Time — the great given, the great unknowable — is rarely thought of as a
political or social category. And yet, human time — our life cycles and
daily rhythms — is a dimension of our experience as fundamental and
formative as ideology or identity.
And, as the 21st century quickens to the end of its first decade, the
character of human temporality itself is undergoing rapid and radical
changes, whose consequences may affect every aspect of our selves and lives.
Some of our manipulations of time would have, until recently, belonged in the
realm of science fiction. Experimental techniques in stem-cell rejuvenation,
or growth of organs from embryonic cells, offer the possibility of extending
human lifespan to hitherto unimaginable lengths.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have devised digital technologies that
function at speeds ungraspable by human perception, and we have come to
expect from them nothing less than instant response.
We want more time, and we want it fast. “Impatience is a virtue,” a Samsung ad
proclaims, while a Sprint broadband slogan warns that “Now waits for no one.”
But even as we live ever faster, we seem to suffer from endemic shortages of
time. Rush and stress are matters of routine complaint.
Partly, this is because our temporal space is simply getting overcrowded.
Increasingly, we live in 24/7 societies, with no time out, and no let-up in
the activities available to or demanded from us. In our big cities, we can
shop till we drop all day, practically every day; and even after dark, we
have all the other time zones to play or work with.
Stockbrokers in New York stay awake through the the night to make transactions
into the Mumbai morning; we can read blogs from Brazil in real time, and
Twitter our news right back. Global time is becoming de-territorialised —
that is, severed not only from its diurnal cycles, but also from its
geographical location.
More counter-intuitively, we seem to be working harder, or at least longer
hours, now than we did in much of the 20th century. After the horrific
exploitations of workers’ time during the Industrial Revolution, the agreed
standard for most employment became a 40 and then, increasingly, 35-hour
week. By now, such figures seem almost pastoral.
For upwardly mobile professionals, a 60-hour week is not uncommon. Partly this
is because of our ethos of conspicuous exertion; working heroic hours shows
that you have staying power (often boosted, mind you, by energyenhancing
drinks, or stronger substances) and that you are in demand. But there is a
more surprising reason why we work harder than we perhaps have to: it is
because we like to work.
This is what micro-studies of American corporations, as well as comparative
studies in advanced democracies, repeatedly reveal: that when people are
offered shorter working hours, they overwhelmingly refuse; and that, in many
cases, they prefer to stay at the office late rather than go home, partly
because home itself has come to feel, in one sociological diagnosis, like
“the third shift”.
There are those e-mails to answer, children to take to various improving
activities and, in between, some “quality time” to fit in, reconfigured as
another kind of task. For women who work, but who still carry the brunt of
housework and child-rearing duties, the situation is particularly stressful.
But men, too, have been affected. Certainly, most can no longer expect a
glass of whisky to be handed to them by their housebound wife when they come
back from the office.
To a large extent, we are collapsing the distinctions between work and
leisure, or what, rather quaintly, used to be called “life”. But perhaps the
most profound changes in the fabric of lived time come from another source —
the creative and dangerous demiurge of contemporary technology.
Laptops, desktops, e-mails, social networking sites, iPhones, BlackBerries,
Twitter: this is the new surround in and with which we live, and to the
younger generations it must seem a kind of second nature. But digital
technologies run on a distinctly non-natural temporality. In their own
innards, they operate at nanoseconds. But they also compress the time of our
own operations into ever-briefer units, shortening the span of our patience
and our attention. Moreover, our various devices make staggering quanta of
information, entertainment and other kinds of stimuli accessible all the
time.
In that sense, our perception of time shortages is real: we can never keep up
or catch up with everything that is available to us, sometimes even in our
own personal space, or world.
In many ways, technology is clearly an enabling force, and few of us would
give up its advantages — for commerce, education and entertainment. And yet,
the evidence is beginning to mount that in trying to exploit time to the
utmost, and in trying to force our experience into digital patterns and
speeds, we run the risk of violating the limits of human temporality and
incurring some high, and paradoxical, costs.
Take the very contemporary pursuit of multitasking. The idea here, of course,
is to cram several activities — usually involving those digital devices —
into any given temporal space, so that the yield, or efficiency value, of
each moment is increased. But a Stanford University study found that
addictive multitaskers perform less well on tests involving several mental
tasks.
There are good reasons for this: although thought sometimes seems to move at
the speed of light, mental perception, or having a thought, actually takes
time — and switching from one kind of activity to another uses up an extra
amount of chemical and neurological processing. If you make your brain shift
too quickly from one category of perception to another, it will perform each
task less well and more slowly.
We end up thus being less efficient by far — sometimes with disastrous
results. Texting while driving causes accidents. On another level, if we try
to maximise our use of time by reducing our hours of sleep, we end up by
wasting time in a more grievous way, by becoming anxious or ill. And now,
according to the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, which studied
2,214 middle-aged British civil servants, there is evidence to suggest that
people who have worked very long hours for prolonged periods are at greater
risk of Alzheimer’s.
Clearly, we cross the limits of biological time at our peril. But is it
possible that in the more elusive sphere of subjectivity and the inner life,
there are similar unwritten laws? Pathologies are often a good clue to the
normal; and it is interesting that the signature disorder of our time —
attention deficit disorder — inheres, essentially, in an extreme impatience
and intolerance of delay.
ADD initially affected mostly children; but it is now being diagnosed in
adults and is thought to be so pervasive, particularly in the US, that it is
sometimes referred to not as a disorder but as a “cultural style”. And,
indeed, the symptoms of ADD closely mimic the patterns of our fast cultures:
restlessness, extreme segmentation of attention, an inability to concentrate
or absorb anything more than bits or bytes.
But on a larger scale, too, one wonders if our devotion to speed is reducing
our capacity for patient observation and reflection. The neuropsychiatrist
Richard Restak believes that prolonged coexistence with digital technologies
is altering the very structure of our brains.
In his book The New Brain: How the Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind,
Restak suggests that “the new brain” may be quicker but that it encodes
information more shallowly and less lastingly. Twitter may be an excellent
instrument of practical communication; but if we submit all our activities
and relationships to the requirements of instrumental time, we may sacrifice
the very interest and depth which makes them valuable.
Few of us would want to live sluggishly or spend our days in inactivity. And
yet, as with the depredations of the natural environment, it is possible
that in trying to exploit our temporal nature to the limit and beyond, we
risk despoiling the very sources of our wealth.
As with the global warming debates, however, there are signs of some attempts
to redress the balance. One modest development comes from a number of “slow”
movements — of which Slow Food is the best known — dedicated to performing
various activities at their own proper pace. It is also possible that, after
a period in which there have been rehabilitation programmes for internet
addicts, the generations growing up with fast technologies will learn to
navigate, or negotiate, their digital environment better. One can only hope
that we can step back from our time greed before time turns on us, and we
lose a rich measure of our humanity.
Time by Eva Hoffman is published by Profile at £10.99. To buy it for £9.89
inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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