Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (16 page)

Kairos
is a more slippery concept. Most simply, it means the right or opportune moment. Where
chronos
measures time quantitatively,
kairos
is more qualitative. It is usually understood as a window of opportunity created by circumstances, God, or fate. It is the ideal time to strike, to propose marriage, or to take any particular course of action.
Carpe diem
.
Kairos
is perfect timing relative to what’s going on, where
chronos
is the numerical description of what happens to be on the clock right then.
Chronos
can be represented by a number;
kairos
must be experienced and interpreted by a human.

While clocks may have suggested that we live in a world bound by
chronos
, digitality asks us to embody
chronos
itself. Where the arms of the clock passed through the undefined, unmeasured spaces between numbers, digital technology registers only
chronos
. It does not exist between its pulses. This is why we call it an asynchronous technology: it does not pass. It is the ticks of the clock but none of the space between. Each new tick is a new line of a code, a new decision point, another division—all oblivious to what happens out there in the world—except when it gets a new discrete input from one of us.

Digital time ignores nearly every feature of
kairos
, but in doing so may offer us the opportunity to recognize
kairos
by its very absence. Clocks initially disconnected us from organic time by creating a metaphor to replace it. Digital time is one step further removed, replacing what it was we meant by “time” altogether. It’s a progression akin to what postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “precession of the simulacra.” There is the real world, then there are the metaphors and maps we use to represent that world, and then there is yet another level of activity that can occur on those maps—utterly disconnected from the original. This happens because we have grown to treat the maps and symbols we have created as if they were the underlying reality. Likewise, we started with this amorphous experience of rhythms that we called time. We created the analog clock to represent the aspects of time we could represent with a technology. Then, with digital readouts, we created a way of representing what was happening on that clock face. It is twice removed from the original.

Now that
chronos
has been fully freed from the cycles and flows through which we humans experience time, we can more easily differentiate between the kinds of clocks and time we are using. We can stop forcing our minds and bodies to keep up with digital
chronos
while also ceasing to misapply our digital technologies to human processes. We come to fully recognize the difference between
chronos
and
kairos
, or between time and timing.

Or think of it this way: Digital technology is more like a still-life picture. A sample. It is frozen in time. Sound, on the other hand, is audible only over time. We hear sound as it decays. Image may be thought of as
chronos
, where sound is more like
kairos
. Not surprisingly, the digital universe is a visual one: people staring silently at screens, where the only sounds in the room are the keys and mouse clicks.

Our analog technologies anchored us temporally in ways our digital ones don’t. In a book or a scroll, the past is on our left, and the future is on our right. We know where we are in linear time by our position in the paper. While the book with its discrete pages is a bit more sequential than the scroll, both are entirely more oriented in time than the computer screen. Whichever program’s window we may have open at the moment is the digital version of now, without context or placement in the timeline. The future on a blog is not to one side, but above—in the as-yet-unposted potential. The past isn’t to the other side, but down, in and among older posts. Or over there, at the next hypertext link. What is next does not unfold over time, but is selected as part of a sequence.

In this context, digiphrenia comes from confusing
chronos
with
kairos
. It happens when we accept the digital premise that every moment must potentially consist of a decision point or a new branch. We live perched atop the static points of
chronos
, suffering from the vertigo of no temporal context. It’s akin to the discomfort many LP listeners had to early CD music and low-resolution digital music files, whose sample rates seemed almost perceptible as a staccato sawtooth wave buzzing under the music. It just didn’t feel like continuous sound and didn’t have the same impact on the body.

Digital audio is markedly superior in many respects. There is no “noise”—only signal. There are no “pops” on the record’s surface, no background hiss. But without those references, our experience becomes frictionless—almost like the vertigo we experience when zooming in or out of a Google map too rapidly. There’s no sense of scale—no background to the foreground. None of the cues that create a sense of organic connection to the medium. There is no messy handwriting to be deciphered, only ACII text. Every copy is the original. And it is perfect—at least when it’s there. When it is not, as in the case of the spaces between the samples in a digital audio recording, there is nothing. For many kinds of activities, this doesn’t matter at all. The fixed type of the printing press already removed pretty much every sign of analog personality from text. For human purposes, there is no real difference between the text in a digital book and a physical one; the only difference is the form factor of the book versus that of the tablet. That’s because a symbol system like text is already abstracted and just as well represented digitally.

When there is a direct communication with the senses, on the other hand, the difference becomes a lot clearer. Like a fluorescent lightbulb, which will perceptibly flicker at 60 hertz along with the alternating current of the house, digital technologies are almost perceptibly on/off. They create an environment, regardless of the content they are expressing. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message.” A lightbulb creates an environment, even though it has no content. Even without a slide or movie through which to project an image onto the wall, the light itself creates an environment where things can happen that otherwise wouldn’t. It is an environment of light.

With digital technology, the environment created is one of choice. We hop from choice to choice with no present at all. Our availability to experience flow or to seize the propitious moment is minimized as our choices per second are multiplied by a dance partner who doesn’t see or feel us. Our rhythms are dictated by the pulses of required inputs and incoming data. It is not a stream but a series of points along a line. Yes, we have the ability to make more choices, but in the process we become primarily choosers. The
obligation
to choose—to “submit” as the button compels us—is no choice at all. Especially when it prevents us from achieving our own sense of flow and rhythm.

