The Web: How We Experience Time in a New Way

For our Senior Seminar class we were required to read the article "Assumed Mobility - Thoughts on experiencing time online," by Marcin Ramocki.  Although we were not required to write about or respond to the article other than talk about it in class, I found the article so interesting and worth the read that I thought I would share it with all of you.

First of all you can view Ramocki's work here.  You can download the PDF of his article here.

Ramocki stresses through out his article that we are constantly changing how we think of the past, because of "new imaginations of the future (1)."  He uses a very good example to explain what he means:

"the importance of your expensive college education would fade substantially if you decided that, instead of going to medical school, you wanted to pursue a career managing a rock band(1)."

 What he means is that, because you changed your mind about your future, the things you used to worry about become obsolete. Ramocki moves on to explain how we interact with images around us and how it has drastically changed because of the web.  The reason I started this blog was for my Viral Marketing class and a lot of the ideas that Ramocki touches upon we have talked about in different ways in class. 

"Just like a film, which is a collection of still, photographic images, the web cannot be reduced to the sum of its elements. The difference here is that the elements are far more complex and the relation between them is algorithmic, not linear(3)."

 The huge difference between the web and normal video or images is our ability to control them and our ability to interact with them.  On a standard TV or movie we are only accepting information and in no way is it two-way.  However, with the web we can not only control the speed at which we watch something, we can comment on what we watch, we can pass it along to friends, and we can download what we watch and edit it in ways we see fit.  The image can now become malleable and be controlled and changed in any way in which the viewer sees fit.  This is where we can "assume mobility of the viewer(4)."

Ramocki uses links as a way to explain our "assumed mobility" in that a link on a page can move someones position and focus, inevitably directing the eye to a whole new experience.  The images and and way we perceive our environment is no longer a linear function.  We can now experience things using the web in non-linear forms.

Ramocki compares how we perceive things linearly to riding a train and how our environment can only be interpreted based on where the train is moving.  He ends his article by saying, "It is up to us to decide how we want to look at things. Without a doubt, the vantage points will keep shifting: the key is to remain a conscious, thoughtful passenger(6)."



Well that about sums it up, but I hope you can enjoy Ramocki's article as much as I did.  Have a good day!!