Skip to content →

Category: real time web

These Are No Ordinary Times: Time Becomes Real

Bunuel: Chien Andalou

As we may think about the real time web, the image goes in and out of focus. Pieces of the dream materialize for a moment and then are withdrawn. The solid experience of Track and IM on Twitter start to reveal the contours of the possibility of discovery on the real time web– and then in the blink of an eye, they dissolve into nothingness. Twitter pulls the experience back into the darkness, and we set out as a band of gypsies attempting to recreate it from the resources we find in the commons.

“Real time” puts time itself into the frame. In a simple sense, real time means what’s happening right now. It’s the conscious moment that cleaves the past from the future. It’s the thread of our lives being pulled through the eye of a needle.

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

We see the past through the future, as it comes rushing toward us, asking us to make a judgment about this present moment. David Byrne and Brian Eno have released some recordings called “Everything that happens will happen today.” I’d go further and say that everything that happens, happens right now. Your only opportunity to act is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to do the right thing is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to connect with another person is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to pick up the thread of the conversation is in the present moment.

As we stand at the crossroads between the past and the future, we must act, and through our actions express a judgement. Do we act in the present moment only for the present moment? Or do we think both of ourselves and our posterity as we make this gesture or that one? There’s a sense in which a person acting in the present moment for the sake of an unknown future is the essence of morality.

As we deepen the questions about the real time web, we uncover the startling fact that underneath all the layers of technology and specialized lingo, we find only ourselves. Human beings, mortals, gathering together to share our joys and sorrows, our dreams and aspirations, our humanity. As we pound out, hammer and tongs, the basic shape of our experience through the real time Network, we would do well to heed the words of that guy who said, “what if all this stuff really matters?”

One Comment

Live Web’s Point of Contact: The 5th Guy in the Room

Walter Benjamin

There’s a sense in which the digital is a copy at its origin. It has no uniqueness, no originality. The difference between the first copy and subsequent copies is just a time stamp in the file system.

In 1936, Walter Benjamin was thinking about the digital before it existed:

That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the ‘aura’ of the work of art. The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition and substitutes plurality of copies for a unique existence.

Walter Benjamin

The digital seems like a black hole, a format that is non-auratic at its core. While digital files can be very amusing, can they ever have the ‘aura’ and unique presence of the original work of art? As we look at the digital objects surrounding us, it seems as though we could be having one of Phillip K. Dick’s nightmares.

Layering the digital on top of the digital, mashing up a new media venue reveals a real time moment that has an originality at the point of contact. Live radio broadcast over the real time web creates a moment of danger, imperfection and improvisation. I’m not talking about commercial radio stuffed down another channel, but the kind of stuff that is emerging from micro-communities within the social web. While these files can be consumed on a digital delay, at the present moment of their creation they show every sign of having an ‘aura.’ You can see it happen sometimes with live music, and in rare cases with comedy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a kind of spark or electricity that happens when you can actually hear people listening to each other. The members of the Firesign Theater are eloquent on this point:

“There was no leader,” Bergman says. “Everything was communally written, and if one person didn’t agree about something, no matter how strongly the other three felt about it, it didn’t go in.” This principle was to hold true with each subsequent Firesign effort because, as Bergman explains, “If one of us doesn’t get it then something’s wrong. But if we get it, then it doesn’t matter who else does.” All the Firesigns agree, however, that a mysterious synergy took place whenever the four of them got together. “It’s like, suddenly there is this fifth guy that actually does the writing,” Austin says. “We all vaguely sort of know him, and a lot of the time take credit for him.”

Phil Austin

The real time web has the potential to offer redemption to the digital, the return of the detached aura in that moment of creation. While the digital has proven itself as a bread winner, it’s only just now learning how to dance.

2 Comments

Cognitive Science of the Real-time Web

Optical Illusion

I keep coming across bits and pieces of the picture of the human factors that will make up the real time web. This morning’s piece came from “Scientific American Mind.” On Sunday mornings I like to visit my local newsstand and look at magazines. Today it was the New York Review of Books for Samantha Power’s article on “The Democrats & National Security” and Scientific American for an article on “The Power of Stories.”

The question I’ve been thinking about is: what’s the minimum speed of the real-time web to create a smooth perceptual flow and enable natural conversation? This quote puts a piece in place:

The brain takes nearly one tenth of a second to consciously register a scene. But the scenery changes far more quickly than that when we move. How does our brain cope? By constantly predicting the future, posits Mark Changizi. This ability explains many visual illusions — The extra motion results from your brain estimating where the ellipses will be in several milliseconds.

The optical illusion at the top of this post works as follows: concentrate your attention on the dot in the center and then move your head toward the screen. And then pull back from the screen. There’s some extra perceptible motion that occurs. That’s the mind projecting future position.

You can view other optical illusions and some explanations here.

Comments closed