Time Condensation

Time moves faster than it used to, primarily due to the condensation of information - and the breakneck speeds at which it reaches us in the all encompassing, interconnected, full force digital age.

I once heard it put that the creation of the Internet created "New Time", this is true.

In "Old Time" information spread via purely physical means, the only way to spread it quicker was to create long distance means of transmitting short and specific pieces of information. Think of lighting beacons on mountains in quick succession to alert the capital of an empire that an army was invading thousands of miles away.

With the invention of infrastructure - roads - beacons and smoke signals were replaced by messages carried by runners and riders, then in an effort to speed things up, carrier pigeons.

With the discovery that you could transmit sound along electrical lines - Morse Code changed the game, then voices over telephone lines, then voices over radio waves, etc.

What I'm trying to highlight here is that we define the movement of time - it's speed - through the amount of information and stimuli that can be parsed through it in a given time period, and as larger and larger quantities of information were condensed and transmitted through increasingly quicker mediums - time itself became condensed.

A year in meat space is equatable to decades online.

It, of course, did not used to be like this - there was once a time when websites acted separately from each other, with little spill over.

The replacement of forums and imageboards with the great monoliths of "social media" today did most of the heavy lifting to destroy these natural impediments to the spread of information.

All of this is to say - the reason people feel so strongly that so much has happened in such a small amount of time comparatively, while also at the same time remaining adamant that nothing has happened in such a long time - is because of the conflicting realities of "Old Time", which is in many ways still uncompressed, and "New Time", which is densely compressed, still actively finding ways to compress itself, and is also seeking to incorporate as much of "Old Time" as it can to compress and assimilate it.

This is also why memes live and die within two week time periods as opposed to years as they used to.