Time-space reversal: from colonizing space to taming time
In digital socialization, social proximity becomes temporal: closer means earlier, faster.
Physical time remains untouchable. Historical time is collapsing. Digital time becomes operational. The digital sensorium seeks to tame time—just as the natural sensorium served to colonize space. Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.
For a biological being, time is one-dimensional and exists only as “now,” while space is three-dimensional wherever you can reach. For a digital being, god-like ubiquity makes all space “here,” while time becomes operational—it can be stopped, sped up, or stretched.
Biology has some means to operate with time—in the form of storing energy, like body fat or hiding food for future nutrition. The first humans added the time-binding “technology” of family and tribe: younglings or the community would take care of the elderly in the future.
Marking territory for “future reference” is seen in animals. Humans also marked (and still mark) territory and objects; those marks evolved into symbols. Marks of celestial events revealed natural cycles—seasons—and helped humans discover time.
Marking celestial events led to the calendar, a precursor to writing. A popular theory, reiterated by Harold Innis in 1951, held that the first fixed date was July 19, 4241 B.C., when the Egyptians recorded that Sirius rose at sunrise, an important predictor of the Nile’s cycles.[i]
Oral tradition provided efficient tools of time-binding. Sagas and songs recorded important past events to preserve tribal instructions. But writing enabled direct control over the future: in temple states, priests’ orders dictated future expenditures of resources and labor.
Over time, humans developed various tools for operating with time: arts, clocks, locks, education, parenting, saving, loans, insurance, investment, budgeting, contracts, diaries, wills, vaccination, cosmetic surgery, fridges—it all trained us to live in the space of time.
Electricity revolutionized time-binding. If the mechanical clock enabled the capitalist exploitation of labor, radio and television allowed capitalizing on leisure. Time spent with radio and TV shows launched the attention economy. At light speed, leisure reversed into labor.
Most importantly, audio and video recording unlocked new temporal dimensions. For the first time, humans could not only operate with or within time but change the flow of time itself. Electronic time could be stopped, accelerated, reversed, rewound, or restarted at any point.
Media evolution progressed from enhancing space control (Promethean media) to perfecting time control (writing, electronic and digital media). With Earth ringed by Sputnik, spatial extensions have hit their limit.[ii] The time has come for humans to extend in time.
Video games introduced new temporal dimensions. In Clash of Clans, gems allow building facilities or troops faster. Time tokens may become currency in the digital economy, where time spending, extension, compression, repetition, stopping, reversing are already becoming assets.
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The sensorium is reversing from physical to digital navigation, with the implosion of the spatial “everywhere” into “here” and the explosion of the temporal “now” into several time dimensions, with different characteristics of velocity, flow, continuity, direction, etc.
Astronomical time flips into customizable timing. As digital users, we easily navigate time-related options such as “save,” “undo,” “restart,” “reload,” “continue,” “load last checkpoint,” “fast forward,” and “2x speed.”
Even the physical sensorium now calls for time manipulation. When watching a game at the stadium, you can feel the lack of a replay to watch an exciting moment again. At a boring event, a fast-forward button would also be welcome—just like when we skip through dull movies.
As the digital sensorium is mostly social, distance, direction, duration, and timespan shift from physical to social characteristics; they represent the distance between people (or their products), direction toward others or crowds, time passed since someone’s actions, and so on.
However, the spatial characteristics of social connections—like close or distant relationships—are likely fading residues of physical reality. As space flips to time for the digital being, temporal features come to dominate our digital sense of others.
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In sensing others, the shift from spatial to temporal is driven by the principle of relevance in our newsfeeds: visibility is defined by friends’ latest activities or by the latest “massiveness”—virality. Delayed responses lose value, so you need to jump on the bandwagon faster.
In digital socialization, social proximity becomes temporal: closer means earlier, faster. We want to join tribe chiefs—influencers—or viral topics as soon as possible. Timing becomes a measure of social distance—and not only for learning the news.
In the real-world hierarchy, status depended on how close one was to high-ranked members of the community. In the digital, one can harvest more responses and status affirmation by being earlier in a viral interaction, as if it were a Ponzi scheme.
And it is a Ponzi scheme. Those joining later pay a “tribute” of responses to those who joined earlier. Timing matters—later reactions have lower value. “I liked it before it was cool!” is a status claim.
Earlier is the new closer. This space-time reversal in our digital sensorium adds to social media emotionality and agitation. The digital environment disfavors the cognitive delay of literacy that allowed deliberation and reflection, and the digital sensorium complies.
The viral nature of social resonance, amplified on digital platforms, shapes waves of user activity. This wave pattern forms a “digital calendar” that replaces the solar–lunar one (already disrupted by electricity). Day or night, spring or fall no longer matter.
Digital seasons are defined by what is buzzing. The social media climate is shaped not by torrential mass movements of air and water, but by torrential coagulations of crowds. Viral tides are the new seasons—except they are sporadic, not regular.
As viral tides are reactive, they can’t be extrapolated into the future. The digital calendar records only the past, resembling oral tradition. Living by it is analog—like the oral mind, which finds meaning by linking the new with the old, not by abstracting ideas.
Physical time remains untouchable. Historical time is collapsing. Digital time becomes operational. The digital sensorium seeks to tame time—just as the natural sensorium served to colonize space.
Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[i] Innis, Harold. (1951). The Bias of Communication. The later views of astronomers and historians on the exact date of this event varies, but the idea stands.
[ii] See: Mir, Andrey. (2010). The Chain of Singularities. Why deep space exploration will never happen.
‘To tame time’ or to colonise time ?
I have long wondered if the rise in Alzheimers with it increasingly being seen in younger cohorts is related to the rise of electronic media. Firstly TV and now social media. Since our memories are intrinsically linked to both physical body space and disembodied mind, collectively breaking these links could lead to the shrinkage in the brain that is responsible for this process and a dependence upon false or early embedded memories and amnesia of later learned social mores. Who knows?
If those in power do it would serve their profit margins best to remain silent.