The Pleasure and Pain of Speed
How long is now? According to Google, not much less than 250 milliseconds. In 2008, the company presented a research report that examined ideal “latency” times for search results. It concluded “that a response time over 1 second may interrupt a user’s flow of thought.” The ideal latency for a search engine, said Google, was right at the quarter-second mark.
Which seems safe enough, because psychologists have long estimated that it takes us humans at least a quarter of a second to do much of anything. William James, wondering more than a century ago what is “the minimum amount of duration which we can distinctly feel,” had it pegged around 50 milliseconds. James cited the seminal work of Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner, who observed that people shown sets of flashing sparks stopped being able to recognize them as distinct entities around 0.044 seconds. This “now” time increases as you go up the ladder of complexity.
To do more than barely register an image as a stimulus, to actually see something for what it is, the neuroscientist Christof Koch notes in The Quest for Consciousness, requires an average of a quarter of a second (when we are told what to look for, recognition drops to 150 milliseconds). Google’s target response time is just on Koch’s cusp of perceivable consciousness. From there, went the implication of Google’s report, lay a sloping temporal despond: More slow, less happy.
A quarter of a second, then, is a biological bright line limiting the speed at which we can experience life. And the life that we are creating for ourselves, with the help of technology, is rushing towards that line. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa catalogues the increases in speed in his recent book, . In absolute terms, the speed of human movement from the pre-modern period to now has increased by a factor of 100. The speed of communications (a revolution, Rosa points out, that came on the heels of transport) rose by a factor of 10 million in the 20th century. Data transmission has soared by a factor of around 10 billion.
