Is technology eating away at the present? Impossible, we’ll do it ourselves

The digital technologies of the internet and mobile phones have changed our understanding and perception of time. Some say for the best. After all, ubiquitous multitasking, parallel completion of a wide range of tasks at the same time, should make us faster and more productive. At the same time listening to a podcast or making a phone call, changing the baby’s diaper and emptying the dishwasher, it is possible. We live in a parallel society in which everyone and everything, including ourselves, is constantly available.

This means for time: their linear passage, one after another, was replaced by the concept of synchrony. The Internet has disrupted time as we know it and reassembled it into a multi-level puzzle where each piece must be placed simultaneously in every moment to keep up.

For the most gentle minds, this is not always an advantage. They suffer from chronophobia, the growing fear that time is passing faster, faster, and even very quickly. In the internet world, the present has merged with the future. Canadian media philosopher Douglas Copeland believes that there is now no time dimension of hope, to which one can draw many things from the past.

Various apps on our smartphones turn this sense of time (fear of missing out) into a business model. We can systematically record and record our activities and rate them according to their percentage of daily chores, use the Pomodoro technique to remind you of regular breaks in the infinitely accelerating flow of time, or document good decisions to better deal with work and life time and hold ourselves accountable if it doesn’t work out once other. None of this changes anything over time.

In fact, it has been scientifically proven that time seems to pass faster with age. And this applies not only to the last periods of time, whole decades of life seem to simply fly by as you get older. So not even time can save itself from the steely grip of inflation.

If the Internet has disrupted time as we know it, how about trying to disable that disruption? There are different ways to do this. We can simply decide to abolish the calendar and live without a time structure.

Just like the little arctic village of Sommarøy I tried two years ago. Without time and measure, stores can only open when the owners want it and people can come together with impulse rather than having to go through the hassle of arranging everything in advance. Well, this might still only work for 300 people. It is not possible to live like this in our complex world. The clock will stay, even if it basically shows how time passes.

Why does time arise and disappear for us horizontally and not vertically?

If there is no structural disorder, it is up to us to change our view of time. We don’t need any new apps or technologies for this, because there is a “tech” that is ideally suited for this: entertainment. It does not describe the state of laziness, as is often wrongly assumed today, but rather focuses on relaxation in the present.

Augustine wrote in his treatise on time as early as the fourth century: “There are three times, present in relation to the present, present in relation to the past, and present in relation to the future.” Flow” is, we say today.

The way time passes also depends on how we imagine it spatially. Mostly by timeline with the past on the left, the present in the middle and the future on the right. This is an ephemeral perception without an alternative. In countries that read from right to left (Arabic and Hebrew), it is often the other way around. Time runs from right to left.

But the real question is: Why does time arise and disappear for us horizontally and not vertically? Wouldn’t the elevated vertical timeline be the appropriate picture of the feeling that arises when something happens, when there are new developments, changes, and improvements that affect our lives, pushing us into the infinite space of possibilities? Space and time are not just dependent on each other in physics.

It is because of our self-selected limitations of the human imagination that we imagine time as a piece of a fly steadily sliding to the left out of life’s field of view, as in a vicious circle.

more: Top Tech Trends in 2022: The Year-End Conversation with Myriam Mikl