On technology against waiting

Philosophical Notes

Published in

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

4 min readJan 31, 2022

Being an impatient person who uses his smartphone to make life easier, I was wondering how technology has shaped our experiences of time, and, particularly, of waiting? It is undeniable that one of the most intriguing temporal relationships that human beings weave with the world is the wait. Phenomenologically, there are different manners of waiting. We wait for our beloved one at the bus station; we wait out the storm during an unexpected rainy day; being children, we must learn to wait; when we travel, we expect a delightful journey; our friends expect unconditional love from us; we look forward to hearing from the recruiting office we have emailed yesterday; all of us hope that the pandemic ends.

As we can see, the wait is a time-related experience, but how can we understand the existence of waiting? In his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Henri Bergson classified time into quantitative time, associated with the invention of clocks, and qualitative time, better known as durée. Duration is the fluid and vivid experience of being within time. Waiting is thus part of the qualitative experiences of time. Both clock time and lived time cohabit, but it seems to the French philosopher that duration has wilted due to the usage of clocks.

When waiting, time undergoes qualitative changes. The quintessential experience of waiting is that time passes slowly, becomes heavy, takes on a thickness that overwhelms and crushes the one who waits. The word for boredom in German is Langeweile, i.e. moments are longer and heavier than usual and Vorfreude involves expecting joyfully a future event. Nevertheless, there is an inherent logic in waiting. Timo Reuter (Warten: Eine verlernte Kunst) says that wer wartet, erwartet etwas, i.e. who waits, expects something. And even if we do not expect anything, we expect something.

As such, waiting imposes on us. Nobody likes to wait, but, one way or another, waiting traps us in the unforeseen, in delays, in tardiness, in unpunctuality. According to Andrea Köhler (Passing Time: An Essay On Waiting), human beings have invented a culture of the wait, which means delaying the satisfaction of needs, postponing activities, making projects, thinking in terms of deadlines. Modern knowledge has tried to solve the problem of wasted time by inventing plannings, routines, forecasts, prognoses, predictions, or deductions, but some kind of waiting is inevitably imposed on us. Immersed in waiting, we seem to lose the ability to determine our actions; our will is blurred within the wait imposed on us.

Clocks have enabled new experiences and ways of understanding time. Lewis Mumford considers it the key machine of the modern industrial age. One of the experiences that have marked the modern era is the public function of the division of time into units (hours, minutes, and seconds). The synchronization of time measurements was possible by the precise and uninterrupted functioning of 19th-century clocks. The idea that each region, each city, each town, each village, each territory has its own time may already seem mythical to us. We can still experience the qualitative difference when we visit other places that work in different rhythms and speeds. Hours pass differently there; in fact, we have the impression that time does not pass very often. The clock was a war machine against the immeasurable moments and rhythms of duration.

Harold Schweizer (On Waiting) asks a fascinating question: In our frenetic world of instant messaging, instant credit, instant gratification, why wait? Before clocks entered the social scene it may have been more flexibly accepted that days blur, languish, and change in their singular way. Our age has become aggressive with waiting since smart digital devices are capable of planning efficiently and making decisions based on algorithms. Getting lost in cities, discovering places by walking, getting to know people are experiences mediated by smart devices. Likewise, waiting is mediated by clocks, timers, chronometers, and more recently, by apps that not only measure time but also optimize it.

Modern technology is an enterprise against delays and wasted time. Andrea Köhler rightly says that awaiting a letter was the expression of a longing impossible to satisfy. Epistolary communication was first and foremost the abode of delayed time. Letters always contain a piece of physical presence and traces of the one who wrote it compared to the instant messages we write every day. Instant communication has made us impatient while the experience of waiting for letters was full of joy beforehand. Who would be nowadays able to await letters, amazon orders, or news of our beloved ones for an indefinite and indeterminate time? As far as I am concerned, I am not sure whether we tolerate waiting anymore or not. Well, we do it when necessary, but compared to other ages our patience may be reduced to 8 seconds, the time that the attention of goldfishes lasts. Would it be possible to understand the smart devices era as the opposition of accelerated time and wasted time? This question will have to wait to be answered in my next notes.

On technology against waiting

Philosophical Notes

Written by Luis Avena