Page + 78 + --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### April, 1995 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 3, Number 2, pp.78-91 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057 Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as STRATE IPCTV3N2 on LISTSERV@GUVM (LISTSERV@GUVM.GEORGETOWN.EDU) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- EXPERIENCING CYBERTIME: COMPUTING AS ACTIVITY AND EVENT Lance Strate Communication Department, Fordham University You no longer have to be an Albert Einstein (1954) to know that space and time are interdependent and inseparable, two aspects of the singular phenomenon of physical reality. Nor do you have to be a Kenneth Burke (1945), Harold Innis (1951), or Edward T. Hall (1959, 1984) to know that the same is true of social reality. It follows quite clearly that the cyberspace that is associated with computing and computer-mediated communication has a counterpart: cybertime. But while the concept of cyberspace has proved to be both popular and powerful, the idea of cybertime has been all but ignored. Consequently, we tend to stress the similarities between computer technology and more traditional notions of physical place; we view computer media as a where, and not a when. + Page 79 + Along the same lines, there is a tendency to focus on computer technologys convergence with and subsumption by, telecommunications and telematics, on cyberspace as the byproduct of the electronic transmission of messages and data over distance rather than over time. This imbalance not only hinders our attempts to assess the impact of computer media, but also influences political and economic decision-making, as politicians, government officials, and the communications industry are guided by transportation and the spatial metaphors of information superhighways and infrastructures. Moreover, while the emphasis placed on computer- mediated communication points us in the direction of cyberspace, as our focus shifts to computer-mediated culture, to the long-term construction of communities, psyches, and shared systems of signification, we need to consider the concept of cybertime. This is not to say that the concept of time has been entirely ignored in discussions of computer technology, but the discussion has been fragmentary and diffused. My intent, therefore, is to begin the exploration of cybertime in a more systematic manner. There is, on the other hand, a long history of discussion and contention concerning the nature of time in general and our relationship to it (see Whitrow, 1980, 1988, for example), and this essay will sample some of the ideas and arguments concerning time that are relevant to the study of computer media. Cybertime itself represents the intersection of several different phenomena. First, there is the computers time- telling function, how it constructs an internal sense of time and measures the passage of time in the outside world, in order to coordinate actions and events. Second, there is the computers representational function, how, as a medium, it conveys a sense of dramatic, fictional, or symbolic time, as well as a sense of past, present, and future. Third, there is our own subjective experience of time as we interact with and through computer media, how computing constitutes a human activity and an event that influences our perception of time, and our sense of self and community. + Page 80 + Human interaction with and through computer media includes our use and experience of time or cyberchronemics. For example, it is commonly noted that electronic mail and computer conferencing are asynchronous forms of interaction: participants need not transmit and receive at the same point in time. This flexibility combined with the speed of electronic transmission makes e-mail a highly efficient mode of interpersonal communication (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991, pp.21-24). Used for networked group communication, the asynchronous character of e-mail eliminates many time- related cues, such as how long a particular task takes to complete, or when it is due. This may result in a deregulation of behavior, a loss of control over the groupUs output, and even an increase in the time it takes to complete a task, but also allows for increased creativity, participation, and satisfaction (pp.52- 53). Although asynchronous communication all but guarantees that the e- mail messages we receive were composed at some point in the past, there is a tendency to experience them as if they were being communicated in the present. This sense of immediacy can also be present when reading other peoples electronic discussions in the archives of bulletin boards, listservs, etc., as Dery (1993) explains: the reader scrolls down-screen, scanning the lively back-and- on-line conversations exhibit a curious half-life; as forth of a discussion that may go back weeks, months, or even years, he experiences the puns, philippics, true confessions, rambling dissertations, and Generation X-er one-liners as if they were taking place in real time--which, for the reader watching them flow past on his screen, they are. (p.561) In cybertime distinctions