Realtime/Realspace

Nicholas Carr writes:

I'm glad to see that "realtime" is officially one word now rather than two. It's an update long overdue. That space between "real" and "time" had become an annoyance. Looking at it was like peering into a black hole of unengaged consciousness, a moment emptied of stimulus. It was more than an annoyance, actually. It was an affront to the very idea of realtime. As soon as you divide realtime into real time it ceases to be realtime. Realtime has no gaps. It's nonstop. It runs together.

Real time is realtime


And...

I was reminded of a haunting passage in a recent New Yorker article about the boom in Japanese cellphone novels:

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”

Realtime, you see, doesn't just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen - the "intimate portable world" that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.

Realtime kills real space


Rob Horning writes:

Accelerating the flow of information is tantamount to commodifying it, effacing the differences between things. It all becomes data to process; if it slows us down, it is an inconvenient datapoint that warrants a more careful calibration of the information stream—the appropriate response in the realtime world would be to put in place a better filter to remove such troubling material.

Speeding up information consumption for its own sake plays into the fantasy that technology permits a kind of ubiquity, lets us be present everywhere through online interconnections, so the maximum potential opportunities are available to us. We can see what all our friends are doing at all times and receive news from every corner of the world as it happens and so on. But it seems that this ubiquity of online presence is counterbalanced by surfeit of information, which flattens it all and renders no opportunity any more compelling than any other. As Carr explains in the second post, “Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen - the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.” He call the two-dimensional space “realspace,” the companion to realtime.

Realtime and realspace