Where We Live Now: How Constant Connectivity Moved Us Out of Place and Into Time
“In the theory of relativity there is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving.” — Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated Brief History of Time
Chen Rong-yu, a 23-year-old computer gamer, had paid for 23 hours of web access to play League of Legends at an Internet cafe in New Taipei City, Taiwan Island. At 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, he sat with his hands outstretched, head drooping slightly. He sat in that exact position for at least nine hours. “I thought that he was only dozing off and paid no particular attention,” the waitress who found him said. She approached Chen when his 23 hours were up, and saw that his face was blackened and he was sitting rigidly in the chair. Rigor mortis had set in. When she moved Chen’s chair away from the desk, the man’s hands remained outstretched as if still gaming — frozen at his computer screen.
He was frozen in time. (He was not the only one. There were 10 other people in the cafe at the time of the discovery, but most remained in front of their computers and showed little interest as police cordoned off the area.)
Replacing Place
For most of history, humans were firmly in place. Celebrated by poets and painters, place was an atavistic identifier: where we were born, where we grew up, schooled, met friends and lovers, sometimes married. Place circumscribed perception. You live in Des Moines off Highway 80, surrounded by Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Dakota; that place-ness determines who you are, how you dress, what you think, even what you will become. Presently we have a wealth of tech trackers, locators, and finders — everywhere maps — but increasingly here is not the physical place we are in but the non-physical place we access and share. This place is located in non-local time (because anyone, anywhere shares that place with us) and the contours of experience in this here are all different.
Connectivity Erodes Place In Favor Of Time
Today, like wilderness or exotic animal species, place is vanishing. It is being eroded by time. Instantaneous connectivity (commercial-grade fiber optic lines clock speeds of 1.4 terabits per second) is a new dimension of time. High-speed connectivity catapults us out of place into the realm of infinite now-ness. (As of this writing there are 4 billion, 46 million Internet users in the world; 125 billion emails are being sent today; 8227 tweets are sent in 1 second, and will be sent today each and every second.) Being connected on a variety of devices enables us to ignore — even abandon — place-ness in favor of now-ness. As we do, our awareness of place and our place in it changes. While gaming environments provide alternate locales (we play there in our graphics-fueled imaginations yet there exists here), now-ness neuters place — vaulting us into the limbic realm of connectivity itself. Like Chen Rong-yu we disregard our physical place — even our physicality — to focus intently on being connected and on the experience that connectivity provides.
Here is the world circumscribed by my device: what comes here, what fits here, what captures my attention here. There (formerly, place) is now an afterthought, a leftover, the remainder of hours when here has exhausted us.
This new time dimension blithely appropriates artifacts from (any) place to furnish almost any featureless locale with the appearance of place. Take Candytopia, a candy-flavored art installation built for a generation of Instagrammers: “Life now has become people going to places to stand in front of it and take a picture. They don’t go inside and experience it — they just leave,” says Jackie Sorkin, Candytopia co-founder. “I think that is a statement of the world we live in today.”
In other words, we are experiencing connectedness — not place — and that connectedness exists only in time; place becomes thereby an artifact of connectedness. Speed hurtles us into time. This is not conventional time measured in o’clocks. It is the time of perpetual here-ness, endless now-ness. Time in that measure becomes place — re-places place with a ticking nowscape of messages, updates, sounds, and swipes.
Changing Addresses: There Moves Here
Cognizance of place demands that we are present in it; that we see a given locale as a unique combination of light, air, smells, sounds, people, experiences. Speed, as a dimension of time — i.e., a download speed of 9 megabits per second (Mbps) — blurs presence. The faster we go, the less aware we are of — the less we actually live in — place. In this way, time severs us from place, making it irrelevant. Reality is no longer where we are; it is how fast there becomes here.
Since there is now anywhere, there is gone, except as a GPS coordinate. There is now here. Pix of some there on Twitter or Facebook are not there. You are never there anymore; you are only here. Even when you travel there, you morph it into here with one hipster post of how cool there is — but no one is there with you. We all join you here.
Living here changes where we live. You see it as people walk face-in-phone through life. They are not in the grocery story or on the avenue. They are un-placed. They are (soon we all will be?) re-placed. Time, as instant connectivity, eats our awareness of place. For most of human history, there was no alternative to place, just as there was no way to instantly connect with millions of others on a digitally networked platform. To be out of place was anathema; our places, both as roles and as physical locations, were fixed, defined by geography, norms, and cultural institutions. This highlights how far our present state has removed us from our history: now-ness is blissfully ahistorical.
