Time-less. Is technology shaping a 6th sense or have we opened the door to the 4th dimension?
Can you sense people in a hurry or feel them standing behind you in lines at the store?
How often can you sense someone in a hurry from just an emoji or the lack of a response in a text message?
Are there times when you feel you have to optimize your every move, just not to be run over by the onslaught of tasks in your life?
When does our need to organize, categorize and store the world around us become an all-consuming way of life?
Maybe you’re suffering from the “relentless now”, or what author Douglas Rushkoff referred to as “Narrative collapse” in his 2013 book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”.
Or even scarier we are plagued with what Alvin Toffler called “Future Shock” in his 1970 masterpiece by the same name. Future Shock was defined as “too much change in too short a period of time”.
Our society and life is disposable sure that’s a given, but we now live in an age where the average web page is changed every 10 days and more media is created every second than the previous 100 years, with a majority of that media posted purposefully to ephemeral services or secured through encryption, never to see the light of day.
What started out as VCRs and DVD has become a way of life. Our ability to record, replay and store life is profoundly shaping what and how humanity relates to time.
FOMO, Flashback Friday, 24 hour McDonald’s breakfast, binge watching seasons of TV in an afternoon, e-cigarettes, all symptoms of time becoming unbundled from our lives, our tools, passions and friends.
Children today don’t have to wait for anything and can stream a song from any decade instantly.
Many college students are graduating with the same set of “friends” that they started elementary school with because of Facebook.
Facebook as allowed us to browse our friends and classmate’s life at any point and even binge watch their demises and successes.
How old are you on Facebook anyway?
TV shows from the past 50 years can be accessed within moments and websites dedicated to fan fiction alternate timelines literal our life.
YouTube vloggers have edited their day into fractions of soundbites creating a generation of people who can only relate to a second or less of speech at a time.
A majority of audiobooks and podcasts listened to at 2x or even 3x speed.
Our lives no longer have an order. What started out with electricity and our ability to change the circadian rhythm with the invention of the light or proliferation of mass transportation to augment our ability to travel great distances in a fraction of the time has morphed into the single largest cognitive upgrade to humanity in the last 1000 years.
Chronospection, the ability to sense time is fast becoming the first cybernetic super skill and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg on how this new ability is changing people and the tools they use.