the role of slowtime

Low def

The whole context of video-streaming e-dialogue is soaked in low-definition information. Pixels, chunks, lumps of colour, texture, make me think of sculpture more than film. The sound space is the thread, through continuity breaks, fuzzy images, as we strain to listen, de-code etc.

Is this a problem? In a way this is a context of maximum sensory involvement in making out the "other" in this, reading and interpreting with high intensity the nuances of body language etc.

Strangers meeting, instinctively behave in ways that correspond to the codes of conduct so necessary in a dangerous world. As we leave home on this type of electric journey we depend on the kindness of strangers. The mutually experienced x-ray revelation through the screen (not a looking glass) requires a large measure of hospitality, and that, as the measure is fulfilled, creates a space of engagement, listening, and above all this climate of tolerance.

So, slow communication generates texture, phatic gestures, looking after each other as guest/hosts, valuing this alternative pace.

In Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us – The Art of Everyday Living, he writes in the Chaper called Thinking:

It was the fact that words were read at increasing speed – a speed far greater than that possible in oral delivery – which troubled Joyce and other moderns. The flaneurs languid gait on the boulevards was an attempt to decelerate the modern world, by reducing quick walking to a slow crawl. (Kiberd 2009 p 75)

Joyce worried that his own book might just be another of those possibilities discarded by a glib, throw-away culture: ‘Who anywhere will read these written words?’ The reader, even more than the characters, must become the true and only hero, not by modelling a self on that of Odysseus, Jesus, Dante or Hamlet, but by seeking to become more fully a reader than anyone had before in the history of literature. It is the reader, as much as Dedalus, who must learn to decode the signatures of all things, to recognise the traces left by all the varied kinds of life that have passed though the world. And it is the reader who must summon the heroism of a thinker brave and intrepid enough to enter the abyss of the self.

(Kiberd 2009 p 76)