How does our relationship with digital technologies alter our relationship with the future, with the present, and with our imaginations? It’s a question we’ve reflected on in various podcasts and interviews in this series. One of the books that most influenced me on this was Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Present Shock’. Rushkoff is a writer, documentarian and lecturer, whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age.
He’s a prolific guy. Fifteen books including the brilliantly-titled ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus’, documentaries such as ‘Generation Like’ and ‘Merchants of Cool’, a podcast called ‘Team Human’, and several graphic novels. He has also worked as a stage fight choreographer, and played keyboards for industrial noise art terror combo Psychic TV. He is a winner of the beautifully named ‘Neil Postman Award for Career Achivement in Public Intellectual Activity’, and is currently Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens in New York. It was a real honour to be able to speak to him recently via Skype. I started by asking what he meant in ‘Present Shock’ when we wrote “our society has re-oriented itself to the present moment”.
“Present Shock was really looking at the way that I guess digital media in particular has changed the temporal landscape. It’s changed the way we contend with time. The Ancient Greeks had two understandings of time really. Two words for time. One was ‘chronos’, which is time on the clock. You know, “what time did you crash the car?” “I crashed the car at 4.17”.
The other idea called ‘kairos’, which is more like time as a readiness. “What time are you going to tell your father you crashed the car?” It doesn’t matter what the time on the clock is, you’re going to tell him when he’s feeling good, after he’s had his drink but before he’s opened his bills. So that’s a kind of time that’s not a chronological time so much as a readiness time, an intuitive time.
What I believe is that digital technology has emphasised this more chronological time and disconnected us from some of the more intuitive or natural bottom up understandings of time. Anything that’s not really a metric, anything that’s not measurable, goes away in the digital simulations or representations of the world we live in.
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