The Edge question this year was “What should we be worried about?” I was befuddled by that, as it implies that there may be something we shouldn’t be worried about. But I managed to write, anxiously, a short piece on a theme that comes up every so often on this blog: technology’s effect on our time sense. Here’s a bit from the beginning, slightly edited:

Human beings, like other animals, seem to have remarkably accurate internal clocks. Take away our wristwatches and our cell phones, take away all those glowing digital tickers that gaze out at us from the faces of our appliances, and we can still make pretty decent estimates about the length of passing minutes and hours. That faculty is easily warped, though. Our perception of time changes with our circumstances. “Our sense of time,” observed William James in his 1890 masterwork The Principles of Psychology, “seems subject to the law of contrast.”

In a 2009 article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the French psychologists Sylvie Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil described what they call the paradox of time: “although humans are able to accurately estimate time as if they possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time,” they wrote, “their representations of time are easily distorted by the context.” Indeed, they continued, “our studies also suggest that these contextual variations of subjective time do not result from the incorrect functioning of the internal clock but, on the contrary, from the excellent ability of the internal clock to adapt to events in the environment.” Our immediate social milieu, in particular, influences the way we experience time. There’s evidence, Droit-Volet and Gill wrote, “that individuals match their time with that of others.” The “activity rhythm” of those around us alters our own perception of the passing of time.

I’m intrigued by this idea that our sense of time adapts to the “activity rhythm” of our social circumstances. The activity rhythm of an online social network seems very different from what people traditionally experienced in their lives. It’s not just that it’s a faster rhythm; it’s also a more insistent rhythm. There’s less variation — fewer slow passages — than you would have previously found in a person’s everyday experience, when conversation and other social interaction ebbed and flowed.

Of course, changes in society’s activity rhythm are nothing new. When people  moved from the country to the city, they had to adapt to a new pace. Still, having that rhythm mediated so intensively by a communication technology does seem pretty different.  Is there a psychological cost to this “unnatural” rhythm, this new and contagious setting for our internal clocks? For some, I expect there is. For others, maybe not.

Image from the Chris Marker film A Grin Without a Cat.

At a time when public discussions of education seem dominated by technological considerations — Should we give kindergartners iPads, or should we wait until they enter first grade? Should we ban printed books from public schools by 2017 or by 2019? When will Tom Friedman write about MOOCs again? — it seems only fair, purely in the interest of balance, to allow a different voice to be heard. So here is Helen Vendler, the gifted poetry critic, describing the perfect grammar school:

I would propose, for the ultimate maintenance of the humanities and all other higher learning, an elementary-school curriculum that would make every ordinary child a proficient reader by the end of the fourth grade — not to pass a test, but rather to ensure progressive expansion of awareness. Other than mathematics, the curriculum of my ideal elementary school would be wholly occupied, all day, every day, with “reading” in its very fullest sense. Let us imagine the day divided into short 20-minute “periods.” Here are 14 daily such periods of “reading,” each divisible into two 10-minute periods, or extended to a half-hour, as seems most practical to teachers in different grades. Many such periods can be spent outside, to break up the tedium of long sitting for young children. The pupils would:

1. engage in choral singing of traditional melodic song (folk songs, country songs, rounds);
2. be read to from poems and stories beyond their own current ability to read;
3. mount short plays — learning roles, rehearsing, and eventually performing;
4. march or dance to counting rhymes, poems, or music, “reading” rhythms and sentences with their bodies;
5. read aloud, chorally, to the teacher;
6. read aloud singly to the teacher, and recite memorized poems either chorally or singly;
7. notice, and describe aloud, the reproduced images of powerful works of art, with the accompanying story told by the teacher (Orpheus, the three kings at Bethlehem, etc.);
8. read silently, and retell in their own words, for discussion, the story they have read;
9. expand their vocabulary to specialized registers through walks where they would learn the names of trees, plants, flowers, and fruits;
10. visit museums of art and natural history to learn to name exotic or extinct things, or visit an orchestra to discover the names and sounds of orchestral instruments;
11. learn conjoined prefixes, suffixes, and roots as they learn new words;
12. tell stories of their own devising;
13. compose words to be sung to tunes they already know; and
14. if they are studying a foreign language, carry out these practices for it as well.

The only homework, in addition to mathematics, would be additional reading practices over the weekends (to be checked by a brief Monday discussion by students).

Because Vendler’s plan doesn’t fit our current frame for thinking about primary education, it won’t — indeed can’t — be taken into account. Our reaction to it is that of the mythical robot: does not compute.

UPDATE: As for dread middle-schoolers, Susan Sontag had a plan.

Illustration from a 1951 edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses.

In 1955, Life magazine looked into its crystal ball to imagine “what life may be like in A.D. 1980.” Here’s the first prediction:

Unhappy about the weather? Everybody talking but nobody doing anything about it? Well, just get in touch with the Atomic Weather Commission. A flick of the nuclear switch, and presto! — the North Pole melts, the vast continent of Antarctica thaws into productive use, Greenland grows bananas, Vermont grows oranges, and everybody’s heating bill vanishes. Not fantastic at all, according to mathematician John von Neumann, who also predicts that energy may be just about as “free as the unmetered air.” So, no light bills.

The future was sunny back then, though Von Neumann, one of the architects of both the atomic bomb and the digital computer, did temper his enthusiasm with a dash of the apocalyptic:

Weather control carries with it the possibility of climatic warfare (e.g., freezing your enemy with another Ice Age). “All this will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other,” concludes Von Neumann, “more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war already have done.” Political forms will have to change, in ways now unforeseeable, to accommodate these realities. (Von Neumann’s implication is that there will either be world government or no government — and no world.)

Photo by R.F. Katzenberger.

There’s a moment, tragically brief, after a new recording or broadcasting tool is introduced when it’s used unselfconsciously, with an endearingly human innocence and enthusiasm. That moment, for Twitter’s video-shooting app Vine, is now. Vine brings the Twitter ethos to the motion picture, imposing a six-second limit on recordings. A site called Vinepeek is randomly streaming new vines, and there’s something at once enervating and exhilarating about watching the clips zip by. It’s mostly the banal stuff you’d expect—kids, pets, meals, tourist shots—but there are also some charmingly clumsy time-lapse and stop-motion experiments, stories trying to be born. And the best thing is: the pervs and promoters haven’t moved in yet. (UPDATE: You may now disregard that last sentence. Vine has been deflowered.)

This will get old fast, but right now it’s new, and alive.

Image from the vine “There might be zombies here” by micro-auteur Chloe Alexandra.

Here’s a small but telling detail from a news photo I came across this weekend (you can see the full image here):

The picture was taken, by Andre Pain, at one of the anti-government protests in Egypt on Friday, the second anniversary of the start of the country’s as yet unfinished revolution. Much has been made of the critical role that new technologies, like the cell phone and the social network, played in that revolution and other recent popular uprisings. Here we see that the very oldest of human technologies — the lever — can still be enormously useful, too. It helps put things in perspective. There are times for messaging. And then there are times when you need to move a big heavy object. Tools are important, but what really matters, now as ever, is the will of the people wielding them.