I Don’t Have All Minute!

“I…experienced disorienting moments of temporal suspension when I downloaded large files of music; these were long moments of isolation and boredom. Everything seemed to pause in the speeded-up temporality of cyberspace. I had similar feelings of separation in Java during Ramadan, when performances and many social activities were halted for a month of fasting and introspection. I tried to fill these times with reading and writing, but the days seemed to stretch into eternity. In comparison, it seems astonishing that on the Internet, such seemingly endless periods could actually be measured in seconds or minutes rather than days or weeks.”

Rene Lysloff (2003). “Musical Community on the Internet: An On-Line Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 18(2): 233-63.

It’s not just normal people–online immersion in musical networks causes fun-house-mirror time-shifts for anthropologists, too.  Next step: understanding how and/or why this phenomenon manifests itself as ravenous leak-hunting and complaining on message boards when downloads take 10 minutes instead of 4.

Filed under: academia  downloading  Rene Lysloff