Our Warped Perception of Time will Change Everything
“Where did the time go?” — once an innocent phrase posed after catching up with friends or on the last day of a vacation is now a serious question we must consider. As we get older, time seems to move faster. And psychologically, time does move faster in our heads since adults have much more to think about and a slower processing time compared to younger ages. However, age is not the only reason life seems to have been speeding up. Due to a growing technocentric dependency, our perceptions of time have changed immensely in recent years. Our brains warping understanding of time could have negative consequences on our lives including more unpredictable events such as in 2020, deteriorating attention spans and typical brain functionality, and potentially, an unrecognizable human race; consequences that may only be avoided by disconnecting more often.
A Warped Perception of Time
According to multiple studies conducted around the world including one at James Cook University in 2015, interacting with technology and technocentric societies has increased the speed of our internal timekeepers. Professor Aoife McLoughlin of James Cook studied how daily, high-usage smartphone owners perceived time compared to counterparts that rarely used smartphones. She found that those who were online more often overestimated the amount of time that had passed compared to the low-usage individuals. This result could make people feel stressed because they were more likely to feel as if time was running out compared to their disconnected peers.
McLoughlin further found that even when reading a simple advertisement, subjects perceived time as passing more quickly compared to the disconnected group that read a much longer monologue from a novel. McLoughlin predicts that highly connected individuals try to emulate the technology they use and try to be more speedy and efficient. The technology almost primes us to increase the pacemaker inside of us.
Despite our near-constant use of technology being a relatively new phenomenon, people have been concerned about this trend for centuries. In fact, philosophers during the French Revolution wrote and shared complaints about the pace of modern life feeling different than the technologically behind past. The past concern for this throughout history show clear indication that people are concerned and quite nervous.
“The New Normal” is Here to Stay
As technology advances, our perceptions of time will continue to speed up which will create significant changes in the stability of our global community. Matt Ridley, author of The Red Queen Effect, believes that life is going to start moving faster at exponentially higher rates. He estimates that in 20 years from now, the rate of change will be 4x what it is now. The year 2020 is a perfect example of our perceptions of time speeding up. From a pandemic, to social movements, government stimuli, wildfires, market fluctuations, and significant technological inventions, 2020 represents “the new normal” and what future years will likely start to look like.
2020 marks a new phenomenon that is truly unlike past eras of history. For example, the Industrial Revolution spanned from about 1760 to 1840. Over this 80-year period, people started developing machines to create goods and retired laborious hand-made processes. The Digital Revolution, in contrast, usually defines the period of 1970 to now. Despite this period being significantly shorter than the Industrial Revolution, the shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics has been incredibly fast and has created many more new technologies and products than previous eras.
These technological developments and increased dependency on technology has led to the significant global changes we saw in 2020. A more global and connected world speeds up travel which spread disease, speeds up natural resource usage which creates environmental destruction such as wildfires, speeds up the public’s access to information and news which fluctuates markets and spurs public movements.
While not all the events in 2020 were negative, the changes were unarguably unpredictable and hard to manage for many groups of people. If this pattern continues, more people will continue to feel unequipped to respond to significant uprooting events such as disease, land and environment changes, unemployment, and more.
Nobody Pays Attention Anymore
Our changing perception of time has significantly changed the way in which we focus and our ability to give attention. A study conducted by Microsoft in 2020 concluded that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds — shrinking almost 25% in only a few years. A study from the American Psychological Association attributes technology as a main reason for this change, saying smartphone usage can make people feel inadequate and distract them from typically engaging activities like work.
The technological environment and offerings have almost artificially forced us into decreasing our attention spans. Whereas traditional television shows in the second half of the 20th century were consistently 30–60 minutes, Facebook clips, YouTube videos, and most notoriously, TikTok posts have created short content snippets people now expect. “The endless scroll” features on TikTok and Instagram make it incredibly easy for someone to switch from one topic to another and with essentially unlimited options of what to watch and customized filtering, these apps have made people expect short content. Additionally, the 24-hour news cycle makes people crave new information. Whereas important topics and headlines may have created discussions for months a few decades ago, headlines are lucky if they last a few days. For example, a 2013 Twitter report found that a trend would last for 17.5 hours. However, in 2016 a Twitter trend lasted only 11.9 hours. And in 2020–11 minutes. A trending topic on Twitter would only last minutes before people became interested in something new.
