IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

38 Chapter 2
picture. Speed, in this context, undermines the foundations of professional
knowledge. The inclination, capacity, and time to reflect on longer-term
issues and consequences is what used to set the professional apart from
the mere technician. 36
‘‘Without consciousness there is never succession, never a before and
after—just a lonely cloud of discrete and discontinuous points,’’ wrote
the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson called this kind of time lived time,
experienced time, or durée (duration). 37 Narrative time is created when
human beings, inveterate interpreters and storytellers that we are, ‘‘join up
the dots’’ between the discrete space-time we would otherwise experience
as lived time. This is surely true of research and innovation. A success factor
in research is time—time to understand a user community, time to get to
know individuals within it, time to conduct research at a speed that does
not threaten people, and time to reflect on results.
From Real Time to Quality Time
Perhaps it’s a bit of a jump, but I have the feeling that Bergson’s concept of
durée is the acorn from which we can grow a new approach to time, speed,
and distance. By separating time from space, we can reprioritize the information
and experiences available to us here and now—and not spend our
lives searching for the there and next.
As I explained earlier, the demand for change is strong. Time values
seem to be changing. Fewer people seem to wear watches nowadays. Fountain
pens are back in fashion. In a celebrated time values study in 1991, Hilton
Hotels found that two-thirds of respondents would take salary cuts in
exchange for getting time off from work. 38
In science, too, as our understanding of complex systems grows, the virtues
of slow growth are becoming apparent. According to Ilya Prigogine,
the father of complexity theory, ‘‘if changes in one small area are too
quickly communicated across a system as a whole, they would tend to be
dampened out. New and dissenting ideas need time to accumulate evidence
and argument.’’ 39
Slow travel is also growing in popularity. It used to be just the poor who
took the slowest means of travel, but the richest people are now substituting
connectivity for velocity. Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape, who, as
we saw earlier, proclaimed the ‘‘law of continuous acceleration,’’ is also