In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan observed that “The Electronic Age” was affecting how humans relate with one another and how we define our individual self. We’d become increasingly self-conscious, constructing our sense of identity in relation to new types of media and messages. As marketing moved away from factual reporting of products, advertising began to manipulate our self-image to sell products by exploiting our feelings. We began comparing ourselves with fabricated images and lifestyles. New ideals. The way we experience the passing of time and the occurrence of events shifted. McLuhan’s analysis of the newly invented instant replay feature led him to believe that instead of focusing on playing a good game well, athletes would increasingly play a game to look good playing it, impacting the nature of athletics, the mind of the athlete, and the way spectators would consume. How chilling this speculation turns out to be in a time of filtered selfies, instant messaging, and social media posts immortalized online. Truly, our technologies have warped our self-construct in profound ways even McLuhan might be surprised by.
The debut of the personal computer in the 1980s and mass adoption in the 1990s changed our relationship with communication and information as they became faster to access and relatively compact to store. The rapid spread of Web 2.0 technologies in the early 2000s initiated a new type of interaction, freeing us from the confines of place and enabling rapid communication across distance from anywhere there was a signal. Rather than checking our messages and favorite news sites on our PC once or twice a day, we now live in a world always online. Devices are ever-present, in all our spaces, incorporated into all our moments. An entirely digitized globe is a near reality.
The internet has shifted our experience of public space and temporality. A public moment exists for a user at the time that user interacts with the event online. In 2014, spurred by the murder of Michael Brown, the Ferguson Protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo in response to ongoing killings of Black citizens by police at disproportionate rates compared to whites of all classes. The uprising exhibited several different temporal experiences and the use of technology as a decentralized and empowering force.
The initial and finite event in the real (or default) world was acutely experienced by Michael Brown when he was shot, the policeman who did the shooting, and the witnesses involved. The filming digitizes the moment, so it seems to happen for the first time over and over from the user perspective when initially accessed. Because of the viral nature of digital media, the event spread throughout geography, accessed in the public space of the internet from a multitude of geo-specific places, freeing the moment from a physical boundary.
The shooting of Michael Brown did not occur in isolation. Unjust killings of Black people are ongoing and highly presenced online, giving the perception that they constantly exist outside of the temporal boundaries of default moment to moment. The protests which followed the shooting of Brown were deeply tied to social media organization, particularly Twitter with the #Ferguson keyword making it easy to string together and reference tweets from any account or source. Black people didn’t need media coverage from white outlets – they could create their own in “real time”.
Online, it was as if the protests were constantly existing in the same public moment, regardless of the timeline of specific incidents and lulls in activity on the ground. A fragmented experience of relative time ensued. Internet users from anywhere in the world could interact and support or conflict with protestors, regardless of distance or time, shifting their temporal relationship to the content differently than the experience of the content producer, real-world events, or user who uploaded the content and responded to interactions. To this day, the #Ferguson information is on the internet, retrievable, and deeply critiqued.
While internet trends come and go quickly, the relationship with default time, place, and occurrence is disassociated through the digitizing and virality of the content produced by the event. The 2020 filmed murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Alabama virally erupted online two months after the incident. As the video was shared, it was again experienced as if it just happened. While this served to put the entire world on notice, viral violence like this not only causes victims of racism to relive their own traumatic experiences but also normalizes violence against Black bodies. However, it was the mass-viewing of the filmed murder that ultimately led to public outcry and the subsequent arrest of the shooters months after Arbery’s death. The time which passed between the incident and the viral video leading to police action was not the only notable phenomenon. As if witnessing two totally different events, white users and Black users each responded to the filmed shooting in profoundly different ways depending on their group identity and experiences, implying very different understandings of the world and constructed reality. One where racism is a constant threat, with no safe resolution to conflict involving the melanin deficient. The other assuming a Black man in the South can stop and have a normal conversation with angry white men pointing guns at him, that that conversation may end in de-escalation, that running away from such a situation is itself admission of guilt and deserving of death. (Arbery was jogging when two men followed him in their truck and this incident occurred.)
