Tonight I’m leading another discussion at the Berkman Center, open to all.

Last time, we talked about Net friendship, and it went really well in part because I only talked for a few minutes at the beginning. It turned into a very interesting, very informal discussion.

That’s what I’m aiming for tonight as well. I’m going to open with just a few comments. I’m not sure what I’m going to say, but perhaps something like this:

We have an image of time as a series of “nows” that march past the razor blade of the present. That’s an incoherent view (IMO). It’s also inconsistent with our lived experience of time which is far clumpier and invested: We experience time as seasons (annual to daily) and memory (the clustering of what matters to us). We can’t get to nows no matter how hard we try. (Important note on the domain of discourse: I’m a westerner. I make no claims about other cultural perspectives.) My hypothesis: It’s harder to make the time-is-nows mistake on the Net because on the Net we’re directly confronted with our tangly threads of interest.

But, because of the way we experience the Net — facing forward, looking at a screen — the fabric of time turns into raveling threads that constantly demand us to re-weave them.

I’d like us to talk about how we experience time on the Internet. E.g., I way too frequently go to do something online and three links later can’t remember what I was trying to do. At first I thought this was a sign of oncoming old age, and there may be an element of truth to that, but it seems also to be encouraged by the Net itself.

I also hope that we talk about the ways in which different Net tools — email, mailing lists, IM, etc. — present time.

But obviously if the discussion works, it’ll go where it wants.

The session is open to all and we serve pizza. 6-7:30 pm tonight at the Baker House [map] [Technorati tag: berkman ]

Categories: Uncategorized dw