Research Report: "New Media" and the Significance of Digital Time and Simulated Realities in Cyberspace
Jackson, Timothy Allen. “Towards a New Media Aesthetic,” in Reading Digital Culture, ed. David Trend (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2001), pp. 347-353
1. Abstract
In “Towards a New Media Aesthetic,” Timothy Jackson outlines some of the major cultural changes resulting from new media technologies such as the Internet, CD-ROM, digital audio and video, and other forms. Cyberspace above all allows users unprecedented freedom to create simulated realities and confront the normative analog passing of time to which humans are naturally accustomed. The fragmentation of time produced by the “endless, yet asynchronous digital march” of cyberspace produces a unique opportunity to more closely investigate issues of personal and collective identities in particular.
2. Description
The emergence of new digital media is rapidly revolutionizing our world in almost every area imaginable, including communication, education, knowledge transfer, and art. More specifically, cyberspace as a form of new media allows for an unprecedented amount of freedom in user’s abilities to create a simulated reality that challenge typical conceptions about the passages of time. The passing of digital time in cyberspace differs from our naturally human analog passage of time, and the reconciliation of these two time flows marks a challenge unfaced by any previous generation.
Our bodies remain in analog time of the physical, Jackson explains, while our minds are captivated by the new rules of digital time, paving the way for innovative ways to behave and organize ideas in cyberspace with new rules of time. This allows for the cultivation of a picnoleptic state, a state in which “ruptures of the mind/body [as] observed in daydreams, or moments of intense concentration, temporarily disable sensory receptors.” This describes the condition when someone is so engrossed in thought, or more commonly, digital activity on a computer screen, that the present, physical reality of the body is eclipsed by cognitive activity. This picnoleptic state is significant in that it perfectly illustrates the digital interruption of analogic life.
Within “New Media” Jackson frequently references the philosophy of Paul Virilio, a French cultural theorist who believes we have finally collided with the last hurdle to instantaneous, globalized information. Virilio writes, for example, that, “Having attained this absolute speed, we face the prospect in the twenty-first century of the invention of a perspective based on real time, replacing the spatial perspective, the perspective based on real space...” Virilio identifies here differences in digital versus analog time flow and a consequently facilitated rupture between mind and body. Cyberspace has disrupted our naturally analog time flow with something much more fragmented.
3. Commentary
Attention to how time is different in cyberspace than our normal analog realities is especially relevant in online blogging activity. Studying cyberspace from the perspective that it is a cultural phenomenon can extend one’s understanding of the dynamics and activity of blogs, as well as its advantages for creating simulated realities and identities. Jackson’s comment that, “events in digital time exist without an event horizon” epitomizes the logic of the Internet blog and the complexity of time in a fragmented environment. Blogs are representations of events that occurred in real time, but are presented in short, abrupt snippets. The result is a highly condensed database of memories that are organized in such a way that days/events are tidily self-contained. With a single click a reader may jump and to a blog entry describing an event or commentary written 30 days in the past, and then just as easily click to an entry completed yesterday. At one point Jackson muses, “What if we aged in a non-linear manner, jumping from infancy to late life and back to pubescence in a manner of seconds or minutes, days, or centuries?” Indeed, blogs do well to simulate this type of virtual time travel. Blogging maintains much of the linearity of analog time in its basic, chronological layout, but allows new flexibility to the movement and passage of time as a result of its position in cyberspace.
A blog entry is also usually written with an intended audience and purpose in mind—the usual motivation of a blogger is to create a certain personal identity or personal representation of their memories and past experiences—a highly-controlled, invented reality. Blogs as an exercise of self-expression allow authors to sort through their brain’s storage of memories and perceptions (Jackson would call these topics of aesthetics), and then present a new, simulated reality that has been tailored to the blogger’s partiality. When a person recounts an event from the pervious weekend, the information they deem mention-worthy, and their additional commentary and thoughts they choose to include, create a reality entirely unique to the author’s experience that is different than how the experience might have been perceived in real time. When compared to the regular cyclical flow of analog time, blogs tend to be to-the-point in their nature by completely omitting the “ordinary” or regular passing of time in which no great or note-worthy event occur. The consequences of such new digital technologies on the re-creation human experience will be central to our project’s exploration of blogs as a way to represent time.
4. Resources for Further Study
- Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
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