Instant communications change our perception of time in an inverse way to how hashtags like #Ferguson, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter seem to sustain and expand a moment endlessly. Communications have increased in speed through technological innovation. Letters moved at the speed of mail, often taking months to reach their recipient barring any ill-fated loss or interception on their way. Telegrams and phones escalated communication across distance. Email made it instant. As mobile digital devices become common place around the planet, messaging hasn’t just become instant, it’s become constant, changing our relationship with the characteristic of interaction. Increasingly distracted by our phones, our presence for happenings in the default world, in real life (IRL), is altered. Part of our mind is always aware that there is a notification, a response, something we’re missing. How does this shift in our attention away from what we’re experiencing in the real world impact us? Does it have anything to do with rising feelings of isolation and restlessness?
Time feels as fragmented as our attention. While digital technologies have provided platform access to anyone with technology and an internet connection, at least temporarily leveled the playing field, it also seems to corrupt our ability to be still, to experience a lived moment, to immerse ourselves in the passing of time with spacious ease. The rate new information bombards us is overwhelming, saturating our nervous systems as we process at speeds we’re ill equipped to. We disassociate through more stimulation as we self-sooth in response to the constant blitz.
Stepping back from the speed of the timeline we are in, creating distance between ourselves and the urgency our society moves, we free ourselves from the entanglement of the public moment, and may contextualize experiences in the greater landscape of related events and technology. Viewing a continuum of media, the pace of the moment becomes less overwhelming. It has less control over the speed at which my own mind is rushing to catch up. Looking from independent video documentaries of the 1990s and following their relationship to modern phenomenon such as hashtags and video memes, the people’s content, a pattern intuitively anticipated synthesizes the chaos we’re so often spinning through.
Marshall McLuhan spoke of looking toward the past to look into the future. The future is always built on the past. Rhythms and patterns emerge, implying the future we are actively creating. We are at a time when we have the unique ability to be intentional about how our cultural innovation dictates our evolution. We have never had this level of conscious connection, studied history, and information access. We have never had such an equal platform to speak from. Everyone has the mic and the masses choose what becomes privileged with power through our engagement. It’s important we maintain this level of accessibility and equality in the containers created through social media.
Like the buildings, streets, and public spaces we conduct the business of our lives, digital constructs create spaces we also live. Social media, videocalls, and games are containers which house experience unbound by the physical location the user is in. These containers house happenings that reverberate throughout the network of humanity. They bring people from diverse cultures and lifestyles into contact, building relationships and digital culture – sometimes with explosive results. During these times of contentious ideology and charged interaction, the people involved with these nodes of co-creation become vectors connecting other points in a growing system. We are essentially creating the mind of the world, replacing the clogging machines of the past, amplifying the character of ourselves. The internet works more and more like the neurological structures of the human brain. How it is wired determines how it performs, the health of functionality, and the psychopathologies which may manifest.
Because digital technologies are shifting the way perceive ourselves, our world, the passing of time, and the way we consume information and communicate, it is vital that we become more intentional in how these tools and systems are both used and designed. Understanding how technology works and the control it has over us from the perspective of the user may help to level the unseen power technology currently has. As algorithms have evolved and improved, the experiences we have are highly curated by our behaviors. In an era of SPAM filters and curated feeds, we choose what is shown to us through what we engage in. How can technologies be designed to enhance user wellbeing rather than addictive user engagement? How can we curate our experiences, producing content which shapes the world we want to live in? And how can we protect the decentralized and accessible nature of these technologies as large government and corporate powers begin to coopt what has historically been the people’s mic? As Sir Winston Churchill commented in the 1940s, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Some thirty years later, Marshal McLuhan observed that, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” Now is the time to understand in earnest: We construct our digital world, and thereafter our digital world constructs us.
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