The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
Aaron Z. Lewisaaronzlewis.comSaved by Sixian and
The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth. The rhythms and seasons of nature help us orient and make sense of when we are. Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is blin... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
As a rule, twentieth century time was imposed on people from the top-down. Twenty-first century time is a bottom-up choose your own adventure story that allows people to make their own time machines and live anywhen.
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
Unlike the clocks of Old Media, the subjective time zones of internet subcultures are a de-centralized creative expression that reflect the idiosyncrasies of many different reality tunnels. Whereas geographic time zones sit next to each other in a very orderly fashion, internet time zones are kaleidoscopic and multi-layered — they allow you to look... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
People who spend a lot of time exploring these subcultures feel like they can see into the future, and for good reason. What happens online often shows up in the headlines weeks, months, or even years later. The internet has become the petri dish of culture — the soil in which new movements and novel conversations find root
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
The conflict between old and new media is in many ways a dispute over who gets to control the “clocks” we live by; who gets to set the pace; who gets access to the technologies that make it easy to synchronize (or de-synchronize) large groups people.Clocks may seem innocuous, but they’re never ideologically neutral. Timekeeping doesn’t just happen.
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. It makes us feel like we’re moving forward through time, rather than standing still or running in circles. My grandmother and her ancestors knew this all too well. Artful forgetting, editing, and curation allowed them to craft narratives that helped their children understand the past and orient towards the future... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
As Kei Kreutler points out, conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes. This dissonance between felt time and measured time gets more confusing by the day, and it’s beginning to feel unsustainable. Amidst the unsettling chaos, it’s tempting to crawl back to the tim... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
In a 1970 interview, Marshall McLuhan foreshadowed this situation and described what it might do to our minds: “We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of huma... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
It seems to me that, through the way Reddit and YouTube and social media work, there’s such an emphasis on creating distinctions and communities, and it’s just created an explosion of interest in ideological sub-groupings that had been completely forgotten. I started in politics in the early ‘00s, and it just didn’t have this flavor. If you were a ... See more