Time and knowledge in the information ecology

What effect does time have upon the kinds of knowledge a given society produces? No effect? Some effect? Don’t know? Or does it depend? Depend upon what? The question is a difficult one and this article seeks primarily to forward some provisional answers through a synthesis of recent work in this area. The question, however, is increasingly pressing as globalisation and the information communications technology (ICT) revolution continue to impact our relationships with time and space in ways that are not fully comprehended. We may begin with some more questions: Is it better to “acquire” and “transmit” knowledge slowly or quickly? Do you “lose” something in the accelerated mode, something that is “captured” and “understood” better through the processes of what the German philosophers of the Enlightenment called bildung, that is to say, through a slower, unified and more cumulative production of knowledge? Or, again, it depends? In Tyranny of the Moment (2001: 152), Thomas Hylland Eriksen makes the ostensibly reasonable observation that “Whatever can be communicated fast, should be communicated fast.” Technically speaking, however, almost everything can be communicated fast, and is increasingly being required to be: but will it still be understood? What about those forms of knowledge that may require more time to develop and communicate effectively? How do these forms “compete” in a real-time information society that is contributing to what James Gleick (2000) calls “the acceleration of just about everything,” a world already deep in an ocean of data and information? To try to gain a useful perspective on these questions, we can begin with an analysis of how we experience and perceive time. [Introduction]