The really good video game players are able to block out both clock time and their own subjective time and descend completely into the time world of the game.
And later:
Long-term computer users often suffer from the constant jolt back and forth between two time worlds.
I never thought about time in this manner, but it makes perfect sense to me. In my own experiences, I often feel "jolted" when my thoughts leave the computer and return to reality. I can often be sitting at my computer hours into the night and not feel any sleepiness or tired at all. But as soon as my eyes, glance down at my clock, all of a sudden, I feel like I'm about to fall asleep at the keyboard. It's an unsettling feeling, that return from cyber to real time.
Perhaps, its because the descent into cybertime leaves behind the traces of fatigue real time can enforce. Cybertime has no space for sleep. Computers, once on, are always on, always occupying themselves with some computation. For a computer, its 1 or 0, on or off, there is no state like sleep a computer can relate to. In that same way, we forget sleep when we enter that cyber timezone.
1 comment:
It's crazy but I do think that we are headed towards a world where we are always on. We will be encouraged to consider the global clock; someone is always on and working on the other side of the world when you're not. It seems impossible that people will actually be able to keep up with the demands of technology which are always on and always working, through the hours when our incompetent bodies need to recharge. Inevitably we will, like you, have to re-enter real time from our never ending cybertime.
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