Distance in the Turn of the 19th Century

In the novel Emma, Jane Austen painstakingly explains and draws out all of the little details and intimations of her characters and their transactions between each other and the immediate surrounding world. Emma highlights the limitations of a world where cars and telephones do not exist. Every letter sent is cherished, communities are closely knit together, and 16 miles takes a day to cover.
For one to receive a letter was a cause for celebration. Characters in Emma would meticulously read, re-read and analyze letters when received. For instance Emma and Harriet copied down what Mr. Elton wrote into a book so that they may read the letter again many times later. When Harriet was proposed to, Austen took the time and page space to note that Emma had read the letter of proposal and realized that it was written by a man, was eloquent but short and conveyed his affections appropriately. Austen took up the page space not to say what was written in the letter, but to analyze the writing style.
When characters receive letters in the book, the whole town finds out about it. Emma herself complains that some letters, such as Jane Fairfax’s, are cause for gossip and are the talk of the town for months on end. People keep their letters on display and allow for all of their visitors to read and then re-read them. Letters are the topic of conversation for days as well.
Nowadays, written letters are not very popular. People will e-mail or use an array of different instant messaging sites. It no longer takes days for one to get news around and e-mails are hardly the topic of conversation for more than a few minutes so that they may be mentioned in passing. Writing is increasingly informal and people no longer need to worry much about penmanship because font can be chosen with the click of a button online. Writing style on facebook isn’t analyzed unless someone decides to send a love letter.
When one comes to visit a home in the novel, it is for at least a week and also the talk of the town. For example when Harriet stayed with friends on a farm, everyone knew about it. When Emma’s sister comes to visit, the whole town is sure to know. Visitors and guests are a large event and call for rooms to be prepared, dining rooms and meals to be made up and parties to be thrown. 10 miles may as well have been a hundred miles. Emma’s sister lives in London, only sixteen miles away, but is only able to visit about once or twice a year.
Distance was very different in the turn of the 19th century than it is today. If one wants to see relatives, they can make all of their travel arrangements online the day before if they so choose and stay in a nearby hotel the next day. Family visits occur often and are hardly the talk of the city except with immediate family members and close friends. Visits usually last a week at most and people will take their guests out to a nice restaurant for some fine dining, but will most likely not throw a party in the honor.

Citations
Austen, Jane. Emma London: Penguin, 1996. Print.

Blog Post #2 (Chris Autry)

At the turn of the 20^th century, the great debate over absolute and perceived space raged, ranging from Einstein’s famous thought experiments to the perspective driven art of the time. The advent of several new technologies, such as the automobile, decreased the perceived space between objects, while people migrated to large cities, further decreasing this distance.

Jane Autsen’s Emma shows how limited travel was in the 1800’s. The only two modes of transportation were either walking or carriage (Trains existed, but an extensive rail infrastructure had not yet been established). While considered a snails pace by today’s standards, the carriage enabled the characters to travel from their hometown of Highbury, near London. This method of travel, however elementary, allowed people of the time to visit relatives and friends who lived some distance away, similar to how the automobile has allowed us to commute to school and work in modern times.

These technologies – cars, trains and planes, effectively decrease the perceived distance between people: a three hour walk becomes a fifteen minute drive. This combination of decreased travel time and long distance, high speed travel is what leads to the decrease in perceived distance. This leads, as Kern writes, to questions about how humans perceive the world around them.

Stephen Kern discusses the concept of relativity as it pertains to space, referencing Einstein’s theory of general relativity several times. The question arises whether or not animals and humans experience the same absolute space, or if the perceived space, and its properties, vary from species to species. A strong argument is made for the relativistic approach, citing the fact that humans have the canals per ear, giving us the ability to sense our position and orientation in three dimensional space, while other animals have only two or one canal per ear. On the other side of the argument, the amoeba is cited. It can only move in two dimensional space, meaning it experiences very little of the absolute space in the world around it, culminating with the simple statement: Just because the single celled amoeba cannot see or detect the stars, does not mean that they do not exist.

This spatial argument extends into mathematics with geometry. Euclidian geometries are based upon human physiology, relying on the correlation between the negative and positive side of an axis and the left and right side of the human body. The symmetry of the coordinate plane follows the symmetry of the body. This is used as an example to show how humans interpret the world around us based on our perception of space. This perception is used in the art of the time as well. Images of the same moment in time, but from different angles, are used to convey meaning.

Works Cited:

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Print.

Austen, Jane. Emma. Penguin Books, 1996. Print.

