Compressed reality, digital expansion and the element of time.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately, and because there are more questions than answers I thought I would put fingers to keyboard and open the topic up for dialogue.

Let’s start with time…

The beginning steps of evolution took a billion years. After that came the nervous system and brains, which developed over a few hundred million years. Next came the development of language - less than a million years in the making. Today our development is a whole other game. We have always lived with change as the only constant, but the rate of this change in our generation is now being measured in nanoseconds instead of centuries. With the rate of change increasing, overlapping, bifurcating, and warping; it is becoming harder to decipher its complexities and what effect it has on society. It is both SCARY and EXCITING as we sprint ‘fast’ forward into this unknown. I have a personal temptation towards the neoteric ephemerality that filters through all our lives, but we will never fully understand what the hyper-compression on time will do to us down the road.

So…not very successfully, I look down that future path and interrogate the many angles that may have an effect on our lives. In the same breath, I agree with Winston Churchill who is credited with saying, ‘The further back you look, the further ahead you can see’, hence the look back at time and its effect on our evolution.

In conjunction with our continued global compression of time and physical space, the digital sphere continues to swell with new complexities and socially rich landscapes. This juxtaposition of compressed physicality woven with expanding digital frontiers is fascinating. One is the ‘base of decay’ while the other the ‘base of eternity’, and both are used for tying together the disparate parts of how we live today.

Again, I ask myself what effect does this have on me today / tomorrow? What is the effect on social networks, home, interactivity, relationships, worth, etc.

-What is home?
-What is address?
-Are you social without a network?
-Where and how do you ‘escape’?
-When are you trespassing?
-What is digital ownership?
-Is ‘pixel privacy’ an oxymoron?
-Are your gigabytes memories? Do they fade?
-Travelling at home or the travelling home?
-Global localism or local globalism?
-Are there digital feelings? Do they lie?

I have a few friends on social networks, mainly Facebook, that I have never met before. Because we have similar interests, a willingness to communicate and extensive digital profiles, I know more about these digital counterparts (friends…I think?) than I do the majority of people I interact with physically on a daily basis at work. I’m not so sure I want to call them virtual relationships…they are as real as I am. It’s just that we choose to communicate, share, exchange and archive our actions through the digital rather than the physical. There are efficiencies with connecting as we do digitally, and with that a rich experience is possible over pixels and a mouse.

Bottom line is that we are changing at break-neck speed and I am not sure we can keep up. Somewhere in the back of my mind I sense some mathematical equation of ((’change’ divided by ‘time’) squared) multiplied by ‘modern day financial systems’ equals (we all join the dinosaurs). But that economic thing brings up a whole other conversation that is better saved for another time, and besides, I would rather focus positively on how we can enhance our quality of lfe through what is being served up.

Whether it be questions, comments, or answers; please let me know what you think!