between past, present, and future fade, and our sense of times passage becomes distorted. Waiting for only a few seconds seems to drag on + Page 81 + forever, while time truly flies when engaged in computing. Immersed in these microworlds, time seems to slow down relative to the outside world; it is almost as if Einsteins theory of relativity and the fact that the faster the speed, the slower the relative rate that time passes, applies to "travelers" along the hyperspeed infobahn. And as Rifkin (1987) relates: The really good video game players are able to block out both clock time and their own subjective time and descend completely into the time world of the game. It is a common experience for video game junkies to spend hours on end in front of the console without any sense whatsoever of the passage of clock time. According to Craig Brod, one of the growing number of psychologists specializing in computer-related distress, those who live with computer workers invariably complain that disputes over time are a major source of friction. Long-term computer users often suffer from the constant jolt back and forth between two time worlds. As they become more enmeshed in the new time world of the computer, they become less and less able to readjust to the temporal norms and standards of traditional clock culture. They become victims of a new form of temporal schizophrenia, caught between two distinctly different temporal orientations. (p.25) These other experiences of time, or experiences of other time, suggest a comparison between cybertime and Mircea Eliades (1959, 1974) concept of sacred time: the computer has an infinity of times in potential, ready to be actualized. Flashy splinters of time, speedy batches of time, dumb loops, programs that open up like fans according to the number of frames you assign them. Michaux speaks of + Page 82 + "a time that has a crowd of moments." Paul Virilio of "an intensive time" (that) "is not complete any more, but indefinitely fractionated in as many instants, instantaneities as the techniques of communication allow it." The computer is also home to "real time," 30 frames per second, a time that fits exactly Eliades definition of sacred time. Religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which, the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites. Real time too is an eternal present of symbols, reversible and recoverable, an ontological time that never gets exhausted and that can be reintegrated at any time. Eliade's sacred time is nonhistorical. It is the time that "floweth not," that does not participate in profane duration. (Stenger, 1991, p.55) As metatime, cybertime would include the concept of sacred time. And while entry into cyberspace is not generally viewed as a religious experience, there is a sense in which this electronic environment is a mythical landscape, a magical realm in which incantation has efficacy, in which objects exhibit intelligence, resurrection is a matter of course (e.g., in games), and a sense of total control is possible (Davis, 1993; Hayward & Wollen, 1993; Rheingold, 1993). It is in this sense that Douglas Rushkoff (1994) refers to "man's leap out of history altogether and into the timeless dimension of Cyberia" (p.4). The term Cyberia is a variation of cyberspace, but he uses it to include New Age mysticism, psychedelic drug culture, and raving, as well. The connections are not unreasonable: virtual reality is the closest simulation to what a world free of time, location, or even a personal identity might look like. Psychedelics and VR are both ways of creating a new, nonlinear reality where self- expression is a community eventS (p.58). It is no wonder, then, that Timothy Leary is a VR booster. + Page 83 + Rushkoff describes virtual environments as a form of sacred space, and virtual time as a form of sacred time, a mystical, Zen-like experience. It is interesting to note that this promises both the elimination of time, timelessness (zero-dimensional time), as well as its infinite expansion in nonlinear form. The sense of temporal dislocation in cybertime is a key characteristic of the experience of computing, whether it is compared to religious epiphany, drug-induced hallucination, or the dream state. Cybertime is in some ways a form of sacred time, a mythic time or dreamtime (Kirk, 1974). And while it has become commonplace to compare the experiencing of audiovisual media to the act of dreaming, no other media provide the same sense of active personal presence as the computer, no other media allow us to construct and encounter other versions of ourselves: dream selves. As a number of scholars have pointed out, computer- mediated communication has led to a great deal of play and experimentation with multiple roles, personalities, and identities (Rheingold, 1993; Sproull, & Kiesler, 1991; Stone, 1991). Cyberspace is implicated in the fragmenting, saturating, or populating of the self (Gergen, 1991) and the decentering of the subject (Poster, 1990). We find ourselves dealing with a multitude of dream selves. Other meanings take hold here as well: Our dream selves are ideal versions of ourselves, fantasy selves; one day, through