Technology creating space and speeding up time

In the current day technology can alter the perception of time and space in our daily lives. This technology is often taken for granted. Transportation technology can allow for the expanding of perceivable space. Also the communication technology allows for a shortening in time. The novel Emma by Jane Austin reveals what our lives would be like without these technologies.
The transportation technology in Emma “restricts” the characters space compared to life present day. Most of the characters moved about by walking and on occasion took carriages to where they wanted to go. This means that the people their options of friends as well as places to go are limited to a walking distance, which is probably a mile radius from their quarters of living. What this means is the people they interact with on a daily basis are the same people. Comparing this with present day where the radius of interaction is around 50 miles rather than 1. You can leave your house in the morning and drive 20 miles to work, 15 miles to a friend’s house after work, and 35 miles back home without even thinking anything of it. If Emma or another character in the novel were to go to London, which is 16 miles from their town, it would be around a daylong trip getting there and then they would have to stay the night.
Having the limited space and thus the same people to interact with was a toll on Emma. She wanted to find a “perfect equal” to be her suitor. Her main problem was there were not enough men in the “pond” she lived in. Compared to the amount of fish in the “sea” we have due to the technology of transportation. Present day we have websites like eHarmony, which allows us to meet people online. This allows the ability to meet people globally. I believe Emma would have a more optimistic idea of marriage if she were able to use the present day technology to find a partner. Although she never is able to find a suitor for herself, she plays matchmaker for all the other people in town.
With our current communication technology time seems to move faster. For example when Harriet was very sick and Emma was trying to check up on her she did so through letters. She had emotional turmoil while waiting for the letters to go back and forth in a matter of days if not weeks between responses. In the current day we have technology where we can call and have not only responses but also a conversation in a matter of minutes. With the additional things that may occupy our time it seems to move at a much faster pace.
How does our world really differ from prior technology? For one the increase in transportation technology allows for the ability to interact with more people and more places. In a sense this is creating space. Additionally with our current communication technology time “speeds up” because the improvement in the speed of interacting with other people and places. The question is how will technology in the future allow for different lives compared to present day?

Citations
Austen, Jane. Emma London: Penguin, 1996. Print.

Blog Post #1 (Chris Autry)

It goes without saying that human beings lie at the pinnacle of social development among every creature residing on Earth. Since the beginning of recorded time, human social interactions have progressed in complexity, and our brains have grown to adapt. The relentless progress of technology – namely, our tools for communication, has decreased the spatial and temporal ‘requirements’ for our daily social interactions.

I recall video chatting with a friend while he was studying abroad in China. The physical distance between us was insurmountable: some 7900 miles through the center of our planet, but this was a moot point, as communication took place instantaneously. Even simple tools have given mankind the tools to accomplish such feats: the telegraph relayed messages cross country in the blink of an eye when it would have taken several days for a train bound courier.

Unlike the past, where one would telegraph a message and then said message would be rendered to its recipient, we have multiple channels of communication to the targeted individual. If you wanted to contact a parent: you could email, fax, phone, Facebook, Skype, text, or instant message them. All of these channels are both time and distance invariant thanks to the infrastructures we’ve built to sustain them. Nearly every individual has multiple forms of instantaneous communication with which they can be reached.

These technologies allow us to work remotely, catch up with friends, and have seemingly created a state where people are hyper aware of their social surroundings. As Frontline’s Digital Nation has alluded to, it is easy to be sucked into one’s digital life. As anyone who has lost their phone can tell you: disconnected, detached, and remote are all feelings that come to the forefront. Now, imagine a week without an internet connection. How has the need for these devices and technologies affected the human social psyche? Though these systems and infrastructures are redundant, it shows just how reliant we are on them.

Reflection on this posits the following question: Can the brain keep up? Communications technology will merely become faster and more complex with the progression of time, but as the Stanford study in Chapter 2 of Digital Nation showed, the brain cannot keep pace in a multi-tasking environment, especially when one or more social interaction is taking place. This is affirmed when one looks at the danger of driving while on the phone: two simple tasks, when combined, can have disastrous outcomes. It’s apparent now that the brain is not ‘wired’ for this type of activity. So now the crux of the problem lies in whether the developing adolescent brain can develop to work in this high speed social landscape, much as people in the past adapted and integrated the telephone, train, and early technologies into their lives as Kern stated.

It’s easy to see, stepping back and observing a time span much larger than the scope of Kern’s book, that the human brain has re-wired itself to cope with the rewiring of our world. Brain size has increased when one compares a modern human to an early proto human or Neanderthal. Social interactions have driven this development. An individual changed from having a handful of close relations within their own camp and walking distance, to having thousands of combined friends across social networking sites, virtual reality, and IRL.

