About Time

by Adam Frank

  Given our proximity to this tectonic surge of cultural re-creation, it is impossible to know how long the digital age will last. The agricultural revolution reshaped human experience for many thousands of years. The industrial revolution created cultural forms that extended across centuries. Will the digital revolution simply lead us to a dead end or will it drive sustainable forms of culture that cross generations? While we cannot answer that question now, we are close enough to the dawning of the electronic era to see firsthand how new forms of technology—that is, new forms of material engagement—directly reshape the human experience of time. Reflecting on the last fifty thousand years of cultural transformation, we should expect that the changes in human time manifested through digital technology would mirror changes in cosmological time. That expectation has been fulfilled.

  The introduction of mechanical clocks shifted the organization of the European day and eventually provided a new metaphor for the heavens—a precise, cosmic clockwork set in motion by God’s hand. Centuries later, the introduction of steam power set the industrial revolution’s new machine age in motion and drove the rhythms of its workers’ punch-clock lives. The science of thermodynamics, emerging from those steam-powered machines, advanced a new understanding of time and transformation in terms of energy, entropy and evolution. Thermodynamics yielded its own metaphors and conceptual tools that reshaped cosmological thinking. Then, just before the dawn of the twentieth century, trains and telegraph wires created new experiences of simultaneity across vast distances. Einstein’s theory of relativity used its own new vision of simultaneity as a pivot point for merging space and time into space-time. Once a fully relativistic account of space-time and its flexible geometry was available, cosmology was given its first complete language. Always and again, transformations in cosmic and human time surged back and forth, each one supporting the other in metaphorical and material realms.

  By the last decades of the twentieth century, silicon technology dominated our material engagement with the world. Machines made possible by silicon microcircuits—computers, personal digital assistants, mobile phones and GPS devices—were accelerating the immediate and very personal movement through daily life. These silicon “machines” moved at speeds so fast their cadence was far more native to atoms than to humans. By building culture timed to their clock cycles, our own time and experience were compressed in ways both thrilling and exhausting. In both our working and personal lives we were expected to do more because these machines would make it possible. And so we entered a new time whose contours were as closely felt and intimately lived as the tick-tock world of our great-grandparents or the sun-parsed days of our more distant ancestors.

  At the same time, the scientific capacities unleashed in the computer age pushed our cosmic narrative of the Big Bang to its limits. Computer simulations, massive data-gathering projects and space-based telescope platforms revealed new challenges to any cosmology that would begin with a beginning. In the closing years of the twentieth century, the pace of life, time and cosmic evolution all were set in a permanent state of acceleration.

  YOU’VE GOT TOO MUCH MAIL: ENTERING THE OUTLOOK UNIVERSE

  Time is not simply what we read off a clock. Instead, time as it is lived can be defined as what we do and how we go about doing it. “There is no such time as ‘this afternoon’ or ‘one-o’clock’ or ‘two o’clock’”, said Suzuki Roshi. “At one o’clock you will eat your lunch. To eat lunch is itself one o’clock.”1 What emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century was a new form of movement through the day. New, silicon-based forms of material engagement were rapidly embraced and rapidly used to re-imagine the institutional facts of culture. Those facts were expressed most intimately by what we did and how those behaviours shaped what we thought. Thus the revolution in time occurred in our hands and between our ears. This pairing of action and thought would become explicit in the relationship between communication and time management as e-mail led us all into the Outlook universe.

  FIGURE 8.1. A screenshot of Microsoft Outlook on a Macintosh personal computer, circa 2001.

  Distraction is expensive. According to Basex, a company that studies knowledge workers and their use of technology, unnecessary electronic interruptions cost the world economy $650 billion per year in lost productivity. In Basex’s research the black hole sucking in all that money is “information overload” driven by that most basic of electronic applications: e-mail.2

  There were many digital technologies that transformed our sense of time during the 1980s and 1990s. Desktop computers reworked the very notion of work. The World Wide Web brought instant access to everything from the Louvre’s collections of fine art to bottomless pits of porn. Online day trading amped up financial time and made markets as jittery as a coked-up comedian. But of all these changes the most pervasive and insidious was the introduction of e-mail. Few lives in the developed world have been untouched by e-mail and its demands. It was the early killer app for computer networks, spreading like a virus through the ecologies of personal and business life. But this greatest of all applications began humbly enough as a kind of afterthought in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer lab.