Here, as Stephen Hawking said of space and time, is finite, but has no boundaries, no edges. Here is endless. Speed pushing us out of place and into time is also not entirely new. When astrophysics describes space travel it measures distance in time: we know cosmic destinations as so many light years away. Memory, so tied to place, has always been the amanuensis of time. But memory, due to the Internet of Never Forgetting, also resides in the endless here. It is no longer solely in our heads and needs no artistic assistant. We save up “theres” like hoarding pennies to drop into the coin sorter of now. Our memories of there are only real in our here display.
Our First Place Is Now Time
I am at a Starbucks in Winter Park, Florida. Starbucks was designed as what Ray Oldenburg called a “third place.” That is, a social setting separate from the two typical social environments of home (“first place”) and work (“second place”). Churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, and parks are examples of third places.
First place now is not a place at all — it is time. It has no physical dimension except as a way station, a conceptual crash pad with no tangible boundaries. If you text me that we’re breaking up, where are we? The we that is breaking up is physical but where are we located? We are not walking across Venice Beach or arguing as we stroll down Peachtree Avenue. I’m in my head; you’re on your way to meet your new boyfriend, Richard. But our exchange, for both of us, exists only in the featureless landscape of time.
Connectivity changes our perception of distance; it ceases to exist concretely and becomes an abstraction. But what happens when we personify the characteristics of connectivity itself? We begin to live through that abstraction.
Any place becomes just background music for time. Like most people at this third place, physically being here is a convenient way station to go there — instantly. If it took hours or days to go there — the meeting with my client in Singapore, a reunion with my pals in Toronto — I would experience the topography, the intervening terrain, and notice where I am. But as time supplants place, instant connection becomes physical location because in a very real sense — hello everyone texting and walking, texting and driving — I do not need full (or almost any) consciousness of where I am. I am in a wrinkle in time-space that out-places place within time. I am in an “imaginary place” that does not exist as a real place — but my interaction is real — in time. Time reality supplants place reality. We spoke at 11:13. We Skyped four minutes ago. We texted and exchanged emails just before the Skype. We are texting now. We are texting in no-place.
The where of those interactions wasn’t the physical confines of a Starbucks on Park Avenue in Winter Park, Florida. And while I acknowledge that another way of describing the locale for those interactions is cyberspace, that doesn’t begin to address our foreshortening of meatspace and how we are abandoning it to live in the here of now — in time.
There was formally defined and understood as far from here. Columbus, rooted firmly in the first place of Spain, had only a spatial goal — to sail west and reach the Indies. There and here were far apart: he brought back natives and gold to prove to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand that there was even there. Only brave men (women were not yet explorers) returned from there to report back to here. Maps of there were either non-existent or wildly inaccurate. There was unknowable until here-o’s traveled there and back.
Now-ness As Religion
Now-ness acts like a religion (from the Latin religare, to bind together): faith in its supreme importance and power binds us together in the moment. Spreading the gospel of now-ness, the news anchors of CNN, Fox and other networks are the high priests of now. Their robes are suits; their message: stay tuned, stay in the now. Just as the Catholic Church once sold indulgences to ensure adherents made their way to heaven, corporate sponsors who have a financial stake in our immersion — and wholehearted belief in — the nirvana of now-ness fund The Church of What’s Happening Now. Search engines are belief engines: tracking and profiling tell data parables. They tell one paramount story: thou shalt have no other gods before now. The numbers are on their side: Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
Now-ness then is more than a referent of the present moment; the steady undertow of now-ness is all engulfing. Now-ness hijacks perspective, or anything beyond itself. Technologies of connectivity have made now a place — the place — where facts, news, noise, and chatter cram and collide. Here where now-ness continually renews itself, where updates eat updates and what is earth-shattering in one moment becomes stale a moment later, what matters is to be uber timely — to be the next breaking story, the latest tweet, the comment that comments on the last comment. (This is the raison d’etre of news feeds: their goal to be the now-est engulfs their intention to be thoughtful and balanced.) History, not in the now, is shoved off stage, out of time because time is now-ness, it is not then-ness. Whatever we might learn from history, or from stepping back to bring context, must be quick — it must fit into a time-slot; it must fit into the timeliness of now — or it simply doesn’t matter. In this place of time, a re-placement of place, the sensorium is dialed down. Sounds may be present, but smells and taste and atmosphere are not. Is it a surprise that as place vanishes our physical environment degrades? We don’t live in it anymore; we are somewhere else, like Chen Rong-yu.
Racing to Be the Now-est
As time becomes the new logic of place, our internal clocks speed up. Living in time, where speed, instantaneousness, blink reactions and perceptions, and ever-greater urgency rule, we abandon our connection to place. This is one reason why many people today feel uprooted, untied to the land or locale of their beginnings. They don’t actually live in that topography anymore.
