Choice is freedom, but not when it’s constantly for its own sake.
By archiving everything, we think that we can store it, but time is not data. It cannot be stored.
Not just is the digital now far from the present, but it’s in direct competition with it, and this is because not just am I absent from it, but so are you. Not just are we absent from it, but so is everyone else. And therein lies its greatest convenience and horror. I can order foreign language books in the middle of the night, shop for Parisian macarons, and leave video messages that get picked up later. At all times, I can operate at a different rhythm and pace from you, while I sustain the illusion that I’m tapped into you in real time.
The digital world cannibalizes time, and in doing so, I want to suggest that what it threatens is the completeness of ourselves. It threatens the flow of love. But we don’t need to let it. We can choose otherwise. We’ve seen again and again just how creative technology can be, and in our lives and in our actions, we can choose those solutions and those innovations and those moments that restore the flow of time instead of fragmenting it. We can slow down and we can tune in to the ebb and flow of time. We can choose to take time back.
The Blogmopped 