Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  More advanced deployments of these technologies attempt to synchronize those internal rhythms with those of the outside world. Most of us today live in cities and spend most of our time indoors, where the cues that used to alert us to the changing days, moon phases, and seasons are largely hidden from us. Our minds may know it’s nighttime, but our eyes and thyroids don’t. Neither do most of us know what phase the moon is in, whether the tides are high, or if the honey is ready—even though some of our immune systems may have registered that ragweed is in the air and triggered an allergic response. So, some of our senses are still connected to the cycles to which we have coordinated our organ systems for the past several hundred thousand years, while others are blinded by our artificial environments or our efforts to synchronize to the wrong signals. (What does it mean to your body when a ten-ton bus zooms past? That you’re in the middle of an elephant stampede?)

  In an effort to resynchronize our internal rhythms with those of nature, chronobiologists have developed computer programs that both monitor the various pulses of our organs while comparing and contrasting them with daily, lunar, and seasonal cycles. Not everyone marches to exactly the same beat, which is why these approaches are highly personalized. New, controversial, but effective exercise programs from companies with names like iHeart and LifeWaves exploit these emerging findings,30 assigning workouts during different, specific hours of the day over the course of each month.

  Believe what we may about such strategies, there is now substantial evidence that time is not generic, however interchangeable our digital devices may make it seem. Yes, the DVR means we can record our programs instead of watching them as they are broadcast, but this does not mean the experience of watching our favorite HBO drama is the same on a Wednesday afternoon as it would have been on the Sunday evening before when everyone else was watching it. We needn’t be slaves to the network’s schedule, but neither must we submit to the notion that we are equally disposed to all activities in all time slots.

  By the same token, businesses need not submit to the schedules and sequences that are external to the social and cultural rhythms defining their product cycles. Duncan Yo-Yos, for just one example, enjoy a cyclical popularity as up and down as the motion of the toy itself. The products become wildly popular every ten years or so, and then retreat into near total stagnation. The company has learned to ride this ebb and flow, emerging with TV campaigns, celebrity spokespeople, and national tournaments every time a new generation of yo-yo aficionados comes of age.

  Likewise, Birkenstock shoes rise and fall in popularity along with a host of other back-to-nature products and behaviors. Instead of resisting these trend waves and ending up with unsold stock and disappointing estimates, the company has learned to recognize the signs of an impending swing in either direction. With each new wave of popularity, Birkenstock launches new lines and opens new dealerships, then pulls back when consumer appetites level off. With this strategy, the company has expanded from making just a handful of shoes to its current offering of close to five hundred different styles.

  A friend of mine who worked on smart phone applications at Apple told me that Steve Jobs always thought of product development in terms of three-year cycles. Jobs simply was not interested in what was happening in the present; he only cared about the way people would be working with technology three years in the future. This is what empowered Jobs to ship the first iMacs with no slot for floppy drives, and iPhones without the ability to play the then-ubiquitous Flash movie files. He was developing products in the present that were situated to catch (and, some may argue, create) changing consumer trends instead of simply meeting his marketing department’s snapshots of current consumer demand.

  This is not as easy for companies with shareholders who refuse to look at anything but quarterly reports and expect year-over-year earnings to do nothing but increase. But that is not the way either people or organizations function—especially not when they are using social networking technologies that in many ways promote the coherence of their living cultures. For while digital technology can serve to disconnect us from the cycles that have traditionally orchestrated our activities, they can also serve to bring us back into sync.

  The choice of how to use them remains ours.

  THE SPACE BETWEEN THE TICKS

  I grew up back when family vacations meant long road trips. My brother and I would fight for control of the AAA TripTik, a plastic-bound pad of little one-page maps with a hand-drawn green-felt-tip pen line over the highway we were supposed to follow. Holding the map meant getting to look at the tiny numbers indicating the mileage between each exit, and then trying to add up how far it was to the next destination or rest stop, while out the window the trees and road signs flew by.

  “I’m getting carsick,” the map holder would inevitably call out, handing over navigational authority to his sibling.

  “Look out the window,” our dad would say. “At things far away. And stop looking at that map!”

  What our father, an accountant, understood from experience if not brain science was that it’s hard to focus on something up close while moving at sixty-five miles per hour down a highway. This is due to what neurologists call sensory conflict. In order to locate our own positions in space, we use multiple sources of information: sight, touch, the angles of our joints, the orientation of the inner ear, and more. When we are focused on a fine motor task or tiny detail, the scale on which this occurs just doesn’t jibe with the speed at which things are flying past in our peripheral vision, or the bumps and acceleration we feel in our stomachs as the car lurches forward. Are we sitting on a couch, falling out of a tree, or running through a field? The body doesn’t know from automobiles. Our inner ear says we are moving, while our eyes, staring at a fixed object like a book, tell the brain we are stationary.

