Algorithmic Time
Jan. 29th, 2020 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThe 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/the-2010s-have-broken-our-sense-of-time
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/the-2010s-have-broken-our-sense-of-time
How did everything get so jumbled? Stories about our phones, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest often concern Nazis, grifters, scammers, plagiarists, the aesthetes who reject that online life, the famous, the infamous, people who are making a buck, and anyone else who pushes the logic and limits already in place. But what about the rest of us?
The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.
The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.
The writer isn't wrong, but holy hell do all of the flashing GIF images make this article difficult to read. I understand that this is (probably?) the result of an intentional artistic decision to create a format that mimics the experience of having your attention constantly divided between multiple competing demands online, but it works a little too well. The essay is about how having our lives mediated through social media disrupts our memory; and, lo and behold, I can barely remember what I read.
All that being said, I'm planning to cut and paste the text into a document to study later, as what the author is describing mirrors my experience of the past four years almost perfectly.
