31. The Digital Age

I have a fond memory of a clock that hung in one of my elementary school classrooms during the 1950s, in the days when computer power was measured in the number of man-centuries of accountant time the machines would save. Looking back now I can see that the clock was a harbinger of the digital age we are now entering, the clock was a hybrid. It had a face like all clocks of the day, but instead of gliding smoothly and continuously, its hands paused at each mark on the circular face and then deliberately leaped to the next mark with a regular rhythm, as though time did not exist in the interval. Not surprisingly, the clock was made by that digital giant, IBM. By now we have become accustomed to experiencing time in a digital way. Digital clocks and watches are everywhere; some children even learn to tell time on them. In the pre-digital era, we thought of time as flowing uninterruptedly, like sand in an hourglass. Minutes and seconds were inexact, and "now" was impossible to pin down. The hands of a clock moved through space. But digitized time is changing all that. Computer technology treats time like any other information to be processed: each unit of time is broken into a theoretically endless series of zeros and ones. Digital seconds or minutes are discrete, and like the hybrid clock of my youth, they are also discontinuous.

In the old days, when we looked at our watches and saw we had 10 minutes to get somewhere, we saw those 10 minutes as a 60 degree wedge on the circular watch face. The concept of 10 minutes had a distinctly spatial feel to it. An hour had a certain wholeness or completeness. An hour of digital time, however, is just another number. To see how late you are in digital time, you must add and subtract. If you're not good at arithmetic, digital time can be problematic.

Digital time may even be processed in a different portion of the brain than spatial time. Spatial concepts tend to be processed primarily by the right, intuitive hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, but arithmetic concepts are generally handled on the left, or verbal and intellectual, side.

"At the very least," says one computer scientist of the advent of digital time, "the terms 'clockwise' and 'counterclockwise' will lose their meaning."

In the digital age, changes in our perception of time will be subtle but pervasive. Time, after all, is a human invention to keep people and machines the world over (and eventually the cosmos over) in step with each other. How we conceive of time, how we record it and how our brains process it cannot but affect our view of our place in the Universe.

And if the inexpensive digital watch can influence our lives to such an extent, what of the home computer, the pocket computer, the two-way wrist television or some as-yet unknown technological miracle that will become commonplace in the next few decades?

In less than 40 years, the image of the mathematics professor tending an electronic "brain" has been replaced by the teenager navigating a video spaceship through a simulated asteroid field. The computing power that once filled entire buildings and was formerly available only to universities, government and big businesses now fits into everyone's pocket, thanks to the development of the microprocessor—an entire computer on a tiny silicon chip. Digital technology has made possible such advances in computer speed and such miniaturization that, for Madison Avenue, the term "digital" has become the updated version of "new and improved." Advertisements tout not only digital watches but digital musical recordings and even computerized auto ignitions and washing machines.

The digital age is said to hold out dazzling promise: the drudgery of the assembly line and of clerical work will be greatly reduced or disappear entirely as computers take over "intelligent tasks"; tremendous savings in energy will occur when computers control heating and cooling; pictures, voices, music and data will travel distortion-free over thousands of miles at low cost.

But while computer experts readily recite long lists of technological triumphs just over the horizon, surprisingly few look deeper into the effects of the digital age on the human psyche. When I contacted one huge computer corporation seeking scientists interested in discussing how their creations might change human consciousness, it was suggested that I might better contact "some of the science-fiction boys".