At the same time owning now-ness becomes a political imperative. Whatever mention, argument, shout, invective, outrageous assertion or despicable behavior can be imported or crammed into now serves a simple agenda: it is part of the now noise. The more crowded here gets, the more we are likely to miss or misinterpret what is going on. Now, thereby, becomes a perfect playground for chaos-as-strategery. Claiming itself to be an arena of competing truths, it is also the ultimate propaganda lab.
What will ultimately emerge from that lab remains to be seen. But there are already a few truths we can recognize:
· Now is crowded and it is possible to affect and subvert people’s perceptions by crowding now further with misperceptions, conspiracy theories, and lies.
· The vast majority of users of now tools have not realized that they have been co-opted by the religion of now-ness and thereby they are unwitting adherents. Like many religious adherents, they do not carefully question the dogma — they worship blindly at the What’s Happening Now temple.
911 of the Mind
To ensure everyone adheres to the religion of now-ness, the media business model is to create a 911 of the mind. Every moment there is a new 911 call: active shooter in Pittsburgh synagogue, 12 injured, 8 dead; suspicious package bomb discovered in Los Angeles mail sorting facility; President predicts his enemies will fail; market plunges 300 points. Once 911 was an emergency number to call; now it is a mental state. Formerly we called 911; now 911 calls us.
When that call comes in, our response behavior is to surrender our natures and intentions to our tools. We adopt device logic — instantaneousness, constant interruption, remote access anywhere, anytime, etc. — as our internal logic and, soon, as our external behavior. We do not insist on a pause, a break, a space. Curiously, we do not ask ourselves why there is no delay or distance between the call and our response. Yet that very ability is our way out of the 911 of the mind trap. Without exercising that space, our minds are overtaxed residents in the now-ness emergency room: always on-call.
Retrieving Now from Our Devices
Moving out of place to live in time — in the new space-time realm of digital interactivity — is as likely to alter our lives as robotic caregivers or driverless cars. We should explore, annotate, and prepare for this change. We must especially address how children and young adults will process this change and help them prepare for new roles and distortions that accompany it.
Our devices are becoming more aware of us — responding to our voice, our face, our emotions, our fingerprints and retinas. In turn, we must become more aware of them and especially how we respond to them. Generating this awareness is as consequential for humans as addressing climate change.
We can start by assessing how we respond to device logic. The logic of our devices is always-on, eternal now-ness. Neither our brains nor our hearts obey that logic. To retrieve now from our devices, we need time outs, time off, pauses, disconnects. To remain sane and whole, we can be deliberate; we can talk back to our devices by consciously deciding to own our now first.
Space, not place, is the key to retrieving now from our devices. We can cultivate and grow space around our technologies to see their logic and how we respond to that logic.We have agency. We can choose to interrupt the logic of interruption; put a space between any happening-now update and ourselves. We can acknowledge its effect: presently not only do we give it surpassing importance — it effectively removes us from place. While our devices redefine and reposition now-ness, we have the choice to accept or reject that seemingly ironclad definition.
The Uneasy Task of Seeing What We’re Doing
We have arrived at a new juncture: to thrive in the face of multiple simultaneous accelerations, it is critical to pay attention to how we respond to, and ultimately use, the newer technologies that create them.
This will not be easy. Our use of technology is utilitarian and in that measure, unconscious. We text, we don’t think about texting. We are not used to — and likely are not interested in — examining the meta layer above our behaviors. Yet it is in this meta layer — the behaviors above the actions, like the meta layer of information above a digital photograph — that we can see how place becomes time.
Even if we become conscious of how we abandon place to live in time as we engage with technology tools, will that recover place for us? Will we once again be able to reclaim physical spaces and places, places that defined and delimited us? Not likely. We are like the Romantics of the 19th century who glorified nature as people were leaving farms and the country life to live and work in cities: whether we’re from Dubai or Dubuque, we enjoy the tech transport out of place into the urbane domain of time too much to abandon it and return to a place-first pastorale.
Instead, we can acknowledge the terms and conditions of this new reality. That would be a timely beginning.
Time, Space, and Place: A Summary
§ Our choice, via innumerable devices and advancing technologies, to increasingly spend time in time (digital connectivity) loosens our ties to place.
§ We have always followed (and will continue to swallow) the logic of our devices. We are speeding up as they speed up. We are keeping time with device clock time, which paces digital connectivity.
§ The more we live in time connectivity, the less connected we are to place; the more we will revalue what is meaningful and important using new time-driven criteria.
§ We are revaluing — and will continue to revalue — what is meaningful and important according to new time-driven criteria: we will feel absent (FOMO) if we are not swimming in infinite nowness. But this is actually a fear of being out of time — not keeping up with insta time.