virtual reality technology, they will also provide us with our ideal body-images (Rheingold, 1991). In the psychoanalytic literature, there is a clear connection between the notion of the double, the shadow, the mirror image, and the condition of narcissism (Rank, 1971); thus, virtual doubles feed into our culture of narcissism (Lasch, 1979). Our cyberselves are digital creatures, made not of flesh and blood, but of data and information. They are unaffected by time, suffering neither from age nor + Page 84 + injury, essentially immortal (Novak, 1991); the double, in psychoanalysis, may also signify death, or its denial (Rank, 1971). While our physical selves are subject to the ravages of time, our dream-self doubles are the masters of cybertime. The double is sometimes seen as a threat, a frightening image of ourselves, or a nger intent on taking our place (Rank, 1971). One such double produced in cyberspace is the shadow left behind electronically and processed through the panoptic sort, through surveillance and the gathering of information about us; it is the double we encounter, for example, in a credit report (Gandy, 1993). This meeting with our data doubles cannot help but be disturbing, as it reflects the effort to reduce us down to a zero-dimensional state, to boil all of our individual qualities and histories down to a yes-or-no answer. In the face of this changeling, we often try to assert the integrity of our individuality, to express our outrage over this violation of our privacy, and especially if our nger is a poor reflection of ourselves, to object to its inaccuracy. This generally provides mixed results, and it seems that the only logical course of resistance in a surveillance society is through the time-honored method of aliasing. With privacy eliminated by the panoptic sort, the only place we can hide is behind a multitude of masks; through the generation of doubles we may use the system against itself, creating an information glut or spamming the data gatherers. Much of our on-line doubling is not a matter of choice, however. When viewed spatially, it is reasonable to conclude that the self becomes more divided as more time is spent in communicating with greater numbers of people (Gergen, 1991). As time is subdivided into nanoseconds, and the time it takes to complete tasks such as the sending and receiving of messages decreases, our communication commitments increase, and we are pulled in more and more different directions. + Page 85 + Since the past does not fade in cybertime, neither do past relationships, nor past versions of ourselves that remain current in e-mail, listserv, and bulletin board archives. This form of cybernetic cloning seems to promote identity diffusion, multiple personality disorders, and schizophrenic behavior. As we spend more and more of our time in cyberspace, experiencing cybertime, we may simply have to suffer this condition gladly and learn to cope with it somehow, or we may be able to use it to forge a more integrated, metadimensional sense of self. We will certainly have increased opportunities to encounter our own unconscious through our cyberspace doubles. The immediate and improvisational nature of computer-mediated communications allows for more of a direct tap into the unconscious mind than the more careful process of face-to- face public communication, and the deliberate composing of written messages. Through flaming, we encounter our id or shadow; through experimentation with on-line gender reversal, our anima or animus. Doubles and dream selves are deeply connected to the unconscious. Sherry Turkle (1984, 1986) refers to the computer itself as the second self because we tend to use it as a Rorschach test, projecting ourselves onto the technology. As our relationship with the technology has evolved from communicating with computers to communicating within them, the computer becomes the place where our second selves dwell, a dreamscape. Thus, our encounter with cyberspace may, over time, perform a therapeutic function akin to psychoanalysis. Moreover, according to Walter Ong (1982), there is less of a barrier between the conscious and Writing and print allow us to explore the conscious mind self- consciously, but at the price of repressing the unconscious. The electronic media, and especially computer media, have unstopped the bottle of the unconscious, and what comes out will not be easy to deal with. The immediate + Page 86 + effect seems to be a certain fragmenting or fractalizing of the self. Over time, however, a new synthesis between the conscious and the unconscious may well emerge, a more integrated mindset of the sort that Carl Jung (1971) was concerned with. As Ong (1982) puts it, human consciousness evolves (p.178), and a new consciousness may therefore emerge through a synthesis between our physical selves and the dream selves we generate in cybertime. In addition to consciousness, the computer joins with other media in altering our sense of community. In referring to these new forms of affiliation, Gary Gumpert (1987) speaks of media communities, Kenneth Gergen (1991) discusses symbolic communities, and Howard Rheingold (1993) uses the term