Blog Post #1 (Matthew Bunker)

With the turn of the twenty-first century the birth of computer’s functions in every day life came to be. Coincidently there has been an alteration in the perception of both space and time. Time has been manipulated by multitasking, while space has been manipulated by the creation of virtual worlds.

What happens when someone multitasks? This was one of the major questions proposed by a PBS special called Digital_Nation. Some discoveries proclaim that multitasking may allow someone to do more than one task at a time. If you just look at the ability to do more than one thing at a time you may be able to say that someone can in a sense “create time” by vertically splitting it; however, when one splits their time vertically there is a price to be paid. Proposed by another fact in this special was that as one multitask they do each task with less effectiveness. With this piece of information we can conclude that the art of multitasking doesn’t create time, but rather waste it without even knowing it.

Likewise by creating virtual worlds are we creating space or ruining it. It is very hard to tell, because the creation of a virtual world allows for the distortion of space. For example you can be in the same room as someone else but in completely different worlds, and the contra-positive holds true as well you can be halfway around the world from someone yet be right next to them in virtual space. Creating space doesn’t seem as dangerous, but it does come at a price. It may decrease the need to travel in order to meet people in the “real world”. Some companies like IBM have people hold meetings in Second Life, a virtual reality, rather than paying for them to fly and meet in reality ("Digital_Nation life on the virtual frontier"). This means that you may never have to meet your colleagues, or you can see distant friends and meet with them in a virtual space.

While sometimes you can see people you already met, you can also make new friends online or even find a romance. Virtual space can be a perfect way for someone who doesn’t have much of a social life in the “real world” meet people and socialize with. As a player of the popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft I can attest to the benefits of a virtual world. It allowed for an escape from the ordinary life where I was merely a junior-high student with few friends. In World of Warcraft I played a priest who was wanted by lots of people for their art in healing techniques, and thus I had made many “virtual friends”. Though playing in the virtual world with virtual friends didn’t seem like it came with a cost rather than the $15 dollars a month happily given in order to keep friends and that reality alive.

Who knows what this bend of time and space holds for the generations of the future. While bending time for multitasking can ruin efficiency the creation of a virtual world may improve it. You must learn to take the good with the bad when it comes to technology. Since the wide population uses technology, there is no way around it. To not keep up with the times is to be left in the past. While adjusting to this current bend in time and space one can only wonder how long it will last before the next bend is created. Will human curiosity never stop and leave this world in a constant change in the perception of time and space?

"Digital_Nation life on the virtual frontier." pbs. Web. 21 Jan 2011. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/.

Blog #1 by Gabriella Alvarez

While watching ‘Digital Nation’, a Frontline documentary on PBS[1], I found myself minimizing the screen and looking at iTunes and eBooks, or just opening up new tabs in my browser. I went to facebook, Google, and the sites for my other classes. I found myself getting lost in the Internet while I was listening to a documentary about how gaming, the Internet and different portable electronic devices are distracting and can cause long term memory and attention damage.

The documentary touched upon how digital natives are getting lost in the gaming world, spending more hours playing and social networking than at work. The Internet and the gaming world have an addictive quality that ends up distorting time for the user. Hours looking at friends on facebook, playing a new virtual reality game, browsing Google, or watching video’s on YouTube and Hulu feel like minutes.

When someone get’s the least bit bored, he/she has the opportunity to pause whatever they’re doing--whether it be homework, making funny photos with the built in camera, or playing a game. Computers and technology now have so much to offer that one can sit in the same chair for days and be completely immersed in the Internet and forget about other needs such as food or water.

The Internet has a sort of magical quality to it, where anything can happen. Whole worlds are created online, such as World of Warcraft. There are other games where people may create online selves either to mirror how they appear in real life or weave a completely different person that actually isn’t a person at all but an elf or vampire or werewolf. People can become whomever they want on the Internet, and converse with whomever they want.

Space and time just don’t have the same meaning anymore. What land barriers are there now that someone in Atlanta, Georgia can look at and converse with someone in Hong Kong, China instantly with the click of a button? How can time go by as slowly as hours when boredom is eliminated?

Nowadays, reading a book doesn’t take students hours to accomplish. They’ll simply go online and look at spark notes or just read certain fragmented passages or abridged versions in the form of PDF documents that will take minutes as opposed to days. And not only can students read online versions, but it is easier for them to read sections at a time of the abridged versions and move on to another task for a while than it is to put down a book and do the same thing. Fragmented versions allow for fragmented time and thought processes rather than one fluid amount of time and one linear thought process.

When one’s mind is flitting from one idea to another in the blink of an eye, the brain is taking in a plethora of more information, and maybe that’s why time seems to speed up. A new, different, ever-changing world should allow for a new, different and ever-changing measurement of time.

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[1] Posted February 2, 2010