Watching feature length movies shows one “the two hours,” “the hour-and-a-half,” and “the three hours” and if one views enough feature length movies one begins to develop a picture in their own mind(s) regarding these lengths of time. “This is what two hours feels like.”
Thus, when a feature length movie is successful it perfectly corresponds with the picture in one’s own mind of “the two hours,” “the hour and a half,” or the “the three hours.”
(That is to say, it finishes at the same you do.)
But what about other lengths of time?
Well, television figured out that we could be trained to picture “the hour,” “the half-hour,” and “the thirty seconds” and it began to regulate these particular time-units vigorously.
Thus, the joy of good television is the spasm of correspondence between the episode or commercial’s account of “the hour,” “the half-hour,” or “the thirty seconds” and one’s own trained picture of “the hour,” “the half-hour,” or “the thirty-seconds.”
When one downloads an entire season of Mad Men, for instance, one begins to get off less on the content of the individual episodes and more on the rhythm of the individual episodes in succession as each one fills in “the 48 minutes” again and again and again and again as versions on a theme.
What time, though, does the digital network picture?
On the one hand, everything’s gotten shorter:
Blog posts are short, videos are short, news articles are headlines.
However, on the other hand, everything’s gotten longer.
One blog post is merely a version on a theme developed in an ongoing performance inhabiting “the several months and years.”
Does the digital network, then, polarize one’s desires for time – make you crave for both the instantaneous and the epic?
Make it schizophrenic?
Tags: blog, cinema, desire, digital, network, performance, rhythm, television, time, web