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2022 Was the Year of Timeless Time
Or, Toward Timefulness in 2023
During 2022, I became more aware of what I’m calling “timeless time.”
Timeless time didn’t emerge because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic merely amplified timeless time to the point where we could perceive it.
On-demand media and algorithms have rendered time timeless, fundamentally changing our lived experience.
The Medium Is the Message — and the Massage!
The famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan said of time:
Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “space” has vanished. We now live in a global village … a simultaneous happening.
McLuhan lived from 1911 to 1980. He was talking about television collapsing our sense of time and space, creating what he called “allatonceness.”
Battles in Vietnam didn’t happen then or there, to be experienced later through written dispatches carried overseas for months. They happened now and here through nightly audio-visual news broadcasts.
It didn’t matter if the footage had been recorded days earlier on reels, which were flown back to the news studio. The experience for viewers felt immediate in time and place. Television collapsed time…
