I’ve got a bad case of the shakes today, and it has nothing to do with the M-80s and bottle rockets going off into the wee hours last night. No, over the long weekend I was cast out of realtime. I had no warning, no time to prepare for my reentry into the drab old chronological order. I feel like a refugee living in a crappy tent in a muddy field on the outskirts of some godforsaken country. I know exactly how T. S. Eliot felt when he wrote “Ridiculous the sad waste time / Stretching before and after.”
What happened is that Google turned off its spigot of realtime results. I still see the “Realtime” option in the drop-down list of search options, but when I click on it it returns nothing. Just a horrifying whiteness, like a marble tombstone before the letters are carved. And the “Latest” option for arranging results that used to appear in the lefthand column of search tools has been replaced by “Past hour.” Past hour? Are you kidding me? Why not just say “Eternity”? I freaking lived in “Latest,” with its single page of perpetually updated results, punctuated by pithy little tweets from all manner of avatarial life. It was pure pre-algorithmic democracy, visceral as raw beef.
Now, the stream is dry.
Apparently this all stems from some tiff between Google and Twitter. The two Internet Goliaths – okay, one Goliath and one mini-Goliath – had a pact that allowed Google to stream tweets in its results, but that agreement went kaput on Saturday. So on Sunday morning Google put a cork in the firehose. And left me an exile from realtime.
Time itself is contingent on the vagaries of online competition. As flies to wanton boys we are to the Gods of the Net.
I take some solace from a statement that came out of the Plex on Sunday: “We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We’re exploring how to incorporate our recently launched Google+ project into this functionality going forward, so stay tuned.”
Living in realtime is all about staying tuned. Staying tuned is the way we live today. Rest assured, Googlers, that I will keep hitting Refresh until “this functionality” returns. The alternative is too distressing to ponder. I need my Now.
This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.
Wow, staying tuned must be the only way to stay alive these days. Is “real time” now like being on life support? Will the lack of real time create a hole in the universe and result in people having to think rather than bloviate?
Real time information is the equivalent to consuming mass quantities of junk food, only its junk data. Eventually you become malnourished and suffer from data obesity (big data).
Today’s glut of data is just like the fast food industry. Quantity but no quality. Relish your time away from real time data. Most of real time data is incorrect to begin with and is lacking nutrition for the brain.
Hey Nick,
[This is off topic]
If you didn’t already know, you were mentioned in a new book titled “Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future–and Locked Us In” by Brian X. Chen
While I don’t think that Chen properly detailed your main argument in ‘The Shallows’, I was glad to see that your point of view was mentioned. When reading Chen’s book it just feels like it would have been so much better if he was familiar with the ideas and words of Marshall Mcluhan.
Nick,
FYI,
Recorded on 20 July 2011 in Old Theatre, Old Building.
Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to a wheelbarrow. No academic analysis or bystander’s account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, Employee Number 59, takes us inside the Googleplex for the closest look you can get without an ID card, giving us a chance to fully experience the potent mix of camaraderie and competition that makes up the company that changed the world.
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1086