  We are similarly disoriented by digital time, for it tends to mix and match different scales simultaneously. A date twenty years in the future has the same size box in the Google calendar as the one tomorrow or next week. A search result may contain both the most recent Tweet about a subject as well as an authoritative text representing fifty years of scholarship—both in the same list, in the same size, and virtually indistinguishable. Just like the world whizzing by out the car window, the digital world on the other side of our computer screens tends to move out of sync with the one in which our bodies reside.

  In both cases, the driver is the only one truly safe from nausea. For while the passengers—or in the digital realm, users—cannot anticipate the coming bumps or steer into curves, drivers can. For those of us contending with digiphrenia, becoming a driver means taking charge of choice making, especially when that means refusing to make any choice at all.

  Digital technology is all about choices. Closer to a computer game than a continuous narrative, the digital path is no longer inevitable, but a branching hierarchy of decision points. The digital timeline moves not from moment to moment, but from choice to choice, hanging absolutely still on each command line—like the number on a digital clock—until the next choice is made and a new reality flips into place.

  This freedom to choose and make choices is the underlying promise of the digital era, or of any new technology. Electric lighting gives us the freedom to choose when to sleep; asphalt gives us the choice where to drive our cars; Prozac gives us the freedom to choose an otherwise depressing lifestyle. But making choices is also inherently polarizing and dualist. It means we prefer one thing over another and want to change things to suit our sense of how things ought to be.

  Our leading consumer-technology brand, Apple, makes this all too clear: using these devices is akin to taking a bite of the forbidden fruit, exchanging the ignorant holism of Eden for the self-aware choice making of adulthood. The “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” as the myth calls it, introduced humanity to the binary universe of active choice that computers now amplify for us today. As a downside, the new freedom of choice created self-consciousness and shame.
Adam and Eve became self-aware and ashamed of their nudity. They were banished from the holism of Eden and went out into the world of yes and no, this and that, Cain and Abel, and good and evil.

  The same is true for us today. Our digital technologies empower us to make so many choices about so many things. But the staccato nature of digital choice also thwarts our efforts to stay fully connected to our greater throughlines and to one another. Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix. I am with my daughter, but the phone is vibrating with a new instant message. Even if I choose to ignore the message and be with her, I have been yanked from the intimate moment by the very need to make a choice. Of course, I can also choose to turn off the phone—which involves pulling it out of my pocket and changing a setting—or just leave it and hope it doesn’t happen again.

  For many of us trying to reconcile our real and virtual scales of existence, there is almost a feeling of operating at different speeds or in multiple time zones. This sensation comes from having to make precise, up-close, moment-to-moment choices while simultaneously attempting to experience the greater flow we associate with creativity and productivity. Like when you’re writing with great flow and energy, but your Microsoft Word program puts a little green line under one word. Do you stop and check, or do you keep going? Or both? Just like the kid in the backseat of the car, we get a kind of vertigo.

  The ancient Greeks would probably tell us our troubles stem from our inability to distinguish between the two main kinds of time, chronos and kairos. It’s as if they understood that time is simply too multifaceted to be described with a single word. Chronos is the kind of time that’s registered by the clock: chronology. It’s not time itself but a particular way of understanding time by the clock. That’s what we literally mean when we say “three o’clock.” This is time of the clock, meaning belonging to the clock, or chronos.

  Kairos is a more slippery concept. Most simply, it means the right or opportune moment. Where chronos measures time quantitatively, kairos is more qualitative. It is usually understood as a window of opportunity created by circumstances, God, or fate. It is the ideal time to strike, to propose marriage, or to take any particular course of action. Carpe diem. Kairos is perfect timing relative to what’s going on, where chronos is the numerical description of what happens to be on the clock right then. Chronos can be represented by a number; kairos must be experienced and interpreted by a human.

  While clocks may have suggested that we live in a world bound by chronos, digitality asks us to embody chronos itself. Where the arms of the clock passed through the undefined, unmeasured spaces between numbers, digital technology registers only chronos. It does not exist between its pulses. This is why we call it an asynchronous technology: it does not pass. It is the ticks of the clock but none of the space between. Each new tick is a new line of a code, a new decision point, another division—all oblivious to what happens out there in the world—except when it gets a new discrete input from one of us.

  Digital time ignores nearly every feature of kairos, but in doing so may offer us the opportunity to recognize kairos by its very absence. Clocks initially disconnected us from organic time by creating a metaphor to replace it. Digital time is one step further removed, replacing what it was we meant by “time” altogether. It’s a progression akin to what postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “precession of the simulacra.” There is the real world, then there are the metaphors and maps we use to represent that world, and then there is yet another level of activity that can occur on those maps—utterly disconnected from the original. This happens because we have grown to treat the maps and symbols we have created as if they were the underlying reality. Likewise, we started with this amorphous experience of rhythms that we called time. We created the analog clock to represent the aspects of time we could represent with a technology. Then, with digital readouts, we created a way of representing what was happening on that clock face. It is twice removed from the original.

