IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

48 Chapter 2
Service has identified five ‘‘key dimensions of patient experience’’—and
time and speed issues dominate. The top two issues are, first, waiting times
for appointments and access to services, and, second, time given to discuss
health and medical problems face to face with health care professionals. A
third priority, safe, high-quality, coordinated care, includes a need for afterhours
calls as a major determinant of satisfaction. 58
Time Literacy: From Velocity to Virtuosity
All cultures have something to learn from others’ conceptions of time. The
reasons for this are partly technological—but mainly cultural. It took industrialization,
and in particular technological developments between the
1870s and World War I, to make everyday mobility technically possible:
better roads, trains, and steamships, and later cars, buses, and airplanes.
But it took the culture of modernity, a culture of speed, to make mobility
desirable. The same is true today. A more balanced temporal regime will
not emerge on its own. Multiple tempos—some fast, some slow—can coexist,
but they have to be desirable, and they have to be designed.
Tempo design does not need to start from scratch. Different temporal
regimes than our own already exist in some cultures; we can learn from
and reuse them. In Israel, Levine found, time is taught as a subject. 59 An
elaborate set of time-teaching exercises is designed to train children from
developing countries to adapt to Israel’s mainstream pace of life. The children
are taught about different conceptions of punctuality and learn to
‘‘translate’’ appointment times depending on the culture of the person
making the appointment. They study the rules of the waiting game and
are taught to distinguish between work time and social time.
Another project designed to help us live in the present while also being
aware of the (very) long term is the Long Now Foundation, which is developing
a ten-thousand-year clock. One of its architects, Stewart Brand,
explains that the clock is designed to change the ways we think about
time. ‘‘Civilization is revving itself up into a pathologically short attention
span. The trends might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the
short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election
perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.
All are on the increase. How do we,’’ Brand asks, ‘‘make long-term thinking
automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?’’ 60