then you’d hear the sounds of transport as it made its way to England. You might hear hushed conversations of spectators around it, perhaps the bragging of its owner of the time. Eventually, more transport sounds, installation in the British National Gallery, etc. It would be a purely sonic version of Noah’s Everyday, and rather than the brooding soundtrack he deftly chose—which turns mundanity into something more dramatic—the sounds of mundanity would bring life to the painting, which would remain still. Someone should do this…

This makes me think of a book I had as a child—The Little House, which tells the story of a house as its surroundings radically change over time. The image above, by the way, comes from a brief article comparing the storybook image to a real-life example of a house that refuses to give in to the pressures of progress. Anyway, The Little House is kind of an analog version of Everyday, isn’t it?

Posted at 7:50am and tagged with: one column, seeing time, time, longreads,.

April 3rd 2011

Seeing Time

7 notes |#

Today I was flipping through a book I read sometime in the last two years: Faster, by James Gleick. It’s been on my mind since I just started reading his newest book, The Information. This passage, in his Afterword, resonated more with me in this pass (apparently) than the first time I read it:

“We struggle to perceive the process of change even as we ourselves are changing. After all, flux is our style, if not our destiny. We don’t exist in a steady state, and we don’t have a motionless platform from which to observe the changing world around us. Sometimes we fail to perceive profound transformations that we’ve been staring at; sometimes we blink and we notice a revolution. The most profound comment on this is still Richard Feynman’s; he was sitting outdoors in New Mexico, looking up at a blue and turbulent sky and talking about the evolution of his field, theoretical physics. ‘It is really like the shape of clouds,’ he said. ‘As one watches them they don’t seem to change, but if you look back a minute later, it is all very different.’” (287)

As soon as I read this, I immediately recalled a few picture-every-day type projects I’d seen on the web. They’re the sort of thing that only the late 20th century could have produced; the technology necessary for that much documentation was just not available or practical beforehand. Here’s one that began way back in 1976 and continues to track a family’s appearance each year. Here, of course, is the famous Noah-takes-a-picture-of-himself-everyday-for-six-years video that was later spoofed by the Simpsons. I am sure there are many, many more… This one is the most recent I’ve seen, and perhaps the most stunning. The subject photographed himself every day between 1991 and 2007, and animated the images (which, incidentally, also track the position of the Earth relative to the Sun). I had to watch it several times in order to really process the physical change he experienced over 17 years. Even at such a rapid speed, you track with him and lose sight of the earlier images. By the time you reach the last image, you know he looks older, but you can’t exactly describe why. The last time I watched it, I also noticed how the intervals between haircuts grew much smaller as he aged.

But I also wonder if the relationship between the availability of that technology and the output of that kind of condensed observation project is parabolic—that maybe we’ll get to the point of an overwhelming amount of immediacy of media that nobody cares anymore to mine the insights that condensing it produces.

But then I think of a couple of other stories—one book and one film—that push this idea of constant/ubiquitous surveillance even further. The film is The Final Cut, the story of a “cutter,” a sort of life-editor/sin-eater of the continuous footage our lives produce via implants who creates the final cuts screened after one dies. The book is The Light of Other Days, which tells the story of the radical societal impact of a time-viewer, which is just as good at showing you an event 100 years in the past as it is one less than a second ago, which is to say that it makes everything, everywhere, everywhen available.

Anyway, this stuff is just on my mind. What do you think?

Posted at 8:22pm and tagged with: seeing time, time, two column, longreads,.

September 4th 2010

|#

Virginia Postrel

Posted at 11:00am and tagged with: quote, time, the-future,.

“
But changing that picture means exchanging today’s architectural metaphor, “building a career,” for another one: adaptive reuse. This is the human-capital equivalent of turning industrial lofts into apartments, factories into medical schools, power plants into art museums, or saw mills into shopping centers. Your original career may be economically obsolete, or you may just want a change, but your knowledge and experience still have their charms. Instead of equating success with a steady progression of better-paying jobs, each related to the previous one, this model emphasizes taking on new challenges and making new contributions, even if that means going back to school, taking a pay cut, or starting as a trainee when you’re middle-aged.
”

September 4th 2010

|#

Robert Krulwich

Posted at 3:32am and tagged with: quote, time,.

“
If only you could unsay that stupid thing you said, undo that stupid thing you did, not have turned left, touched her when you should have, not cried, not cared, cared more, stayed still. There are so many things we would do differently if we could back up and do it again. But the thing is, we can’t undo what is done. The past is inviolate. It belongs to what the writer Thomas Wolfe called “the indestructible fabric.” It won’t be reversed.
”

July 28th 2010

|#

Posted at 2:11pm and tagged with: time,.

July 28th 2010

|#

A Timeline of Timelines

Posted at 12:04pm and tagged with: time, timeline,.

A Timeline of Timelines

July 26th 2010

|#

“It is entirely possible that beneath the quantum domain is a world of pure chaos, without any fixed laws or symmetries.”

Posted at 3:28pm and tagged with: time, cosmology, science,.

“It is entirely possible that beneath the quantum domain is a world of pure chaos, without any fixed laws or symmetries.”

July 16th 2010

7 notes |#

Sean Carroll

Posted at 3:38pm and tagged with: quote, time,.

“
Hidden within this simple fact - the farther away things are, the farther they are receding - lies a deep consequence: We are not at the center of some giant cosmic migration. You might get the impression that we are somehow special, what with all of these galaxies moving away from us. But put yourself in the place of an alien astronomer within one of those other galaxies. If that astronomer looks back at us, of course they would see the Milky Way receding from them. But if they look in the opposite direction in the sky, they will also see galaxies moving away from them - because, from our perspective, those more distant galaxies are moving even faster. This is a very profound feature of the universe in which we live. There isn’t any particular special place, or central point away from which everything is moving. All of the galaxies are moving away from all of the other galaxies, and each of them sees the same kind of behavior. It’s almost as if the galaxies aren’t moving at all, but rather that the galaxies are staying put and space itself is expanding in between them.
”

July 16th 2010

|#

Saint Augustine

Posted at 12:12pm and tagged with: time,.

“
What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times - past, present and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation.
”

July 8th 2010

|#

Elise Boulding

Posted at 9:00am and tagged with: quote, time, the-future,.

“
A favorite concept of mine is the 200-year present, a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today. If you take that span, you and I will have had contact with a lot of people from different parts of that span. So think in terms of events over that span and realize how long change takes. You can see how difficult it has been to create these bodies and new ways and how in many ways we are slipping backward; but in other ways we are not. I take comfort to know that super-power hegemony has a very limited lifespan (decline and fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire).
”

June 12th 2010

|#

This is amazing. Check out what they sell!

Posted at 11:45am and tagged with: time-travel, time,.

This is amazing. Check out what they sell!

June 10th 2010

|#

Wonderful. Via The Long Now Foundation:

It’s a reverse time lapse put together by Greg Mercer and Emily Ward (editing), and David Quednau (animation). Unwinding 20,000 years of a modern American city and frontier outposts, Native American settlements and the last ice age, we arrive in their world and resurrect them in film.

Posted at 11:22am and tagged with: video, time, time-travel,.