  The history of technological revolutions is full of dramatic first lines. Samuel Morse’s first message pulsing across telegraph lines was “What hath God wrought.”3 Alexander Graham Bell’s famous first message spoken into the telephone was “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.”4 E-mail’s origins, unfortunately, fail to rise to such a dramatic standard.5 “QWERTYUIOP” was, by all accounts, the first modern cross-computer e-mail. Ray Tomlinson, the man credited with creating the first networked version of e-mail, has rather vague memories of the event: “I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYUIOP or something similar.”6

  In 1971 Tomlinson was working as a computer engineer with a contractor for the U.S. Defense Department. The company’s project was to help develop the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the original version of what we now call the Internet. ARPANET was a work in progress at the time, consisting of only fifteen nodes at places such as UCLA, Stanford and the University of Utah.7 Rather than the laptops we now carry in briefcases and the smart phones we carry in pockets, in those days the term computer referred only to mainframes that looked very much like the megaliths of the Neolithic era. Mainframes were housed in vast air-conditioned “machine rooms”, attended to by teams of classically nerdy acolytes. Most important, these machines were solipsistic lords of their own domains. Users worked within the confines of a single computer system, and the systems did not talk to one another. The system’s users were, however, always interested in talking.

  As early as 1964, computer programmers had developed ways to leave one another messages on files that could be shared within each stand-alone system.8 Tomlinson recognized that the users of ARPANET, which was intended to be a network of many distinct and geographically remote computers, needed something similar but more sophisticated. His achievement was the development of the all-important protocols for file transfer.9 These protocols were coded rules that allowed computers to talk to one another. In particular, Tomlinson developed rules for sending and receiving messages between linked machines. Adding the now ubiquitous @ between the computer user’s name and the computer system’s name was the final piece of the puzzle. “The @ sign seemed to make sense”, Tomlinson later recalled. “I used the @ sign to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other host rather than being local.”10

  It did indeed make sense. For the growing population of scientists using ARPANET for daily research, Thompson’s creation seemed like a natural outgrowth of their activity. A 1973 ARPA report on the new electronic messaging service concluded, “A surprising aspect of the message service is the unplanned, unanticipated, and unsupported nature of its birth and early growth. It just happened, and its early history
has seemed more like the discovery of a natural phenomenon than the deliberate development of a new technology.”11

  ARPANET users liked e-mail and did not have to be encouraged to use it. Their acceptance of the new tool offers an object lesson in the realms of time and culture. Here, at the very dawn of a new form of material engagement, we can see the process begin. E-mail was not dreamed up as a means to change human communication and the human experience of time. In 1976, just a few years after ARPANET’s developers wrote their report, the rest of the world still experienced telecommunication as the bright buzzing ring of the phone on the kitchen wall or the nightstand. Mail meant a paper envelope whose weight could be judged by its heft in the hand. But for the small group of ARPANET’s users, a new kind of activity had become possible. By typing a message on a keypad that instantly appeared to its receiver somewhere else in the country, a new kind of behaviour and a new way of spending time had been imagined into existence. It was the seed of new material engagement cracking open beneath the culture’s surface. The rest of the world, for good or ill, would soon nurture that seed into something entirely novel for the human experience of time.

  In the 1980s, personal computers became both a wildly successful business and a ubiquitous “appliance” in homes and businesses. The IBM PC was introduced in 1983 and Apple’s groundbreaking Macintosh first went on sale in 1984. These machines, connected through dial-up services such as CompuServe and AppleLink, brought e-mail to a broad population of users. Meanwhile, dial-up “bulletin board systems” (BBSs) were growing in popularity, allowing people with common interests to exchange messages. Though each system had its limitations, together they formed the arena for a period of “training”, in which a vanguard of home-based users established new behaviours on the electronic frontiers of culture. Most people, however, knew of e-mail as only something they read about in Newsweek or heard about through a more tech-savvy friend. Most important, e-mail was still simply a means of communication; it had yet to become merged with other functions such as time management or social networking. Pencilling in an appointment on your calendar was still done with a pencil.

  The adoption of e-mail in the business world was the most important step in e-mail’s march to world domination and role as master of a new form of lived time. Hosted on local area networks (LANs), e-mail was enthusiastically embraced by corporations that had already developed internal computer cultures. Almost overnight, or so it would seem, working in an office meant dealing with the imperatives and politics of electronic communications. Gossip and the rumour mill had long been the staples of office social behaviour, though they were largely limited to water cooler conversations and coffee break dialogue. Now, electronic communication, with all its potential for misinterpretations, would be added to the daily social dance, including dealing with the disaster of hitting SEND ALL on an e-mail meant only for a select few.

  The 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail marks a turning point in e-mail’s novelty and intrusion into social time. The film follows the online romance between Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). Though competitors in the real world of business (she runs a small bookstore, he runs a bookstore chain), in the anonymous world of e-mail they bare their souls and fall in love. The timing of e-mail conversations, the expectations of a sent message’s reply and the “wow” quality of using this new medium to carry out the age-old romantic dance make You’ve Got Mail a clear example of a culture redefining its norms of behaviour (and hence time) around a new form of material engagement. You’ve Got Mail should be compared with another Ryan-Hanks romantic comedy vehicle from just five years earlier. In Sleepless in Seattle the two lovers find each other thanks to an old-fashioned snail-mail letter. A decade or so after You’ve Got Mail a film centred on e-mail would make little sense, as the culture had already absorbed it into the background of daily time. In 2010, films about Facebook in which e-mail was just one component would be relevant, but not e-mail alone. In 1998, however, e-mail was still new and had just started taking us into the seamless integration of digital information, life and time.

