This is a rough, raw draft

This is a rough, raw draft. It is certain to change. It hasn’t been proofread so don’t worry about typos, etc. It hasn’t even been re-read so it’s like to be quite incoherent.

Chapter started: March 15, 2001
This version started: March 15, 2001
Latest: March 16, 2001

NOTE: This is a draft. It is not to be used, published or quoted from without very express permission of the copyright holder, David Weinberger [email protected]

This chapter is an experiment. I haven’t re-read it or nuthin’.

Interests and Time

Here’s a way to drive your spouse nuts. As you’re walking someplace that perhaps feels a little farther than it should, turn to her (or him, if that’s your preference), and say, “We’re not even close to getting there.” She replies that it’s really not so far. This is your chance. You point at a telephone pole that’s 50 feet from you. “Close?” you expostulate, “Why we’re not even at that telephone pole.” As she absorbs this irrelevancy, immediately say, “We’re still not at that telephone pole. In fact, we’re not even half way there. We’re still not even halfway there. We’re still walking and we’re not even halfway to that telephone pole.” Then, when you finally pass it – and it will seem like forever if you’re executing this maneuver properly – pick another object and begin again: “Ok, so we’re past that telephone pole. But we’re still not past that mailbox. We’re not even half way to that mailbox…” Your spouse is guaranteed to find this truly annoying. Best of all, your kids will pick up on it in an instant, adding it to their arsenal of ways to irk their parents.

By splitting distances into halves, we’re repeating the thinking about time that gets us into trouble. The fact is that time just doesn’t bear much scrutiny. Everywhere we look, we run into paradoxes, many based on the idea that, just as there are atoms of matter, time also comes in teeny-tiny increments called “moments.” Every kid, I assume, has lain on her back, looked up at the clouds, and tried to hold onto a single Now. Not even hold onto it. Just find it. Every time you look, it’s gone. It might as well not be there. But it has to be because the past is gone and the future isn’t yet. The Now is the only part of time that’s really real, yet we can’t put our finger on it. The thing that’s most real – the Now – escapes us. It’s so frustrating.

Then in history class we get taught how to create a time line. Time is a line. One thing happens after another. You arrange those events – those Nows – one next to another. Put a red marker on the current Now, and move the righthand moments to the left, one at a time. That’s time. For reasons we can’t understand – another way in which time messes with our minds – the line only moves in one direction. If we could drive the wrong way on the one-way street of time, other paradoxes would kick in and we might end up as our own grandparent or stepping on a prehistoric butterfly that somehow causes a grade B actor to become the most beloved president of his century.

The fact that every time we look at time it either vanishes or spins off into impossible paradoxes maybe we should take as a hint that something is seriously fucked up in our thinking about this particular topic. It’s going to take more than the Web to fix it. Very likely we Westerners need to make a hasty exit and be reborn as Easterners. Short of that, I think we can see that within the basics of time as we think of it, the Web is changing some of time’s fundamentals. In short, it’s doing much more than simply moving us into so-called “Internet time” that runs seven times faster than in the real world. That phrase started out as a witticism because of the pretended precision of the multiplier (which I’ve always assumed comes from the old saws about the age of dogs) but does get at something quite true: transactions and communications on the Web are unhindered by matter and its inertia. So things go faster. And, of course, the interest in the Internet spread at faster than Internet speed. If the Internet sometimes felt like a Gold Rush, that’s more due to the rush than to the gold.

But the Web is doing more than just speeding up the rate at which the film is projected (explaining why so often Web folks seem so herky-jerky, like Keystone Cops falling over one another). The communication niches that are getting filled – or invented – almost all have to do with variations on how they use time. For example, email is faster than regular mail, but if that were the only difference, then we could have stuck with faxes. It’s much more important that email, unlike a phone conversation, can be checked and read at your convenience. (Those who have their computers set to announce audibly when new mail has arrived, aren’t getting enough email. The creepy-cheery “You have mail!” voice really should be saying, “You’ve been interrupted!”) There are, of course, expectations on the turn-around time of email; in my milieu, if you haven’t answered an email in two days, you probably should explain and apologize. When email is too slow – not in its delivery time but in its expected turn-around time – there’s always instant messaging in which people type at one another in “real time,” i.e., close to instantaneously. Almost all the differences between email and instant messaging have to do with time. Because IM requires real-time typing, the two conversants have to be in the room at the same time. Because IM is instantaneous, conversants respond to individual lines, as typed, rather than waiting to read the message as a whole; as a result, you get something that’s much more like a conversation. But because the speed of IM is limited to how fast people type, one conversant will reply to another’s most recent line while the other is typing in a new line, so IM conversations frequently have a one-step-back, two-steps-forward structure that takes some getting used to. And because the transmission of the typing of an IM message is simultaneous with the typing itself, you don’t get to do drafts of an IM message the way you can do a draft of an email. All these differences have to do with time. And the same sort of temporal considerations are at the heart of the other forms of Web communications. For example, as we’ll discuss in our chapter on the nature of the Web public, discussion boards are organized by “threads” (or topics) that can stretch over the course of months the way no real world conversation can.

