My household god at the moment is Thomas Hylland Eriksen. I first stumbled upon him when taking a ethnology class a couple of years ago and two of his books was on the reading-list.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a social anthropologist at the university of Oslo and his latest book is called "Øyeblikkets tyranni. Rask og langsom tid i informasjonssamfunnet" or in its Swedish translation "Ögonblickets tyranni. Snabb och långsam tid i informationssamhället".
The topis is "fast and slow time" and Hylland Eriksen argues that "slow time" ought to be at the top of the wishlist for the inhabitants of the information society. He points out a phenomen which I have recognized in my own life, namely the breaking up of time in smaller and smaller pieces.
Fast time, in contradiction to slow time, contains a lot of interruption. The continues time between phonecalls, sms, meetings, faxes und und und is short and getting shorter every day.
Hylland Eriksen describes a normal day at the office. He reads Aftenposten while waiting for the green light on his way to work, reads a second newspaper while waiting for the elevator, turns his computer on and finds he has recived 21 new email since yesterday afternoon. He gets a cup of coffee and is about to start writing his book but only has to answer the phone and find som information on the Internet first. He is on the phone for a couple of minutes and then he doesn't find what he is looking for on the net and starts answering emails instead.
In a short second of self-knowledge, he realises this isn't gonna be a book unless he turns his computer off. He does that and starts taking notes by hand.
In the next sentence he admits that last part isn't really true, he did not write �yeblikkets tyranni by hand. But he makes his point anyway - this is what I do almost every morning.
I sit at my desk, coffee cup to the left, and I have a clear ambition. Despite this clear ambition, I get lost in the Internet djungle almost every day and often lose more then 45 minutes before I realise what I'm doing and try to get back on track.
So what is his point then?
That we all should throw our computers, cell phones and faxes away and return to writing with a quill?
Not really, he is no advocate of a world without Internet. He is not a nostalgic person who yearns for the long gone but safe peasant society where everybody lived in small villages and knew eachother.
His ambition is to make the unwanted effects of the information society visible and this is something I feel is important because I often feel as if I spread myself thin. I sometimes, or rather oft to be honest, want to turn everything off (cellphone, normal phone, computer) and get some time to think without getting input from all around all the time. I want "slow time"!
But speed is addictive and once you have become used to it, it's difficult to quit.
- Hello, my name is Steffanie and I'm a speed addict.
- Hello Steffanie!
