IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

36 Chapter 2
also warned that the acceleration of life, the use of the telephone, and the
‘‘annihilation of space and time’’ experienced by early train travelers would
cause ‘‘serious mental degeneration.’’ 30 In the 1930s, according to Hunt,
Byron referred to London as a ‘‘Babylon,’’ a chaotic labyrinth of the jabbering
and the jostling.
All this sounds quaint today. But the fact remains that we have been talking
about the negative impacts of speed for nearly two hundred years—but
have not taken effective remedial action.
From Clock Time to Real Time
Time scarcity has always been a feature of industrial life, but the Internet
has ratcheted up the pressure. Clock time is being supplanted by Internetenabled
‘‘real time.’’ The probable author of this term, at least in a business
context, is Don Tapscott. Tapscott began discussing the real-time enterprise
in his 1992 book Paradigm Shift and fully developed the idea in The Digital
Economy. He wrote in 1995 that ‘‘the new economy is a real time economy.
Commerce becomes electronic as business transactions and communications
occur at the speed of light rather than the post office. The new enterprise
is a real time enterprise—continuously and immediately adjusting to
changing business conditions.’’ 31 The growth of networked communications
has accelerated the emergence of an always-on, 24/7 society whose
premise is that if anything can happen anytime, it should happen now.
The drive toward real time has its origins in attempts by large companies
to integrate their global systems in space and time. They are wiring up digital
nervous systems that connect everything involved in their operations:
information technology (IT) systems, factories, and employees, as well as
suppliers, customers, and products. These processes of interconnection
have names like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource
management (ERM), and supply chain integration (SCI). As Ludwig
Siegele wrote in The Economist in 2002, these companies are collecting data
from any point in space or time where a customer ‘‘touches’’ a company—
such as a store, a call center, or a website; their aim is to develop ‘‘dashboards’’
that will use these disparate data feeds to measure key indicators,
compare their performance against goals, and alert managers if a deviation
becomes large enough to warrant action. ‘‘Some of the world’s biggest
companies want to convert their worldwide information flows into a vast