Relationship with Time

Look at how we’ve changed the capturing of the passing of time. Before we rewired our brains to connect personal with commercial, down time as wasted opportunity, we used to talk about our accomplishments as memories. We remember the marathon we ran, the little moments that made that day feel so significant. That marathon included training, but we... See more

Art critic Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 explores how we entered a culture that battles against rest and time itself. A nonstop 24/7 culture that never turns off. If attention is finite, a 24/7 society fights to expand the surface area of waking time to capture more of it.

“The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same.