Speaking about “The Secret Powers of Time”, Stanford professor emeritus Philip Zimbardo (famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment) explains how various perspectives of time – past, present and future – influence our actions and relationships. There are six main orientation time zones:
- Past: Past positive (nostalgic), or past negative (regretful)
- Present: hedonistic (seeking pleasure, knowledge), or fatalistic (“It doesn’t pay to plan”)
- Future: resist temptation for future benefit, or geared to reward after death (both build on trust or expectation)
Catholic nations are more present and past oriented, while Protestant nations are more future orientated.
He says we are going through a time revolution. Children are naturally and essentially hedonistic and present-oriented. What schools around the globe do is to give them a past or future orientation (depending on the predominant culture). Now computer games are increasingly keeping children in their present-hedonistic state, rewiring their brains, so they will be bored in the analogue classroom. Games are indeed addictive, and “all addictions are addictions of present hedonism.” School and education is all about delaying gratification, but present oriented kids will not relate the messages to themselves and their future. I hear echos of my father talking about “instant gratification” as a key element of hedonistic pop culture back when I was a teen in the 1970s.
Philip Zimbardo (2008): The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life. Free Press.
Sherry Turkle, professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, writes that mobile devices are becoming the vehicle for intimate relationships, as robots take on responsibilities previously born by friends and family. The instantaneous, engineered response is in fact allowing us to flee from conversation, which takes effort in terms of time and patience, and hence requires us to build those essential skills.
“Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.”
Sherry Turkle: The Flight From Conversation, NYT April 21, 2012
Sherry Turkle (2011): Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.
2 Responses
Speaking in the present, I really like this topic, and I think I will in the future too! Great post!
Hi Vicki, the time zones concept is a great hook, isn’t it? Everyone I’ve passed it on to has reacted with a great big “aha!”
But I wonder whether this is really a major shift, or simply a matter of perspective, and each generation looks at the next and thinks they’re becoming more hedonistic.