Time was, observed Jeremy Rifkin, when there were no watches, when the seasons determined daily activity, when faster didn`t necessarily mean better. Today computers operate at a speed beyond human comprehension. The more we save time, the more time we spend trying to save it and the less time we seem to have.
It`s time, in other words, to slow down.
Rifkin, a Chicago-born author, sociologist, public-policy consultant and lecturer, has made a career of explaining things about which the average reader has no questions until he reads Rifkin`s answers. Indeed, his latest topic is one that most of us probably have not taken the time to ponder, yet it may lead to an environmental disaster on par with toxic waste, he contends.
By pulling together research from 125 scholarly books and 500 articles, he builds a case in his new book, ”Time Wars” (Henry Holt & Co., $18.95), that the ubiquitous computer has overthrown the clock, just as the clock overthrew the calendar during the Industrial Revolution as the means by which we measure our lives.
Rifkin says that because of the speed at which the computer works, thereby redefining efficiency, our lives are spinning dangerously out of control.
His latest effort is an obvious offshoot of his previous best-seller,
”Entropy,” in which he profiled the winding down of the universe.
In ”Time Wars” he traces the history of man`s perception of time, from Neolithic man`s mere observance of circadian rhythms to the computerized
”nanosecond time frame” now being forced, with potentially dire results, upon the Western world.
Along the way, in his new book he supplies intriguing information the average reader probably didn`t know:
”Hours” did not exist until the 13th Century, when Benedictine monks, obsessed with the idea that idleness was the ultimate evil, invented them, along with the mechanical clock and the schedule. Minutes did not make their debut on the clock face until the 17th Century, and seconds were unknown until shortly before the American Revolution.
The concept of ”efficiency,” that work is valued chiefly by how much it produces and how quickly, did not exist until 1880, when an obscure economist, Frederick Taylor, invented it in the first factory time-and-motion study.
But fascinating trivia is not Rifkin`s goal, nor are hours, minutes and seconds his worry.
”In the last 10 years,” Rifkin said, ”we`ve introduced the nanosecond. That`s a billionth of a second, and in the time it takes for you to snap your fingers, 500 million of them have gone by. Between the time you ask a computer a question and time it responds, that computer has the capacity to process as much data as all the words that have ever been spoken by all the humans who have ever lived on this planet.
”It`s beyond comprehension, but the computer is establishing a new pace for activity. So what happens when our kids, in the 21st Century, grow up in a world where they`re actually organizing time as a total abstraction? They can`t feel it. They can`t experience it or participate in it. It`s beyond the realm of participation.”
Despite the mind-bending implausibility of a nanosecond, Rifkin said, its pace already is creeping into the American workforce.
The supermarket cashier who used to chat with her customers is desperately silent now as she drags milk, bread and cereal over an electronic ”eye” that reads their Universal Product Codes. The computer monitors her pace, and if she falls behind, she might lose her job, Rifkin said.
In some industries the computer operator has just 17 seconds to deal with any data on his screen, or it disappears and his job is jeopardized.
Meanwhile, high school and college students imbued with the staccato demands of video games have attention spans so short that little can be gotten across to them by books, which they no longer read, or professors, to whom they no longer have the patience to listen, Rifkin said. The students would rather ”access” the information, speedily and in truncated form, on their personal computers.
Rifkin even has a doomsday scenario that a few years ago lived in the realm of science fiction.
”In public policy,” he said, ”the ultimate decision of whether we drop a nuclear bomb-the biggest social decision we`ll ever face in the history of our species-will be left to computers because human response time is now considered too slow.
”We`ve lost all control. Time has sped out of the realm of our participation.”
The result, Rifkin said, is increasing burnout in the work force and an invitation to massive rebellion, just as agrarian peasants rebelled against rigid factory schedules early in the Industrial Revolution.
”There are therapy groups going on now in California and other parts of the country for computer people who are now so oriented toward nanosecond time and so sped up they can`t accommodate the slower rhythms of social discourse,” Rifkin said.
”Relationships are breaking up. Families are under strain. These individuals are literally in another time world.
”The computer culture we`ve created now is so accelerating our lifestyles that people can`t catch up anymore to the flow of activities. It`s reaching the point of temporal gridlock.
”You have spatial gridlock in Manhattan when the cabs just don`t move. There`s a temporal gridlock going on in places like Manhattan now. People are frantic. They can`t keep schedules, they can`t meet deadlines and they can`t keep relationships because there are just too many time demands.”
Rifkin predicted that the new discipline of ”temporal science” in the next few years will ”emerge as the new intellectual frontier,” after which it will become one of the most volatile political issues in society.
”We have a real crisis because our social time bears faint resemblance to the incoming and outgoing tides or the changing solar pattern during the day,” he said. ”The result is stress-related disease.
”The thing I`m trying to establish with this book is that time is an environmental issue. We always thought of the environment as spatial. What I`m trying to get across now is that time is more a critical environmental issue than space because nature has its own time frame in how it recycles and replenishes.
”We have reached a point at which we are producing and consuming at such an accelerated rate that nature can`t possibly recycle and replenish at the pace we`re demanding.
”That`s why we have garbage dumps that can`t be absorbed. We`re exhausting the resources-soil, water. Species are becoming extinct. You cannot press the human species into a nanosecond-programmed future without tremendous rebellion, biologically, emotionally and spiritually.”
Rifkin offers escape hatches for those who do not wish to become microchips in the world computer bank. He noted that urbanites are beginning to flee big cities in search of a quieter rural life, and he predicted that the defection will increase as people realize the hazards of the relentless pace of modern life.
”The first thing is to be aware of it,” he said. ”There has to be an awareness of time. It`s the most intimate part of our lives; it`s the most important social invention we`ve ever come up with, yet it`s the least analyzed, discussed and debated.
”If we can begin to detach ourselves and get a sense of how time operates as a social and cultural invention, that`s the first step toward liberation.”
For the individual, a change in watch styles might serve as an effective talisman.
”The analog watch is a circle,” Rifkin said. ”It`s an analogue of the planet and the solar day. It`s an acknowledgement that time is indebted to the rhythms of the planet. We move around the clock and around the planet in 24 hours, and it has a reference for past and future.
”The digital watch is numbers in a vacuum. The numbers come pulsating out. They are not circadian, and there is no circle as a reference to the rotation of the planet. There is no reference to past or future; you don`t know where you`ve come from, and you don`t know where you`re going. You have only the ever-present mathematical abstraction called `now.`
”Get yourself an old-fashioned trainman`s watch,” Rifkin advised.
”You`ll play with it; you`ll caress it; you`ll be aware of the cyclical time frame every day. You`ll participate with your watch. You`ll enjoy the hell out of it. It doesn`t pulse away automatically. You`ll have to rewind time every day.”