The first experience most of us had of this sort of forced choice was call waiting—the interruptive beep letting us know we had the option of putting our current conversation on hold and responding to whoever was now calling us. By utilizing the feature and checking on the incoming call, we are introducing a new choice into our flow. In the process, we are also saying, “Hold on while I check to make sure there’s not someone calling whom I want to speak with more than I want to speak with you.” Sure, we can justify that it might be an emergency, but it’s really just a new decision point.

Now with caller ID in addition to our call waiting, we can visually check on the source of the incoming call without our current caller even knowing. We pull the phone away from our ear, imperceptibly disconnecting from the call for long enough to scan the incoming number. Then we return to the conversation in process, only half listening while we inwardly debate whether to interrupt the conversation with the now certain fact that whatever the person on the other end is saying is less important to us than the alternative, the incoming caller. (It was easier when everyone heard the beep, and the insult seemed less willful.)

The real crime here is not simply the indignity suffered by our rejected talk partner, but the way we so easily allow the sanctity of our moment to be undermined. It assumes that
kairos
has no value—that if there is a moment of opportunity to be seized, that moment will break into our flow from the outside, like a pop-up ad on the Web. We lose the ability to imagine opportunities emerging and excitement arising from pursuing whatever we are currently doing, as we compulsively anticipate the next decision point.

Clay Shirky correctly distinguishes this problem from the overused term “information overload,” preferring instead to call it “filter failure.” In a scarce mediaspace dominated by books, printing a text meant taking a financial risk. The amount of information out there was limited by the amount of money publishers and advertisers were willing to spend. Now that information can be generated and distributed essentially for free, the onus is upon the receiver to filter out or even stop the incoming traffic. Even though each one seems to offer more choices and opportunities, its very presence demands a response, ultimately reducing our autonomy.

Once we make the leap toward valuing the experience of the now and the possibilities of
kairos
, we can begin to apply some simple filters and mechanisms to defend it. We can set up any cell phone to ring or interrupt calls only for family members; we can configure our computers to alert us to only the incoming emails of particular people; and we can turn off all the extraneous alerts from everything we subscribe to. Unless we want our entire day guided by the remote possibility that a plane may crash into our office building, we need to trust that we can safely proceed on the assumption that it won’t.

While there is tremendous value in group thinking, shared platforms, and networked collaboration, there is also value in a single mind contemplating a problem. We can defend our access to our personal
kairos
by letting the digital care for the
chronos
. Email lives outside time and can sit in the inbox until we are ready to read it. This should not be guilt provoking. The sender of the email is the one who relegated this missive to the timeless universe. Once sent, it is no longer part of our living, breathing cycling world of
kairos
but of the sequential realm of
chronos
. Email will form a stack, just like the stacks of processes in a computer program, and wait until we open it.

When I visit companies looking to improve their digital practices, I often suggest office workers attempt not to answer or check on email for an entire hour—or even two hours in a row. They usually reel in shock. Why is this so hard for so many of us? It’s not because we need the email for our productivity, but because we are addicted to the possibility that there’s a great tidbit in there somewhere. Like compulsive gamblers at a slot machine rewarded with a few quarters every dozen tries, we are trained to keep opening emails in the hope of a little shot of serotonin—a pleasant ping from the world of
chronos
. We must retrain ourselves instead to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being. Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.

A friend of mine makes her living selling homemade candles through the craft site etsy.com. As her business got more successful, more orders would come through. By habit, she stopped whatever she was doing and checked her email every time a new message dinged through. If it was an order, she opened it, printed it out, and filled it before returning to her work melting wax, mixing scents, and dipping her wicks. Her routine became broken up and entirely un-fun, until it occurred to her to let the emails stack up all day, and then process them all at once. She used an automatic reply to all incoming orders, giving customers the instant feedback they have come to expect, but kept her flesh-and-blood candle maker self insulated from the staccato flow of orders. At 3 p.m. each day, her reward was to go to the computer and see how many orders had come in since morning. She had enough time to pack them all at once while listening to music, and then take them to the post office before closing. She achieved greater efficiency while also granting herself greater flow.

The digital can be stacked; the human gets to live in real time. This experience is what makes us creative, intelligent, and capable of learning. As science and innovation writer Steven Johnson has shown, great ideas don’t really come out of sudden eureka moments, but after long, steady slogs through problems.
³¹
They are slow, iterative processes. Great ideas, as Johnson explained it to a TED audience, “fade into view over long periods of time.” For instance, Charles Darwin described his discovery of evolution as a eureka moment that occurred while he was reading Malthus on a particular night in October of 1838. But Darwin’s notebooks reveal that he had the entire theory of evolution long before this moment; he simply hadn’t fully articulated it yet.

As Johnson argues it, “If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the ‘slow hunch.’ We’ve heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people’s minds. They have a feeling that there’s an interesting problem, but they don’t quite have the tools yet to discover them.” Solving the problem means being in the right place at the right time—available to the propitious moment, the
kairos
. Perhaps counterintuitively, protecting what is left of this flow from the pressing obligation of new choices gives us a leg up on innovation.