  Now that chronos has been fully freed from the cycles and flows through which we humans experience time, we can more easily differentiate between the kinds of clocks and time we are using. We can stop forcing our minds and bodies to keep up with digital chronos while also ceasing to misapply our digital technologies to human processes. We come to fully recognize the difference between chronos and kairos, or between time and timing.

  Or think of it this way: Digital technology is more like a still-life picture. A sample. It is frozen in time. Sound, on the other hand, is audible only over time. We hear sound as it decays. Image may be thought of as chronos, where sound is more like kairos. Not surprisingly, the digital universe is a visual one: people staring silently at screens, where the only sounds in the room are the keys and mouse clicks.

  Our analog technologies anchored us temporally in ways our digital ones don’t. In a book or a scroll, the past is on our left, and the future is on our right. We know where we are in linear time by our position in the paper. While the book with its discrete pages is a bit more sequential than the scroll, both are entirely more oriented in time than the computer screen. Whichever program’s window we may have open at the moment is the digital version of now, without context or placement in the timeline. The future on a blog is not to one side, but above—in the as-yet-unposted potential. The past isn’t to the other side, but down, in and among older posts. Or over there, at the next hypertext link. What is next does not unfold over time, but is selected as part of a sequence.

  In this context, digiphrenia comes from confusing chronos with kairos. It happens when we accept the digital premise that every moment must potentially consist of a decision point or a new branch. We live perched atop the static points of chronos, suffering from the vertigo of no temporal context. It’s akin to the discomfort many LP listeners had to early CD music and low-resolution digital music files, whose sample rates seemed almost perceptible as a staccato sawtooth wave buzzing under the music. It just didn’t feel like continuous sound and didn’t have the same impact on the body.

  Digital audio is markedly superior in many respects. There is no “noise”—only signal. There are no “pops” on the record’s surface, no background hiss. But without those references, our experience becomes frictionless—almost like the vertigo we experience when zooming in or out of a Google map too rapidly. There’s no sense of scale—no background to the foreground. None of the cues that create a sense of organic connection to the medium. There is no messy handwriting to be deciphered, only ACII text. Every copy is the original. And it is perfect—at least when it’s there. When it is not, as in the case of the spaces between the samples in a digital audio recording, there is nothing. For many kinds of activities, this doesn’t matter at all. The fixed type of the printing press already removed pretty much every sign of analog personality from text. For human purposes, there is no real difference between the text in a digital book and a physical one; the only difference is the form factor of the book versus that of the tablet. That’s because a symbol system like text is already abstracted and just as well represented digitally.

  When there is a direct communication with the senses, on the other hand, the difference becomes a lot clearer. Like a fluorescent lightbulb, which will perceptibly flicker at 60 hertz along with the alternating current of the house, digital technologies are almost perceptibly on/off. They create an environment, regardless of the content they are expressing. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message.” A lightbulb creates an environment, even though it has no content. Even without a slide or movie through which to project an image onto the wall, the light itself creates an environment where things can happen that otherwise wouldn’t. It is an environment of light.

  With digital technology, the environment created is one of choice. We hop from choice to choice with no present at all. Our availability to experience flow or to seize the propitious moment is minimized as our choices per second are
multiplied by a dance partner who doesn’t see or feel us. Our rhythms are dictated by the pulses of required inputs and incoming data. It is not a stream but a series of points along a line. Yes, we have the ability to make more choices, but in the process we become primarily choosers. The obligation to choose—to “submit” as the button compels us—is no choice at all. Especially when it prevents us from achieving our own sense of flow and rhythm.

  The first experience most of us had of this sort of forced choice was call waiting—the interruptive beep letting us know we had the option of putting our current conversation on hold and responding to whoever was now calling us. By utilizing the feature and checking on the incoming call, we are introducing a new choice into our flow. In the process, we are also saying, “Hold on while I check to make sure there’s not someone calling whom I want to speak with more than I want to speak with you.” Sure, we can justify that it might be an emergency, but it’s really just a new decision point.

  Now with caller ID in addition to our call waiting, we can visually check on the source of the incoming call without our current caller even knowing. We pull the phone away from our ear, imperceptibly disconnecting from the call for long enough to scan the incoming number. Then we return to the conversation in process, only half listening while we inwardly debate whether to interrupt the conversation with the now certain fact that whatever the person on the other end is saying is less important to us than the alternative, the incoming caller. (It was easier when everyone heard the beep, and the insult seemed less willful.)