The world has been shrunk down to a global village, the internet has developed a personal sense of humour, and we've all become instantly contactable all the time. It's nothing 'new' per se, but it is revolutionary. Broadly speaking we've seen time double, triple, quadruple.
Previously if you wanted to talk to someone, you would travel the distance necessary until your voice was audible, and you would speak with them. Face to face, person to person, voice to voice. Conversations were exclusive back then, you could only talk to as many people as were around you. And that was nice.
Letters introduced conversations that could span distance, no longer were we bound by geography, but we could communicate with people in foreign lands. Letters also introduced the delayed conversation, if you wanted someone to know something, you could send a paper emissary in your place to recount your thoughts. Now one person could hear multiple 'voices' from across the world, but it was still regulated by effort.
The time it took to put pen to paper and then to transport that paper to someone was far greater than the time it took for that person to eventually read your words. Things weren't getting out of hand for anyone receiving 'too many letters', unless you determined to reply to all your fan mail (ahem, Ringo).
This is the first hint of the stretching of time. Letters function on 'theoretical time', they are waiting in a queue for their recipient to stop, sit, and read them. As if standing over the shoulder of the person you are talking to face to face, letters represent a person waiting to 'cut in' and talk to you when you get a minute.
Without there being a real danger of letter's taking over your life, we can begin to see the potential problem with theoretical time. If people constantly keep lining up behind the person you're talking to, you'll never get the time to talk/read/respond to all of them. The moment we extend ourselves beyond our physical face-to-face capacity, we begin to juggle borrowed time.
Then take letters and times then by a thousand and that's what we have going on at the moment, but even worse. We are in a dinner party of myriad competing voices, navigating a conversation with five people simultaneously, each with ten people waiting in line behind.
We've extended ourselves into theoretical time with text messages, emails, phone-calls, voicemails, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, Tumblr. We are an emerging generation of Ringo Starrs, enslaved by a backlog of communications that we have received but cannot properly engage with.
And as we hurtle towards our fiscal cliff of insuperable time-debts we have hardly realised what all this 'efficiency' has cost us. We are faux-celebrities awash in a swarm of paparazzi, constantly and continually having our attention demanded and our image recorded. We are held captive by a faceless audience's approval of our superficial and contrived lives.
More than just being relentlessly contactable, we have also dragged this chaos into our private relationships. Not only have our dinner-party-lives become a hydra, but we have sacrificed our solace to the god of 'likes'. Where social media was born to extend our capacity to relate to people, it has ironically robbed us of relationships in their truest form.
It's now almost impossible to engage with anyone for more than an hour without them voluntarily checking to see if someone is tapping them on the shoulder to talk. We cannot just be with each other anymore, we cannot be fully present without double checking that we aren't missing out on human contact in a cheaper, digital form. We are desperately interconnected and hopelessly alone, we are 'famous' and yet not properly known at all.
I sometimes play a game with friends when we are out at dinner. We all stack our phones in the middle of the table and we leave them there. If anyone touches their phone then they buy dinner or drinks for everyone. It's a necessary gimmick to liberate us from our shared addiction. It's hard to not be able to take a photo of your dinner when it arrives, and you don't get to Google every minor piece of trivia you're trying to remember for your story to make sense.
But what you lose in irrelevant knee-jerk habits, you gain in genuine experience of human relationships.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of all of this is that we somehow believe that we have chosen the better option for ourselves and our relationships. We have been sold the lie of quantity over quality. And as we drag our chaotic dinner party lives along to every minor social gathering, we are pursuing a life that seems desirable but at the cost of actually living it. We produce the appearance of a life that even we desire to attain.
The future of telecommunications is not to get people's phones out of their hands and up onto their heads, constantly in front of their eyes. But it is to get their phones out of their hands full stop, to cut down on this constant stream of media operating on theoretical time.
Perhaps the greatest lesson that this telecommunication-generation needs to learn is what drove the boom in the first place: the true value of spending quality time with other people.
Sam Manchester is currently a theology student with an inescapable sociology degree behind him. In an attempt to reconcile the two, he reflects and writes about their coalescence in everyday life.
Sam's archive of articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/sam-manchester.html