virtual communities. Communities, it must be remembered, are something more than just a gathering or a group. Community ties can only emerge over time; they are not so much a matter of spatial proximity as they are a function of patience, growth, and continuity. Traditional communities, villages, and tribes tend to be stable and singular associations. Clearly, this notion of community is being undermined by our new technologies, as individuals and groups are connected into global networks, electronic tribes dispersed through cyberspace. The unique characteristics of cybertime make it possible to maintain multiple associations, to change group membership frequently and without difficulty, and to develop fairly strong ties in short periods of time. This more fluid arrangement yields a kind of liquid tribalism. Tribalism at hyper-speed is amorphous and constantly changing, multiple and overlapping. This is not the homogenous global village, but rather a dense web of interconnected tribal networks, multidimensional and fractalized. The microworld is indeed a small world, one in which the real worlds six degrees of separation (see Milgram, 1974) approaches zero. Of course, we will be increasingly open to the panoptic sort as well. As Kroker + Page 87 + and Weinstein (1994) put it: you will pay for information with information; indeed, you will be information (p.11). What they are implying is that we will become our own liquid assets. But our own value will be based on gregariousness, on the number of relationships, associations, and networks we are a part of, on the number of doubles we have in play, on our ability to navigate the networks at hyperspeed, on our nomadic power (Critical Arts Ensemble, 1994). Print mediated-culture may have fostered individualism (McLuhan, 1962, 1964), but computer mediated-culture promotes networking, tribal associations, and various forms of virtual (and possibly global) communities. The network is usually seen as a spatial concept, but we must remember that time too is a network of relations among different events. Cybertime is networked time, and also a network of different concepts of time. As metatime, it has a certain liberating potential. But it also threatens us with overload and a loss of coherence, with the breakdown of the signifying chain, the connection of signifier to signified and of one sign to another needed to generate meaning; this is the schizophrenic breakdown associated with the postmodern condition (Jameson, 1991). Cybertime does not eliminate, but rather subsumes one- dimensional time, clock and calendar time, and the sense of historical time that has taken us so long to develop. We need not lose touch with the one-dimensional, but instead can use it as an anchor to a more stable and coherent sense of time. What is needed is a balance between these tendencies, and a balance that also includes the zero- dimensional tendencies of cybertime. Timelessness is a much sought after experience, but it should not come at the expense of history and tradition, and certainly not at the expense of the future. The ways in which we use and experience time are, after all, the key to cultural survival. + Page 88 + References Burke, K. (1945). A grammar of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Critical Arts Ensemble. (1994). The electronic disturbance. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Davis, E. (1993). Techgnosis: Magic, memory, and the angels of information. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 92(4), 585-616. Dery, M. (Ed.). (1993). Flame wars: The discourse of cyberculture [Special issue]. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 92(4). Einstein, A. (1954). Relativity, the special and the general theory: A popular exposition (Rev. ed.) (R.W. Lawson, Trans.). London: Methuen. Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane (W. Trask, Trans.). New York: Harvest/HBJ Books. Eliade, M. (1974). The myth of the eternal return or, Cosmos and history (W. Trask, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gandy, O.H., Jr. (1993). The panoptic sort: A political economy of personal information. 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New York: Oxford University Press. + Page 91 + Whitrow, G.J. (1980). The natural philosophy of time (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitrow, G.J. (1988). Time in history: Views of time from prehistory to the present day. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ------------------------- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Lance Strate is an Assistant Professor in Fordham Universitys Communications Department, and the Supervisory Editor of Hampton Presss Content Area Series in Media Ecology. He is the editor, with Ronald Jacobson and Stephanie B. Gibson, of _Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction In An Electronic Environment_, to be published by Hampton Press, Creskill, NJ, in the fall of 1995. This article is excerpted from, Cybertime, a chapter from that anthology. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1995 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: barnessu@sfitva.cc.fitsuny.edu