Space and Time in the Cloud
When I briefly taught Computer Science at Mount Royal, my course was "Distributed Systems". My theme was how we can escape synchronous interactions between individuals and between individuals and machines. Traditional dialogues with computers went: 1. Type something 2. Computer replies 3. Type something else 4. Computer replies etc....
Two things were changing.
1. With distributed systems, you no longer had to be in the same place as the computer. This was already taken for granted back then and the students dutifully slept through this point.
2. You were no longer constrained to have the conversation at the same TIME either. You could send an e-mail, for example, then go on about your business. You could collect messages when it suits you. Students would wake up briefly in time to miss this point, then go back to sleep.
Thus, in both time and space, we were being set free from former constraints.
This is happening now in a much broader context. A long time ago, I was convinced that the "news" was not necessarily about what was happening around me, or even stuff that was in any way relevant to me. The news would, for example, include details of Bill Clinton's sex life. However, for a long time, I was under the spell of the "shared now". I turned on the "news" every morning to see what was happening NOW. In my heart of hearts, I knew that there was nothing special about NOW. There were a lot of events that were more important to me even if they occurred a week ago or maybe even a century ago. But I kept watching the "news".
Eventually, I began to depend more and more on podcasts. Podcasts would let me chose what was relevant even though the analysis might concern events that happened a few days ago, or even a few centuries ago. Gradually, I became detached from the "shared now". I stopped watching the "news" altogether and became absorbed in a very long time line (billions of years!) and a vast territory (I learned about Chinese history for example).
A few days back, I had an experience that revealed how much this had changed my experience of the world around me. Against habit, I turned on the "news" while driving to my Dad's place. I had a kind of out of the body experience. It was like travelling in a foreign country. "So this is what is news at this time and place". Odd. I wonder where and when I am? Why are they telling me this stuff? What will they tell me tomorrow? Why all this breathless emphasis on events of the last few hours? I had become used to mentally roving over centuries, mulling over events and issues that changed history. Suddenly, I was jerked back into what I used to think of as "here and now" -- a blurry sequence of loosely related experiences that happened to "me" in rigid sequence, one at a time, like squares of toilet paper torn off the roll of reality.
I don't think I'm the only one undergoing this changing point of view. Everyone understands that modern communication technology frees us from constraints of space. Less understood is the importance of our broadening experience of time. Rarely understood is the inevitable ultimate vision: experience of the sweep of human history and the ultimate challenges we face as human beings. Perhaps we can also discover the small but not negligible place we have in all of this. I'm not ignorant of the fact that this sounds suspiciously like a religious awakening. But I don't think it has much to do with religion. It's the effect of a tidal wave of new information and technology that makes that information available to all of us. We're getting a glimpse for the first time of what it means to be alive in this time and place.
Two things were changing.
1. With distributed systems, you no longer had to be in the same place as the computer. This was already taken for granted back then and the students dutifully slept through this point.
2. You were no longer constrained to have the conversation at the same TIME either. You could send an e-mail, for example, then go on about your business. You could collect messages when it suits you. Students would wake up briefly in time to miss this point, then go back to sleep.
Thus, in both time and space, we were being set free from former constraints.
This is happening now in a much broader context. A long time ago, I was convinced that the "news" was not necessarily about what was happening around me, or even stuff that was in any way relevant to me. The news would, for example, include details of Bill Clinton's sex life. However, for a long time, I was under the spell of the "shared now". I turned on the "news" every morning to see what was happening NOW. In my heart of hearts, I knew that there was nothing special about NOW. There were a lot of events that were more important to me even if they occurred a week ago or maybe even a century ago. But I kept watching the "news".
Eventually, I began to depend more and more on podcasts. Podcasts would let me chose what was relevant even though the analysis might concern events that happened a few days ago, or even a few centuries ago. Gradually, I became detached from the "shared now". I stopped watching the "news" altogether and became absorbed in a very long time line (billions of years!) and a vast territory (I learned about Chinese history for example).
A few days back, I had an experience that revealed how much this had changed my experience of the world around me. Against habit, I turned on the "news" while driving to my Dad's place. I had a kind of out of the body experience. It was like travelling in a foreign country. "So this is what is news at this time and place". Odd. I wonder where and when I am? Why are they telling me this stuff? What will they tell me tomorrow? Why all this breathless emphasis on events of the last few hours? I had become used to mentally roving over centuries, mulling over events and issues that changed history. Suddenly, I was jerked back into what I used to think of as "here and now" -- a blurry sequence of loosely related experiences that happened to "me" in rigid sequence, one at a time, like squares of toilet paper torn off the roll of reality.
I don't think I'm the only one undergoing this changing point of view. Everyone understands that modern communication technology frees us from constraints of space. Less understood is the importance of our broadening experience of time. Rarely understood is the inevitable ultimate vision: experience of the sweep of human history and the ultimate challenges we face as human beings. Perhaps we can also discover the small but not negligible place we have in all of this. I'm not ignorant of the fact that this sounds suspiciously like a religious awakening. But I don't think it has much to do with religion. It's the effect of a tidal wave of new information and technology that makes that information available to all of us. We're getting a glimpse for the first time of what it means to be alive in this time and place.
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