{"id":6143,"date":"2015-06-09T12:41:13","date_gmt":"2015-06-09T18:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6143"},"modified":"2018-05-18T08:00:47","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T12:00:47","slug":"the-seconds-are-just-packed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6143","title":{"rendered":"The seconds are just packed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hopper3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s Realtime Chronicles, which began here<\/a> in 2009. An earlier version of this post\u00a0appeared<\/a> at Edge.org.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cEverything is going too fast and not fast enough,\u201d laments\u00a0Warren Oates, playing a\u00a0decaying gearhead called G.T.O., in Monte Hellman’s 1971 masterpiece<\/a>\u00a0Two-Lane Blacktop<\/em>. I can relate. The faster the clock spins, the more I feel as if\u00a0I\u2019m stuck in a slo-mo GIF loop.<\/p>\n

It’s weird. We humans\u00a0have been shown to have remarkably accurate internal clocks. Take away our wristwatches and our cell phones, dim the LEDs on all our appliances and gizmos, and we can still make pretty good estimates about the passage of minutes and hours. Our brains have adapted well to mechanical time-keeping devices. But our time-tracking\u00a0faculty goes\u00a0out of whack easily. Our perception of time is subjective; it changes, as we all know, with circumstances. When things are happening quickly around us, delays that would otherwise seem brief begin to feel interminable. Seconds stretch out. Minutes go on forever. \u201cOur sense of time,\u201d observed William James in his 1890\u00a0Principles of Psychology<\/em>, \u201cseems subject to the law of contrast.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 2009 article<\/a> in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,<\/em> the French psychologists Sylvie Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil described what they call the paradox of time: \u201calthough humans are able to accurately estimate time as if they possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time,\u201d they wrote, \u201ctheir representations of time are easily distorted by the context.\u201d They describe how our sense of time changes with our emotional state. When we\u2019re agitated or anxious, for instance, time seems to crawl; we lose patience. Our social milieu, too, influences the way we experience time. Studies suggest, write Droit-Volet and Gill, \u201cthat individuals match their time with that of others.\u201d The \u201cactivity rhythm\u201d of those around us alters our own perception of the passing of time.<\/p>\n

“A compression of time characterizes the life of the century now closing,” wrote James Gleick in his 1999 book Faster<\/em>. Such compression\u00a0characterized, as well, the preceding century. ‘The dreamy quiet old days are over and gone forever,” lamented William Smith\u00a0in 1886; “for men now live, think and work at express speed.” I suspect it would take no more than\u00a0a minute\u00a0of googling to discover\u00a0a quotation from one of the ancients bemoaning the horrific speed of contemporary life. The past has always had the advantage of seeming, and probably being,\u00a0less hurried than the present.<\/p>\n

Still, something has changed in the last few years. Given what we know about the variability of our time sense, it seems clear that information and communication technologies would have a particularly strong effect on our perception of\u00a0time. After all, those technologies\u00a0often determine the pace of the events we experience, the speed with which we\u2019re presented with new information and stimuli, and even the rhythm of our interactions with others. That\u2019s been true for a long time\u00a0\u2014 the newspaper, the telephone, and the television all quickened the\u00a0speed\u00a0of life \u2014\u00a0but the influence must be all the\u00a0stronger now that we carry powerful and extraordinarily fast computers around with us all day long. Our gadgets train us to expect near-instantaneous responses to our actions, and we quickly get frustrated and annoyed at even brief delays.<\/p>\n

I know from my own experience with\u00a0computers that my perception of time has been changed by technology. If I go from using a fast computer or web connection to using even a slightly slower one, processes that take just a few seconds\u00a0longer \u2014 waking the machine from sleep, launching an application, opening a web page \u2014 seem almost intolerably slow. Never before have I been so aware of, and annoyed by, the passage of mere seconds.<\/p>\n

Research on web users makes it clear that this is a general phenomenon. Back in 2006, a famous study<\/a> of online retailing found that a large percentage of shoppers would abandon a merchant’s\u00a0site if its pages took four seconds or longer to load. In the few years since, the so-called Four Second Rule has been repealed and replaced by the Quarter of a Second Rule. Studies by companies like Google and Microsoft now find that it takes a delay of just 250 milliseconds in page loading for people to start abandoning a site.\u00a0\u201cTwo hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,\u201d a top Microsoft engineer said<\/a> in 2012. \u00a0To put that into perspective, it takes about the same amount of time for you to blink an eye.<\/p>\n

A recent study<\/a> of online video viewing provides more evidence of how advances in media and networking technology reduce the patience of human beings. The researchers, affiliated with the networking firm Akamai Technologies, studied a huge database that documented 23 million video views by nearly seven million people. They found that people start abandoning a video in droves after a two-second delay. That won\u2019t come as a surprise to anyone who has had to wait for a YouTube clip\u00a0to begin after clicking the Start button. (The only surprise was\u00a0that 10 percent of people were\u00a0willing to wait a full fifty\u00a0seconds for a video to begin. Almost a whole minute! I’m guessing they spent the time checking their Facebook feed.) More interesting is the study\u2019s finding of a causal link between higher connection speeds and higher abandonment rates. Check it out:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Every time a network gets quicker, we become antsier.\u00a0“Every millisecond matters,” says<\/a>\u00a0a Google engineer.<\/p>\n

As we experience faster flows of information online, we become, in other words, less patient people.\u00a0But impatience is\u00a0not just a network effect. The phenomenon is amplified by the constant buzz of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, texting, and social networking in general. Society\u2019s \u201cactivity rhythm\u201d has never been so harried. Impatience is a contagion spread from gadget to gadget.<\/p>\n

All of this has obvious importance to anyone involved in online media or in running data centers. But it also has implications for how all of us think, socialize, and in general live. If we assume that networks will continue to get faster \u2014 a pretty safe bet \u2014 then we can also conclude that we\u2019ll become more and more impatient, more and more intolerant of even milliseconds of delay between action and response. As a result, we\u2019ll be less likely to experience anything that requires us to wait, that doesn\u2019t provide us with instant gratification. That has cultural as well as personal consequences. The greatest of works \u2014 in art, science, politics, whatever \u2014 tend to take time and patience both to create and to appreciate. The deepest experiences can\u2019t be measured in fractions of seconds.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear whether a technology-induced loss of patience persists even when we\u2019re not using the technology. But I would hypothesize (based on what I see in myself and in others) that our sense of time is indeed changing in a lasting way. Digital technologies are training us to be more conscious of and more antagonistic toward delays of all sorts \u2014 and perhaps more intolerant of moments of time that pass without the arrival of new messages or\u00a0other stimuli. Call it the patience deficit. Because our experience of time is so important to our experience of life, it strikes me that these kinds of technology- and media-induced changes in our perceptions can have particularly broad consequences.\u00a0How long are you willing to wait for a\u00a0new thing? How many empty seconds can you endure?<\/p>\n

Image: detail of Edward Hopper’s “Four Lane Road.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s Realtime Chronicles, which began here in 2009. An earlier version of this post\u00a0appeared at Edge.org. \u201cEverything is going too fast and not fast enough,\u201d laments\u00a0Warren Oates, playing a\u00a0decaying gearhead called G.T.O., in Monte Hellman’s 1971 masterpiece\u00a0Two-Lane Blacktop. I can relate. The faster the clock spins, the more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-realtime"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6143"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8480,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6143\/revisions\/8480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}