Time is Resistance
Para ler em português, clique aqui.
_____________________ p r o l o g u e _______________________
The feeling that time is increasingly going faster never seems to diminish. It’s a notion that permeates all things and relations: our close friends, family, coworkers, deadlines and work projects. In my point of view, the feeling that time is being continuously compressed makes the connection between existence and the passage of time even more evident. Studying more about time acceleration and its pace, I realized rethinking our relationship with time is key to decode the layers of modern society. It is no coincidence that, according to German philosopher Hartmut Rosa, the smartphone (mine, yours, ours) is responsible for changing our relationship with temporality.
Before smartphones, we needed our fingers to dial numbers, now we only need our fingertips to call anyone anywhere around the world, buy a ticket, rent a vacation house, post a picture on Instagram, rent a movie, invest and transfer money, listen to music. And, more than that, it’s precisely our mutual relationship with technology and technological devices that creates new temporal experiences. This free exchange with technology can shape new ways of understanding our life experiences as well as the passage of time, and, even more profoundly, can change how we act (and exist) in this world.
It is obvious that we experience life at an accelerated pace, and a crisis in the understanding of what it means to be distant in an interconnected world, considering that we witness multiple temporalities without moving around. Bearing in mind that our everyday life is filled with converging technologies and continuous interconnectivity, wouldn’t it be necessary to update our vocabulary and think about the real meaning (and the one we want them to have) of the concepts of near and far? Fast and slow? Presence and absence? Present and future?
concepts>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
1. pseudo-presence — by Brazilian physicist Ernst Wolfgang, concerning the immateriality of temporal narratives: “the internet, in particular, created a market that flows in extreme spatial and temporal compression, giving a perpetual sense of displacement that results in new experiences and the sense of pseudo-presence”.
2.intra-action — A concept by feminist philosopher Karen Barad, a pioneer in the field of “New Materialism”, a philosophical stance that broadens the discussion around materialism. A wide and complex concept, very well explained in the following video.
3.homo cellullaris — The Italian semiologist and philosopher Umberto Eco named homo cellullaris the evolution of homo sapiens. For him, this “new species” challenges the initial definition of homo consciens, for the loss of loneliness that coexists with silent reflection is lost. His theories also remind us that change does not always mean emancipation.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — h o r i z o n — — — — — — — — — →
Low Tech Mag — A magazine/manifesto that promotes their own solar power, and features articles that help us to think about technological progress in a sustainable way.
Karen Hao, my favorite journalist, and specialist in artificial intelligence and humankind. She talks about how AI researchers are aiming to study the subject the same way social scientists study humans, in a new field called machine behavior.
Documentary, by Jane Goddall, the mother of chimpanzees, is an ethnographic masterpiece.
Have a good week,
See you soon!
Luiza Futuro
