Speed and the Digital Habitat.
The Digital Habitat alters what we call “Space-Time” profoundly, and few people have a foggy idea of what that actually means. A good start would be to read some of the works by Paul Virilio. Virilio is a philosopher who has dedicated his life to the task of finding out what speed does to us - as humans, individually and collectively. Speed is a relative phenomenon, it’s not actually a phenomenon but it describes the relation between phenomena. Speed is a ratio of space and time, usually we think about a certain distance, say 1 km, and the time we need to cover that distance, and that ratio is what we call speed. As human beings, our core reference is what our body can do, so we look at the average time we need to cover a 1 km distance - when we would walk it or run it or take the bike or the car or the train or the airplane, etc. All of these speeds relate to a physical distance. The digital habitat has no physical dimension, it operates on an assumption of synchronized immediacy. Think a white sheet of paper and two dots on it. In the physical realm, finding the shortest distance between the two dots would mean to draw a straight line that connects the two dots. But whenever we do something in the digital habitat, we are confronted with what Virilio called a “lost dimension”. And this lost dimension is our good ol´ Space-Time and the notion of speed that is related to it. The substitute for this lost dimension in the digital habitat is the so-called “cyberspace”. The cyberspace is made of communication and control. It is an extended present, an instant that -paradoxically- lasts forever. Forever like in “eternity”. The shortest distance of the two dots on that sheet of paper would then be attained if we simply fold the paper so the two dots would "touch", and the distance between them would be reduced to Zero. For lack of other words we tend to call the digital experience “fast”, or “accelerated”, but that's not where it's at, because, remember, space-time is reduced to Zero. Paul Virilio came up with a better term, he labeled it “polar inertia”. That is the speed at which the earth rotates at the North- or Southpole. It's Zero km/h. It amounts to something like sitting in a car with the engine screaming because of your heavy foot on the accelerator, but you're in idle mode, standing still. That is speed in the Digital Habitat. And that kind of speed is very alien to the human experience.
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AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
January 2021
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