The faster we go, the farther we get….
That makes sense in a car of course, but what about in a social sense?
Annalee Newitz proposes in The trouble with Twitter that as urban centres grow, and the acceptance of technologies grow, so do our expectations of immediacy of information delivery.
Once upon a time, long, long ago (10 years ago), we were content to get our news and information from newspapers (which were one day behind of course) or news broadcasts (more current but not immediate). If we couldn’t catch the call, we used our answering machines to check what our friends wanted to tell us. This has all shifted dramatically. Many people are literally glued to their mobile devices and cell phones, texting constantly with friends around the corner, or around the world. We are developing thumb injusries from the strain of it all.
Packages like Twitter allow several people to carry on threads of discussion. We expect to know right now what and when our friends are doing things, the stock market prices, the news from Afghanistan.
Dr. Luis Bettencourt in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences asserts that the “pace of life in urban areas speeds up exponentially relative to population size. What that means is if your population grows at rate n, your pace of life grows at the rate of n-squared.” As Annalee puts it “In other words, really freakin’ fast”.
These same researchers are concerned that as a race, humans will not be able to sustain the ever increasing pace of our lives, the ‘multi-tasking’ phenomenon by which we do more and more, but do each additional task less well. Our brains simply aren’t wired to do so much so fast. So by speeding up our pace of life are we moving faster towards the goal, or towards self-destruction?
25 Apr
