Taking Back Time
High-tech Humanity
By Douglas Rushkoff
EVENTS HAPPEN IN REAL TIME.
That should go without saying. We all know that the greatest luxury—and greatest obstacle—of holding events is that we need to get a whole bunch of busy people to take a couple of days off to attend a meeting, and a couple of days more traveling to be there. It’s a challenge, particularly in the always-on culture that our many networks, devices and applications impose upon us.
But seizing the power of real-time presence and exchange is—more than anything else—the object of the event planner’s game, yet it is also often the most overlooked these days. And I can’t help but suspect this is the result of our unhealthy relationship with technology.
Back in the day (I mean the early days of networking, like 1990 or so) the Internet was not something happening to us all the time, but an activity we engaged in consciously. Our participation on bulletin boards, discussion lists or USENET groups was not in real-time, but an entirely asynchronous style of engagement. We logged in one evening, read the posts that had been made since our last visit, and then took a moment to post our own responses. It was a slow process and the quality of our conversations did not depend on the speed with which we mustered a response. On the contrary, the depth of our exchanges depended on the amount of time we took to digest what others had said, contemplate the sense of their posts and then formulate a response of our own.
Those of us who remember these sorts of conversations still marvel at the depth and breadth they afforded us and the way new “threads” would emerge and spin out into their own conversations, and so on. It was a way of learning, meeting new people and, most of all, experiencing the joy of having as much time as we wanted to come up with an answer to something. And, of course, our answers were better for it—much better than those we cobble together, unwillingly, under pressure.
Part of the reason this style of exchange worked so well (and still does in the rare instances in which we’re allowed to do it) is that it is absolutely consistent with the underlying architecture and biases of the Internet itself. The Internet’s operating system—UNIX—doesn’t really occur in real time, either. In an effort to make computers “wait” for human commands, UNIX does everything in steps completely unrelated to the passing of the clock. It doesn’t move on until a person or another machine tells it to do so.
So early Internet conversations took the same path. Even e-mail was understood as something that could wait—unlike, say, a phone conversation. If days or a week went by before an answer to an e-mail came through, it was not considered odd or impolite. In fact, on some of the earliest systems like FIDONET (a hobbyist’s network of linked machines) it could take days for an e-mail to even arrive!
The advent of broadband networks, which allow us to leave our computers perpetually online, as well as smart phones and pagers which bring the Internet into our pockets, has turned the Internet from an opt-in activity to an always-on state of being. New messages ping or vibrate in our pockets, the inbox fills up in that window behind the one we’re working in and everybody seems to want an answer to everything, right now.
Of course, we know what kinds of answers this engenders.
Computing is asynchronous, yet we are quickly adopting an always-on approach to digital technology. This surrenders the human nervous system rather than expanding it. Likewise, the simultaneity of information streaming toward us prevents parsing or consideration. It is a constant flow that must be managed.
The now-ness of the net also engenders impulsive, unthinking responses over considered ones and a tendency to treat communications as a way to bark orders or fend off commands of others. We want to satisfy the devices chirping and vibrating in our pockets to make them stop. Instead of looking at digital conversations as opportunities for depth, we experience them as involuntary triggers of our nervous systems. In short, UNIX, the specifically asynchronous operating system of the Net, is ultimately incompatible with the human living in real time. We end up suffering the physical and emotional stresses previously associated with careers such as air traffic controllers and emergency response operators.
The live event is an opportunity to restore, dare we say it, the sanctity of the present moment. And this is particularly hard in an environment where Twitter, Google Wave and every other streaming real-time application has people convinced that they are already in the present moment. They are not; they are in total distraction and utterly divorced from the present.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps, the way to highlight the now-ness of your real meeting is to exploit the run-up to the event by doing the reverse. Use your networking technology, your Web site and your e-mail not to accelerate excitement and urgency, but to slow down time. Give participants a chance to read presenters’ writings and reports. Let them participate in old-fashioned, text-only exchanges about the key conference issues. Give them time to contemplate, alone and in small, self-selecting groups, the topics that will be explored during the conference itself.
This way, they will have already experienced the luxury of lingering on a topic as long as they want, digressing into alternate sidetracks and—most of all—determining what ideas they really need to explore with others in real time once the event actually happens.
The Net may be a tool of some organizational use during a conference. But its real value is in the weeks and months preceding the meeting. That’s the time when the value is created that can make the difference between a rushed touching of antenna and a truly culminating event. One+
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author, most recently, of Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. He teaches media studies at The New School in New York. Contact him at rushkoff@rushkoff.com.