Web time is apart from real world time. Imagine you’re engaged in an instant messaging session, or catching up on your email, or writing a response to a message posted last week to www.volvospy.com, a board for Volvo owners. Your scheduler begins to ding to remind you that you’ve got a meeting down the hall or an appointment to get your teeth cleaned. The dinging calls us back from the Web world and into the real world where time is a drumbeat. Tick tock tick tock, we imagine all the world’s clocks banging the Now on the head in perfect synchronization – or as perfect as the small fingers of the human hand can make it. Just as with the reduction of space to a set of uniform points, we’ve reduced time to a set of uniform moments primarily so we can quantify, measure and agree on precisely tagged points. The drumbeat is eternal and universal. How aware we are of it determines the type of interval we’re having – during the workday, we check our watches and curse at people who keep us waiting; while on vacation we remove our watches so we won’t get a tan line and measure our days by the glare of the sun. And, one of the infuriating paradoxes of time is that it hastens precisely when we’re most absorbed in an activity – if we’re having fun, time goes quickly, while it crawls just when we want it to zoom.

At our worst, we confuse the drumbeat of time with a property of reality. We think there really is a succession of Nows that click away, rather than thinking of clock time simply as a measure laid over the real. The parallel would be to think that mountains not only have minerals, trees, and snow, and have not only shape and height, but also have inches. An inch is a measurement of a mountain, not a part of a mountain. Similarly, clock time measures change but clock time is not a property of change. As the tide crests, the groundhog burrows, and the businessperson runs to an airplane gate, the drumbeat can be heard, but we’re the ones beating the drum.

In fact, the tick-tocking doesn’t measure mere change; “change” is too bland. The only way most of us could get to a perception of the world as always changing is to drop some powerful hallucinogens. No, the change that we see is organized into themes and continuities dictated by our interests. I mean “interests” in the broadest sense – anything we care about. And, it seems clear to me that we’re not in charge of what’s going to interest us. We’re pulled this way and that, in many directions simultaneously; if that means I’m defining us as explosions, I can live with it. We don’t choose what to be interested in. That’s why the word “emotion” comes from that which moves us and the word “passion” comes from that in the face of which we are helpless. Interest obscures the drumbeat of time.

So, you’re at www.volvospy.com, responding to a thread about whether dynamic traction is worth the money, or you’re at www.crimsonskies.com engaged in a thread about the best way to fly your stunt plane under the freeway in the last mission of the game “Crimson Skies.” These threads have been going on for days. As you read through them and compose a reply, you don’t hear the drumbeat. Threads have nothing to do with the mechanical tick tock of time. Threads are topics, and topics by their nature are subject areas someone cares about. If you hear the drumbeat, it’s coming from the real world, not the Web and it means you’re losing interest in the thread.

The Web isn’t the only place this happens. Far from it. Interest defeats drumbeats everywhere. But in the real world we frequently make the mistake of thinking that the drumbeats are a real part of the landscape. In fact we get ourselves to believe that Nows are the only real part of time, as if the past and future were some type of fiction. On the Web, it’s harder to make these mistakes for the Web is spun purely out of human interest.

Of course, the Web doesn’t just pull time together, back from the Vegamatic of time (“It slices, it dices, and best of all … tons of juliennes!”). It takes these threads of interest and weaves them into a crazy quilt. So, you can imagine two different dinnertime conversations. The first is from a real world breadwinner recounting her day: “Wow, what a doozy! I was 15 minutes late because of traffic, which meant I missed Old Man Smither’s weekly update at the staff meeting. So, when it was my turn to report, I explained why I thought we had to change paths on the Manning account, not knowing that Smithers had spent a full 12 minutes saying why we can’t change paths. And then after wasting most of the morning going over Jimson’s plans – basically doing his job for him – I grabbed a fajita-burger at the Splash & Laugh…” It’s a nice little story, all pitched around the basic literary theme of “My Life Sucks.” Now imagine a different conversation from someone who’s spent her day on the Web: “I checked my email and had a message from TimCat that really pissed me off, so I wrote this scathing reply – pretty funny, I thought – but she sent it around to her little circle, so I started hearing from them. Also, Jamie sent me a link to this hysterical site where they’ve taken all the old ad jingles, and have hamsters singing them. It’s a lot funnier if you see it. But that site had a link to a place that archives still images from the great old TV shows, like Lucy on the candy assembly line. Then there was another message from the guys at Luckyville trying to get me to tell them what my lucky charm is, which really strikes me as stupid beyond imagining. So I checked out who they are by doing a search on their names, and it turns out that …” So far, this reporter is taken us through close to 2.5 minutes of her day. The point? The Web takes the nice, unified time line and shatters it like a crystal goblet. It turns out that because space is so hard to move around in, it provides continuity to our stories of ourselves. Hyperlinks, on the other hand, enable our attention to fly off and provide no unifying theme beyond what seemed interesting for some reason, any reason. Hyperlinks are organized distraction. And yet they’re only a distraction if we have some other objective in mind. Maybe they represent a new type of attention.

