“The Internet changes everything.” We think we know what that means but I’ve come to believe that we’ve overlooked an important characteristic of everything.
We’re becoming more and more aware of the effect of the internet on geography. The meta-verse erases space. Online, everybody is the same distance from anybody else. The corollary of that has been slipping by us. If the meta-verse erases space, it must also erase time. For those who spend many hours each day onlne, I don’t mean that kind of time. Einstein gave us the models for non-Euclidean space-time and we’ve projected the web into space without paying attention to the effect on time.
The trigger event for this line of thinking happened when my boss came looking for advice about having “a webcast.” She was thinking of the classic synchronous talking-head 45 minute presentation followed by a short Q&A complete with video and audio feeds for the presenter and a text chat for the audience. My suggestion was to distribute the presentation in advance, have the participants read it, and come ready to text-chat with the author. Since finding a date/time where all the people can get together is going to be difficult, why not make sure they get the most opportunity to talk together? By moving the logistics into asynchronous channels, it would leave the time on the synchronous channel for what could only be done synchronously. She thought this was a pretty good idea and she’s thinking about it.
But when I mentioned the conversation to my friend, Donal, he asked, “What can you only do on sync?”
After a lot of pondering, the answer turns out to be, “not much.” It boils down to those few circumstances in communication when emotion and rhetoric are more important than ideas. Donal said that at the time, but it took a while for me to agree with him. Ultimately, if we look at many activities — music, sports, education — the value of the synchronous aggregate is not in the music, or the game, or the lesson but in the synchronous performance — the emotional amplification of being part of something in the now that is larger than yourself.
One thing that we realized was the tyranny of synchrony — from dependence on phone, to IM, to chat room, to face-to-face meetings — was the ‘default’ condition because the current capabilities for asynchronous interaction are very, very new. Sure, we’ve had postal service for a long time, but even as little as 10 years ago, email was not common. The newer affordances like threaded discussion boards (with their roots in the old bbs systems), blogs (rooted in web pages) with RSS, and even the older email/listserv technology have only become endemic in the last 3-5 years. We operate synchronously because that’s the way it’s always been done.
But the Internet changes everything. The network makes everyone the same distance away, whether the person is sitting on the other side of the room or on the other side of the globe. With that transmutation of space, we also get a parallel transmutation in time. At a fixed velocity shorter distances require less time to traverse. Likewise in communications, if all distances are the same, then all messages take the same amount of time to deliver. The space between questioner and responder is — effectively — nil. Not technically zero, but fixed at an indentical quantum distance on all transactions. Looking at the projection onto time in this space/time model, we also have to shift time to a similar quantum duration on all transactions.
In a synchronous mode we have to wait for the other to finish before we can begin to assess the message. In many situations, we begin processing as soon as the other starts instead of waiting for the complete message. This creates the situation where people talk past each other without really hearing what the other is saying, formulating the response while the sender is still formlating the message. They allow the rhythms of communication to direct responses rather than the content. So even outside the meta-verse, emotion and rhetoric are more important than ideas and information.
In asynchronous modes of communication we do not have to wait for the transmission to be completed before we can begin processing. The transmission is complete as soon as we perceive it. That’s not to say that the message has been completely received, but rather that the sender is no longer engaged in the transaction at the point where the receiver begins receiving. The distinction — and while subtle — is profound. Since the sender is no longer engaged in the transaction, the process of sending and receiving becomes decoupled and processing time is expanded by virtue of not having to respond in the now.
Further, even conservation of the Einsteinian temporal flow is consistent with this manipulation of time. We cannot go forward in time — I can’t answer today a question you may ask tomorrow. I can answer tomorrow any question to may ask today. The causal arrow points forward in time. You ask and at some time in the future, I reply. The concepts of space/time are preserved — altho scaled somewhat surprisingly — in the meta-verse.
Yes, some things remain uniquely suited to synchronous effort — team sports, musical groups, and theatre. The value in these transactions is the emotional effect of participation. Other activities which have been synchronous in the past — work, education, and learning — can now be decoupled in meaningful ways to take advantage of the transmutation of time in the meta-verse.
June 4th, 2006 at 1:40 am
I have found this presentation of what the internet means, might mean, to practice, and of communication, particularly interesting.
The challenge of listening, really listening, before responding, and in asynchronous time having time to really process the whole before trying to respond to the parts is a helpful way of pointing out how the internet might change some of our interactive processes.
And I also find it interesting that in my practice I do still sometimes start to work on the response to the first statement, without waiting to see the following statements, even when they are there, and available. Some of that is almost as if I want to get my thought that responded to the first statement out, while it is there, new and fresh, and not yet having to be amended and adjusted to consider what else the other person has said, which might in the end mean that I have nothing to say, and nothing to add to what they had said, and successfully explained and substantiated.