  An important feature of the 1980s desktop LAN system was the development of ever more intuitive user interfaces. E-mail hovered in the background for many of these applications. Even the simple ability to append attachments to an electronic message created a vast new terrain of possibilities for workers to navigate. The era of the ever-circulating, never-finished spreadsheet had arrived.

  By the early 1990s, the true Internet, born of U.S. federal projects such as ARPANET, Usenet, Milnet and others, had begun its own conquest of the world. Here, the convergence of human time and cosmic time becomes clear. The first successful Web browser, Mosaic, was developed specifically for astrophysics research.12 The brain behind Mosaic, Marc Andreessen, was an undergraduate working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.13 Andreessen developed Mosaic as a tool for his astronomer bosses to share research-related files, and he put hypertext—onscreen text referencing immediately accessible files—centre stage in his development.14 The now ubiquitous hypertext was a radical innovation at the time and emerged directly from the realms of particle physics research. Tim Berners-Lee was the programmer who first developed hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the protocol on which the World Wide Web is built, while working as a programmer at CERN, the principal European particle physics research institute.15 The fact that Berners-Lee created a digital tool to aid particle physicists in their research—which, almost overnight, became an essential element of a cultural transformation—marks a remarkably explicit example of material engagement changing both human time and the cosmic vision of time. The mid-1990s saw technologies such as hypertext and Web browsers exploding into culture through a newly commercialized Internet. It was through these new forms of material engagement that human life collapsed onto the two dimensions of our computer screens.

  As companies rushed to the digital frontier, instant communication by e-mail was recognized as a service of such fundamental importance that it could serve as a backbone for other digital products and services. As search engines grew in importance, the offer of free e-mail accounts became a standard means of drawing users into the accelerating universe of electronic content. In just a few years, addresses with @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com and @gmail.com would become the standard for a world moving to new electronic clock cycles.

  The ubiquity of e-mail allowed software companies to build integrated platforms using electronic communications as their foundation. These tools would soon come to dictate and shape our days. Microsoft’s Outlook was introduced in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s, its linked e-mail, calendar, contacts list and to-do list functionality became omnipresent. Outlook had its roots in the 1980s with a Canadian company called Consumers Software and their Network Courier application. The program was ported to Windows in 1986, morphing into Microsoft Mail 3.0 as part of the phenomenally successful Windows 3.0. When the Windows stand-alone calendar program Schedule+ was merged with Microsoft Mail, the plate tectonics of culture shifted in an earthquake known as Outlook’s personal information management (PIM) system.16

  Personal information management, the all-encompassing ever-updating electronic repository for your life, existed in gadgets before Outlook. Personal digital assistants such as the Palm Pilot had already pushed boundaries in bundling the shifting facts of daily life into an application. But Microsoft’s ubiquity meant Outlook would become, for a time, the de facto standard in training millions in how to move along the contours of a new time.

  The day, that most intimate experience of temporality, now took on a new symbolic form. In the neatly ordered patchwork of precisely timed, colour-coded appointments, each linked to its contacts and to-do bullets, human life became an exercise in information management. Time and communication had been paired before in older technological shifts from the telegraph to the telephone, but as digital technologies came to fully rule over the shape of our days, th
e two became seamlessly interwoven. Efficiency in communication became the driver for efficiency in all domains of the day. With e-mail acting as the universal solvent, our personal lives were broken down and alchemically transformed into personal information. This became the fluid pushing through the body of our new streamlined lives.

  In the Outlook universe, time became a kind of flexible geometry (metaphorically in spirit reminiscent of Einstein’s relativity). The coloured blocks on the calendar screen denoting meetings, teleconferences, children’s playdates and gym workouts could be stretched and squeezed endlessly as each of us worked to “manage” our time. The neatly stacked rectangles gave the illusion that time could be managed with a precision that mirrored a universe whose own story was told in billionths or trillionths of a second. We began to expect that life could be parsed with the same accuracy as the boundaries of those coloured blocks on our electronic calendars.

  A 2002 announcement for a lunchtime programme at my city’s central library tells visitors that the talk will begin at 12:12 p.m. It is as if the announcement’s author imagined the speaker could somehow be “dragged and dropped” into this kind of precision. No doubt a global-send e-mail carried the news of this sharply timed event to thousands of recipients, where just a click on the screen would add it to their linked calendar program. In 1972, would a talk beginning at 12:12 have made sense at all?

  By 2002, it was an Outlook universe and we were all living in it even if we owned a Mac or remained Linux rebels. Personal information management was bound to appeal to us regardless of what platform our machines used. It formed the basis of time management. In a hyperconnected world, efficiency in our use of time was something that could now be managed with a totality that included whom we knew, where we went to meet them and what we planned to do with them once we arrived. From playdates to speed dates, our days accelerated in the name of efficiency. We were moving so fast that time had been crowded out of our minds and onto our devices. The most intimate internal experiences of time had been outsourced due to overload.