Another year, with 12 months and 8,760 hours, has come and gone. Was it too fast, too slow or something in between?
That depends on which clock you use. By the machine clock, time keeps moving faster and faster as the digital universe expands at an exponential pace. There’s a billion people on Facebook and 1.4 billion smartphones in the world. Last year people posted one trillion photos in cyberspace. Google’s data farms transmitted 1.7 megabytes of random data for every man, woman and child on the planet, every second. There’s not enough time for that much information. That’s too many answers with not enough questions.
By the human clock, time passes more slowly. Individual humans can actually pause, rewind or speed up time as they need. This allows time for reflection, patience and better thinking. It’s how we look back at the year 2016. What just happened? Where are we going next? What are the really important questions and answers?
With the human clock we have time to measure our past year’s successes and disappointments, our milestones, shared moments and important conversations. In our community we can make a list of some of these.
In 2016 we elected good local government leaders. We supported new local taxes for libraries, schools, promised road repairs and infrastructure. We had robust conversations about affordable housing and the homeless (and we agreed to keep working on our housing problems again this year, remember?). We shared food at our local food pantries and we all contributed and benefitted from a sturdy local economy with lots of jobs and diversity.
We also legalized marijuana and now in this new year we must anxiously watch how our landscapes, marketplaces and laws will change.
New marijuana laws are just one of the really big changes that will keep happening to us. More and more we feel unable to control very much. But that is not true on a local level where how we treat each other, vote for our own laws and support each other’s families and businesses still belong to us.
When we let ourselves get overwhelmed by the Internet of Things, we lose touch with our core values and taught principles. We get impatient and we get too deadened by too much data.
Turning the calendar from one year to the next is a good time to remind ourselves about a few basic timekeeping principles.
For example, fashion and fads are not the same as culture. The Internet of Things pushes all kinds of memes, celebrities and virtual realities at us that we mistake for a lasting quality. A world run by machine clocks mistakes politics and partisanship for real government and a permanent institution. Real facts and real science are being obliterated by a Google data universe that has no limits, filters or pause buttons.
Year by year — if we let it — we are amusing ourselves to death. We are allowing computer-assisted impulses to overload our human clocks. We just learned it might be too late to save real facts from fake ones. If we are being more and more surrounded by fake news how are we reacting to it all? With fake emotions and fake alarm?
We all just got one year older, but did we get any smarter? The machine clocks and data servers put terabytes of information into our brains. But we need our human clocks to help us unwind it all, cancel out the stupid parts and declare ourselves all the wiser because of it.
— Rollie Atkinson