Are our attention spans decreasing or is life getting more interesting?

Because hyperlinked time is fragmented, it’s also non-linear, non-sequential. You can get to where you want without having to traverse space. Just click. For example, if you go to your local meatspace Motor Vehicles Department to renew your license, you’ll wait on line until it’s your turn. Cut in line and die. Leave the line because you want to have lunch and you’re going to have to start all over when you get back. The line is supreme. All hail the line. If, on the other hand, you are able to renew your license online, you’ll click over to the Motor Vehicles page, click on the link to “Renew,” and start to fill out the form. If you then decide to go have lunch, or to go check the online stock prices, or to watch an episode at www.nakednews.com, you can come back to the Motor Vehicles page precisely where you left off. That’s what non-linear time is about.

Here’s what’s great about the hyperlinked time of the Web: Because it generally doesn’t require coordinating other people to the march of the drumbeat, we can do things when we want. We are in control of our time on the Web, not the tick-tock that chases us like the crocodile chases Captain Hook. But, if this puts time back in step with interests, and if our interests are sliced and diced into bits about as small as atoms and as small as Now moments, then what’s been gained? We are lords of shattered time, monarchs of ground glass.

Ah, but interest doesn’t slice the way time does. Interest – our caring about things – is fractal. Consider the recent cases of elephantiasis of interest: the OJ trial, the Monica Lewinsky episode, the Elian adventure.[1] These media storms share some characteristics. First, they go on longer than anyone expects, maintaining the public's interest well past their objective importance. Second, they get obsessive about details — the minute-by-minute timetable of OJ's movements, Bill's Christmas list for Monica, Elian’s daily breakfast-and-purge reports. Third, they're stories and stories are what humans listen to. We can get so wrapped in fictional stories about fictitious people that we can jump in our seats in the middle of a movie and weep at the end of a book.

The media, it seems, are applying to the public arena what they've learned from literature. The great stories of literature have always shown us that interest is fractal. With a fractal shape, the closer you look, the more detail is revealed, and the detail reflects the shape at the higher level of magnification — a shape made up of the same shape made up of the same shape, ad infinitum. Humans are like that. Our experience of the world is interest-based all the way through. As you look at why we do something, you see a view of the world shaped by what we care about. As you look ever more closely, going to finer and finer details, you always find not only that the view is shaped by our interests, but that those interests reflect our larger interests — interests are fractal. In the right hands, even the most minute dissections of human character and soul show a person's largest aspirations and passions writ small. We have no better example of this than James Joyce's Ulysses, in which the most ordinary and even boring of humans is shown to lead a life that in its details deserves to be described in the language of heroes — Leopold Bloom as Odysseus.

So, we stumble across a person who snares our interest the way a good story begins. We have the communications infrastructure to enable us to run down and broadcast the pathways of details, and at every level the fractal nature of human interest means we can find the story fascinating. Ultimately, details are the only thing that's interesting in any story precisely because they reveal the fractal shape of the whole. Stories are the unrolling of understanding through time. They're what we humans care about.

So the shattered continuum of linear time is revealed to be tied together in deeply fractal ways, often in stories in which the end is revealed to have been present in the beginning all along and the whole is revealed to have been present in the details. So, if we say that Web time returns control to us, we really mean that it returns time to the control of our interests, but our interests are not under our control. Time is returned to the passions we undergo, the hooking of our attention by the words of the Web. And this isn’t linear either; our attention isn’t hooked the way a bigmouth bass is. Rather, the hooks of our attention are fractal, folded in one another, interests devolving into sets of smaller interests, down to the atoms of attention: the telling details. And not only is our attention capable of manifold unfolding, but the words on the Web that hook us are social; our interest is snared by hooks set by others with similar passions, obsessions and cravings. We are hooked by the interests of others. Fractal mirrors reflecting and refracting.

This way of binding time is as old as our world, as old as the first conversation that went deeper than “Please pass the burning stick.” It is the ever-present structure of time and attention. But the Web – free of the drag of space and free of a permission-based social structure – unsticks our interests. We’re not stuck on a line in the Motor Vehicles Department re-reading for the twelfth time the poster trying to convince us not to run over children while we’re driving drunk. We are instead searching, or seeking, or playing, or lolling, driven by the interests that turn our head this way and that and that pump our passionate hearts with its own tick-tocking drumbeat.

[End here?]

Reality and time and perfection?

History

[1] If you are not an American Citizen, here's a key: OJ beheaded his wife and her friend but was released because he vigorously claimed to be an African-American. Monica caused Clinton to do the worst thing a US president has ever ever done: lie about getting blow jobs. Elian was a Cuban boy who let us make it clear that because of our strong belief in family values, we think you're better off as an orphan in Miami than living with your father.