Informationsociety

The day is not the same without VG! (Commercial for A famous Norwegian newspaper.)
If we have not read the latest VG, we have problems with conversation with people we meet.
I will come with the assertion that the slow time should be on top of any wish list in the information society. Here we have a common cause in the hurried time we live in. We live our lives in a chaos of, soap operas, phone, e-mail, competitive, burnout and constant new technology. Children and young people sits in their rooms and doing homework at the same time as they chat, play games, send Sms, listening to music, watching television and answering questions from parents. Research shows that in fact there is already thirty-year-olds who are mentally exhausted by the burden the human brain is exposed to. Information overload! Something is about to go completely wrong.

One would not think that all the time-saving technology - from the filofax for the e-mail and mobile phone - would cause all got worse than ever? Availability approaching one hundred percent. There are inaccessible, we must fight for, the right to think thoughts that are longer than five centimeters. It is more of everything: Electronic media has not resulted in the write fewer books. The Internet has not done that people travel less by air. Fax and e-mail has not meant that it’s called less. All this and much more stacked atop each other. It will happen soon, making it difficult to concentrate on what is happening now. Our culture is about to become his own worst enemy, where development is about to be the implication. Everybody knows well the feeling that they do not get done what they should because it is something else they need to do first?

In his diary, the musician Brian Eno writes on trends in popular music in recent decades. He writes, among other things, that until the mid-1990s, it was possible to distinguish between distinct phases and trends in pop and rock. Heavy, glam psychedelia, and symforock was replaced by reggae, punk and new wave, then came ska and synthpop. Eno writes further that such a historical division has become impossible. Now we have everything at once. All possible retro-wave (nostalgia for everything from the fifties to the early nineties) and all kinds of mixtures.
Without saying it straight out, Eno focuses on a contemporary phenomenon - vertical stacking. Everything is on top of each other at the same time, without order. There are a lot of noise, and noise everywhere, but it does not really lead in any direction. It is easy to see the disease character of many television programs, in popular newspapers and on the World Wide Web. Some also believe that vertical stacking is also a good description of doing things over and over again and the new pattern of working life.

In another context, the theoretician Paul Virilio focused on communications technology compression of time-space. With the emergence of the satellite-based communications - mobile phones, internet, and cable TV - we come to a point where no longer delays exist. Pauses, the spaces and the wait are over. It requires quick decisions everywhere, and the result is not always the best.

Critics of speed are as old as modernity itself. Many were concerned about what the tremendous speed would do with the human psyche when the first steam trains came!
The spread of mobile telecommunications, internet I-pod and I-Pad, is about to fill all the spaces. Before the email's time, it was agreed to wait a week before you got the answer to a letter. One could use the waiting time to something reasonable. Now we are impatient for a day. Before the the latest news reached us in the early evening. Now you can get them all the time on a mobile phone. If we don’t speak for half a minute, we are perceived as something is wrong. That something happens all the time is a guarantee for that nothing happens.
We have left the days when cigarette replaced the pipe, cornflakes replaced porridge, phone replaced visiting. When there is war in Afghanistan, we trust that the media coverage is direct. The delay shrinks. Everything should be pushed into an intense simultaneity, and the amount of experience increases. Everything has its price. The cost is that we get a time where everything stands still in the furious pace.

Got to take the power back!

Every night in the wintertime, I take my walk along the road, trying to get my body in shape. As I do my walking there in the dark, my mind goes everywhere. Sometimes I look at the stars and take a journey to experience the life out there (if there is any at all). Another walk, I compose a new song for my band. One of these nights, walking there all alone, I was thinking: “So quiet!” No sounds but a train longing for its end station. No sound of children playing out in the snow. Only the monotone sound my footsteps were making mixed with the sound of the running train in the distance. Some years ago, walking along the road, I could hear and watch children out in the playground, making fun playing all of their games. Often, I could watch them all, along with their parents playing the games as well. Out there in the winter night, with the moon and the stars above we could say hello to each others, make conversations with our neighbors, and exchange information. Where are they now? Where have they gone? Where are they hiding, making no noise?