Real time describes the moment you passed the camera.
When you’re reading this essay, you’re reading it in real time. It’s a description of time proceeding simultaneously with the moment you’re living. It’s time you can feel in your heartbeat, in your breathing, in what you see and hear and smell and touch. It is not a measure of perception, however. That’s something else and I’ll come to that point in a moment.
A thirty second commercial takes thirty seconds of real time to watch, end to end. If you can’t fast forward and the commercial holds your interest for any reason at all, it will cost you a measurable quantity of real time: thirty seconds.
The people who made that commercial used real time, too, of course. They very likely used hundreds of hours aggregated together to make that thirty second spot. The product of their work, the commercial, thus has become a condensation of time, a diamond compressed from ordinary chronological carbon. Even if the sparkle of their compression efforts leaves you disinterested or dismissive, it’s still a profound condensation of time.
Real time is where we live, but these days real time is not where many people aspire to live. Time shifting has become the new signifier of social and technical competence. People who know how to navigate the modern world know how to shift their personal associations with the clock. Take the ordinary activities that many people do while navigating the contemporary work day from home. While waiting for a restaurant delivery , a smart time-shifter has also responded to short-response emails and simultaneously running a load of laundry. Non-linear events are nonetheless taking place simultaneously: wash goes round and round while your supper makes its way across town. (Don’t ever skimp on the tip!)
Perception is what we consume cognitively as opposed to sensually. (You can come to a realization about an idea days after reading a book, for example. You perceive something that you are not actually feeling.) It’s true that there are tightly bound connections between the two; it’s arguable they’re inextricable. For this consideration, however, let’s presume that perception is what consumes our thinking selves. Therefore, when we shift time and space by perceiving ourselves elsewhere, we’ve transformed our physical lives into something that still doesn’t have an adequate description. Life mediated through screens is life lived some outside of the world.
There’s a big difference between life mediated through screens and life that experiences specific, discrete moments that require screens for interaction. The analogue here is the experience of looking at a painting. An image, inside a frame, presents an alternate reality of a sort, namely an image that a painter wanted to explore and share. When we look at that painting, we’re still in the physical world, in real time, considering the ideas contained.
A trickier example might be when someone watches a movie. While it may appear as if the experience is simply one more expression of images mediated by a screen, a movie offers the possibility for a moment of real-time cognition, of experiencing discrete, focused ideas presented by a group of creatives as they share a story. While watching a movie we’re still in our own lives, in real time, even if the movie speeds up or slows down the narrative process.
When the information we consume are out of chronological sync with events of the real world we say we’re not in real-time. When we peruse the accumulated data of some activity collected over a span of days or weeks or years, we’re perceiving the world outside of real time. Separated from real time, it’s possible to ascertain information trends, medical histories, or more. Some people think this confers cool power, but I’m not so sure. It’s certainly powerful, and in the case of making smart financial or medical decisions, it’s certainly useful. But there be dragons here. At least be aware when you peruse bits of data on social media platforms and consider what we believe to be insights otherwise unavailable to our human senses. Be aware that you are folding time and space to acquire this information. Reality says that information just a few atoms thick is not the same as deep understanding of fewer subjects. Information is not understanding, and it sure isn’t wisdom. When we stay in touch with friends through the mediation of screens, out of real-time interactions, we believe we know more info about more people, but we really know less info about those few, very important people in our lives. It’s inevitable: we’ve distributed a finite amount of time to a wider number of targets. Same goes for reading, or studying, or skill development. Sure, there are pleasures in this temporal chess, and even value, but it’s not a zero-sum game.
I’m not saying we should all avoid time-shifting. Its a feature of the new world as much as high speed cloud computing. I’m just saying that the few minutes you just spent reading this essay took place in a time when you were actually present. Who wants to reach the end of his or her life only to wonder how it went by so fast without really getting to experience very much of it in the real world?