Technological developments have also created opportunities for multitasking. With work and social life being integrated into mobile devices, it has become normal to watch TV or listen to a podcast while working on a class presentation or grading papers. However, this trend of multitasking decreases the amount of time people spend focusing on one and only one thing at a time. So, when people are tasked with only focusing on one task at hand, it feels unfamiliar and people lack practice.
These cultural shifts technology has created has had the largest effect on children. According to a study done by the Cleveland Clinic, kids aged 5 years or younger who experience two or more hours of daily screen time are nearly eight times more likely to be diagnosed with focus-related conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This lack of ability to focus makes children consume more contact and constantly look for stimulation which researchers say tend to increase children’s’ internal time keepers. Since electronics allow for repeated stimulation and immediate gratification, children are unable to focus when the “real world” is so “slow” and not as mesmerizing.
The decreasing attention span is not the only neurological change that technology has inspired. Increased patterns of addiction, slowed ability in language development, and lack of processing skills of emotional signals can all be attributed to our increasing technocentric society. Since technology has changed the way our brain operates in these ways, it is completely possible that can also permanently change our perception of time and internal timekeepers. Especially if children show continued patterns of weaker language and emotional ability, their dependence on technology and usage will only increase which will speed up how they see the world around them.
The way in which people live day-to-day has changed so significantly that it is not a surprise that our attention spans and typical brain functionality has changed as well.
An Unrecognizable Human Race
While these technological developments and integration within our lives is the case for many across the world, it is not for everyone. As Richard Stallman writes in his compilation of essays, Free Software, Free Society, the high price of many technologies has created a digital divide that has insofar been unable to bridge. This divide means a lot of things many researchers have discussed including inequity of education attainment, imbalance of employment opportunities, and more. However, what has been overlooked is the differences in the way people act and live from one another. In a population group where technology use is common and high, people may act more introverted, lack strong social skills, and work less in team structures. This is compared to a population group where technology use is uncommon, people may feel uncomfortable with multitasking, expect certain social skills from their peers, and interact more for tasks that others may think should be independent. If groups of people start to perceive something so standard such as time differently from one another, it may be difficult to sync when necessary. While this diversity can be good in some settings, it could create significant gaps between populations that people may not want to approach. In fact, it could discourage different societies from interacting and collaborating all together.
Moreover, whereas great individual innovators, thinkers, politicians, and more have often shaped progress, corporate conglomerates have started to do so more often. The fact that companies such as Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter have been able to warp our perception of time makes it feel like individuals no longer have power the way in which they think or how their brain operates. Even if you restrict your usage, content access and the global events happening around us has inevitably changed how we see and feel the time pass. This lack of independence and lack of choice in a psychological pillar like the way in which we perceive time feels incredibly intrusive. Although many have discussed how companies have shaped the way in which we think, learn, and vote, we never really considered how they are changing our mental constructs and abilities.
So Can Anything Be Done?
While our changing perceptions of time can feel scary and the consequences are potentially severe, McLoughlin and other researchers in the space suggest that we can stop time from speeding up by just unplugging a bit more. Since our pacemakers are constantly activated when we are plugged in, giving it breaks to perceive time as we once did could help slow the pacemaker down. Although no long-term positive or negative effects have been fully quantified in research, lower technology use could help world events slow down and stop “the new normal”, increase attention span and improve brain functionality, and more closely emulate the humanity we are familiar with.
Additionally, governments should try to regulate the amount companies can systematically change constructs as significant as our attention spans and internal time keepers. While a lot of what companies have introduced created unintended consequences we could not prepare for such as the infinite loop and “trending” on Twitter, we now must me more weary and vigilant of new innovations and feature introductions. This could help slow down how are brains are changing and give us more control over our own minds.
However, it is not just on a few individuals to change our technology use patterns. In Ethics after the Information Revolution, Floridi poses the concept of ecopoiesis, or the morally informed construction of the environment. He states that in order to move from individual virutes to shared global values, society needs an ecopoietic approach to recognize everyone’s responsibilities towards the environment. For society to stay careful and prevent negative consequences of this time speed-up, the global community must collaborate on an ecopiesis that slows down our perception of time and find solutions in order for people to not feel overwhelmed by the time speed up.
