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Student Affairs Daniel Salter - Penn State University Editor Stuart Brown - StudentAffairs.com Dana Christman - New Mexico State University Summer 2002 • Vol. 3, No. 2 |
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Thomas Hylland Eriksen |
Gerry Muir Associate Dean for Student Life Drew University |
Posted July 31, 2002 Student Affairs Online, 3 (Summer)
With the rise of new technologies- pagers, cell phones, FAX machines, email, and the World Wide Web- few people would deny that we have entered the Information Age. Information is available to us in all forms, 24 hours a day. With this new access came a promise of new freedoms and increased ease in completing tasks. No longer would it be the norm to wait a week for a reply to a letter. With email, the expectation for a reply can be within the day, if not the hour. The web provides up to the minute reporting on events, allowing us to view the news at our convenience, rather than waiting for an evening broadcast. Technology has given us more time, more freedom; at least, that was the promise of these technologies. Yet, for many of us, time has become an even more precious commodity, as pagers provide colleagues and friends with total access to an individual at any time of day. There is now so much information at our fingertips, that finding information is no longer the challenge, but rather, sorting through all the information that is readily available. Time is now a precious commodity. These technologies are geared to save time, make tasks easier, yet Professor Eriksen’s tome questions whether the development of these technologies has really created a freer existence, or rather, quite the opposite.
In reading Tyranny of the Moment, I felt the connection of a shared experience with the author, though Professor Eriksen wrote from a distinctly Scandinavian perspective, reflective of his work at the University of Oslo. He presented several examples of what seems an understood if not formally defined experience; the feeling of being overwhelmed by the twenty to fifty email messages waiting in one’s in-box in the morning, and having to set aside the first hour of every day just to answer communications that came in between the hours of 6:00pm and 8:00am; the frustration of having to choose between one of the ten Internet services soliciting my business, much like the multiple long distance carriers, cable and/or digital TV vendors, and cell phone manufacturers. It can be a blessing and a curse, the number and variety of choices presented through the development of technology. Professor Eriksen addresses this experience in the introduction, where he proposes the central claim of the book:
The unhindered and massive flow of information in our time is about to fill all the gaps [in time], leading as a consequence to a situation where everything threatens to become a hysterical series of saturated moments, without a before-and-after, a here-and-there to separate them. Indeed, even the here-and-now is threatened since the next moment comes so quickly that is become difficult to live in the present. . . The consequences of this extreme hurriedness are overwhelming; both the past and the future as mental categories are threatened by the tyranny of the moment. (p. 2-3)
Professor Eriksen builds on his thesis in the following chapters, first focusing on the present transition being experienced with the access and usage of information. With the rise of the Internet, there is no lack of information on any topic, from the most general to the minutest. Whereas just a decade ago, the challenge would have been to find information on certain topics, now the challenge is to filter the information that is thrust upon us. As more information is made available, the rare commodity becomes our attention to any one item. It can be felt as an acceleration of activity. Professor Eriksen elaborates on this in the following chapters, showing how society has faced these accelerations in the past, with the rise of the written word over oral history, the standardization of time measurement, and the creation of currency to manage goods and trade. With any major societal transition, the pace of life changes, leaving less slow time- time to relax or reflect - and replacing it with a barrage of activities and tasks that create and fill what he termed as fast time.
Professor Eriksen theorized that with the rise in the amount of fast time people are asked to cope with, the consequences would be varied. Marriage and other long term commitments could suffer as people seek instant gratification experiences. The transfer of knowledge, whether from parents or university professors, would need to adapt to accommodate the vast amount of information and how students will access information. New skills will be needed to manage information flow. We would witness exponential growth of the Internet and other entities of our world.
Yet, this volume is not pessimistic, nor is it a lament for simpler times. At its heart, Tyranny of the Moment seeks to do three things; highlight the phenomenon of fast time, have its readers recognize the by-products of our transition into the Information Age, and offer suggestions for how we might manage the transition. In the final chapter, “The Pleasures of Slow Time,” Professor Eriksen offers ideas for how to handle the influx of information and opportunities, and challenges the reader to make a personal management system for the resources that are available to them.
Overall, Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age is a volume which will provide a student affairs administrator with comfort, through the shared understanding of difficulties during a time of new expectations and possibilities, as well as history and practical suggestions for creating a personal resource management plan. It is a quick read and sparked excellent conversations with colleagues on what the department’s resource management plan should be for our staff. It will prove especially useful to the middle manager or senior student affairs officer.
