Comments on: Why is Faster Better?

By: tomhigley

tomhigley — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:49:47 +0000

Years ago, when I was doing one of my first startups, I had a phone conversation with an older friend and angel investor in one of my companies. This is the guy who wrote the check that made him my first angel investor. At the time, tech was on a tear. Internet companies were springing up everywhere. I was traveling constantly. I was using every new electronic device and toy, each new app I could find to reduce the time it took me to do X, where X pretty much stands for anything I had to do or accomplish. It felt like I was moving faster (and seeing a little bit farther) than almost anyone I knew. Back to my friend, the angel investor. In this particular conversation, it felt to me like he was speaking in slow motion. I was four steps ahead of each word he spoke. I waited a week for each sentence. And suddenly, I heard myself speaking to him impatiently, without the respect an appreciation he deserved.

Yesterday, I was listening to the audio of a YouTube video as I drove to the airport. A police cruiser, flashing its red and blue lights, pulled me over. The officer who came to the window pointed out that my entire driving record was visible. And every entry said "speed." He gave me a warning and asked me when I was going to deal with "the problem."

These things are connected. Faster isn't better or worse. Newer isn't better or worse. But faster and newer can exert such a powerful influence over how we think, act, speak, etc., that we often embrace them as intrinsically superior to slower and older. It's almost always a good thing to stop, from time-to-time, and reassess the underlying drivers of our thoughts and behavior.

By: micah

micah — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:23:44 +0000

I havent read that book, but it make sense. Its just seems that we have
become a society/economy of easy and now, and we will be ok with mistakes
and blunders as long as its easy and now. There is something not right about
it all, and I am still not sure I know exactly what it is. But, I do know
that parts of the real time web are here to stay, but that a backlash has to
be coming. There needs to be an event that pushing things to an equilibrium.

By: Merredith

Merredith — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:54:37 +0000

I'm glad you wrote this; I think about this a lot, and the subject comes up often in the context of “old” vs. “new” media, which automatically aligns people into camps — and so ignores the larger point. Accuracy, analysis, and multiple even opposing sources of information can give us ways to understand and possibly to react better — at least sometimes. Did you ever read “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?” — Milan Kundera noted that as communication improved, history itself seemed to accelerate. Scholars and the common man used to take time to digest an event, but with improved communications, the *next* event would be upon us, and we would forget the previous one.

It feels like real-time could be more of the same… just even faster.

Thanks for writing this post, it deserves a big audience.

By: John Fischer

John Fischer — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:17:27 +0000

Faster is better when it comes to technology but too many of us are falling into a trap of trying to run our lives as fast as our tech, getting the two intertwined….. so I leave with a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

By: Wiltsie

Wiltsie — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:12:17 +0000

Is trusting a proven source on Twitter different than trusting a proven media source? I guess I have very little faith in mainstream media in general. Or are we talking about unproven sources on Twitter?

By: micah

micah — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:59:31 +0000

I disagree. I think many people assume the information to be accurate,
especially as the source is more trusted, which is one of the difficulties
with twitter and the concept of ambient intimacy.

By: Wiltsie

Wiltsie — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:51:14 +0000

I don't agree that slower is necessarily more accurate. I feel similarly about real-time as I do about Wikipedia (post about Wikipedia here:http://lizwiltsie.com/2009/06/22/wikipedia-and-the-truth/). Basically, we don't expect real-time to be perfect, and we are more skeptical of that information. Skeptical is good.

I totally agree with your assessment of why real-time fascinates us though.