{"id":1989,"date":"2012-03-08T14:57:41","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T19:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=1989"},"modified":"2012-03-08T14:57:41","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T19:57:41","slug":"listening-post-about-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2012\/03\/08\/listening-post-about-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Listening Post: About time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Persistence of Time. Salvador Dali.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1922, science fiction writer Ray Cummings explained half of reality, saying, “Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” Later the physicist John Wheeler finished the job, adding “Space is what prevents everything from happening to me.”<\/p>\n

Too bad then, that so many of us have been busily annihilating this tidy structure by transferring our allegiance to an alternate reality where the rules don’t apply–the non-sequential, omnipresent\u00a0 world of cyberspace. Within this notional universe, everything that ever happened is still happening, and everything that happened anywhere, is happening everywhere.<\/p>\n

This was not so stressful when the great cloud of information was kept at arm’s length, in a big clunky machine under your desk,\u00a0 plugged into the wall. But now we take this pocket universe with us wherever we go, one tap away from taking us with it. We commune with it on street corners, in bed, on the road, in the restaurant, while walking the dog. Can’t let an hour go by without checking in.<\/p>\n

In the linear world our bodies inhabit, this is clearly obsession at work, a derangement of natural priority. But in the digital world our minds increasingly inhabit, it is disconnection that seems the unnatural state. We could <\/em>straddle both these universes, but only if we had twice as much time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1922, science fiction writer Ray Cummings explained half of reality, saying, “Time is what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}