Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, Index of Contents
Reader's Digest Series of Excerpts and Quotes.
Reader's Digest Series of Excerpts and Quotes from 1932.
Reader's Digest Series of Excerpts and Quotes from 1932.
Reader's Digest Series of Excerpts and Quotes from 1932.
The way we live now has changed steadily in the last hundred years and drastically in the last ten years.
Our modern lives appear to restrict our connection with nature's rhythms and sounds. A little more than a a century ago, before electricity, cell phones, and e-mail; most people woke up when the sun came up, went to bed when the sun set, ate homegrown meals, and worked close to where they lived.
People spoke of moments as "fleeting", memories as "lasting", admonished their children with such phrases as, "haste makes waste".
Stories started with "Once upon a time", and we actually had a sense of what that meant. Days were based more on light than hours and years more on seasons than calendars. It took weeks for a letter to cross the country and more than that for a response.
|
|
Time was set by nature's rhythms; such as, tides, lunar cycles, seasons, stars, sunrise, sunset, shadows, and plants. As early as 4 B.C., a scribe of Alexander the Great observed that the leaves of certain trees opened during the day and closed during the night.
That kind of subtle awareness is lost when we have clocks, wrist watches, appointments, deadlines, and favorite television shows which come on at specific time schedules.
Since the advent of the wind-up clock (1876) and the battery-operated watch (1956), there has been a shift from living the more simplified existence to greater influences of all kinds of technology.
Phrases today reveal a sense of urgency about time: lack of time, quick time, real time, face time, dealine, check list, multitask, behind, finding time, making time, losing time, filling time, killing time, spending time, wasting time, on time, out of time, time frame, and fast-forward.
Consumer technology traditionlly has promised to save time and labor, freeing us to pursue activities that really matter, and few would deny that consumer technologies have made the lives of people easier during the past century.
For most people, it is no longer necessary to do laundry by hand, to calculaste numerical figures in our heads, or to make bread from scratch. Consumer products lure us with a wide spectrum of promises then crank up our lives, and rev up our expectations. Over the years people have consumed those promises as fast as affluence would allow.
More and more, what promises to save people time consumes their time. Consumer technology requires prioritizing needs, selecting brands, buying, installing, maintaining, and upgrading.
Consumer technologies have reached a point of diminishing returns. Now the homes of people are filled with labor-saving devices, yet the use of time has not benefited many.
One study has shown that the amount of labor-saving, simplifying, time-reducing, promise-making technology which people have in their homes actually does little to reduce the amount of time which is spent doing household chores; however, they remain obsessed with productivity and efficiency. How much is actually accomplished in a day, an hour, in ten minutes?
Word News Contact:
comments@wordnews.info
