DISTANCE AND TIME

I mused a couple of days ago about space, dimension, and distance metaphors for the Internet. The Economist has done me one better. In the March 13, 2003 edition it has included an article titled “The Revenge of Geography”. The article deals with various efforts to map linkages between geographic space and cyberspace.


Sometimes the value of information decays rapidly with distance. If you are hungry and in a strange neighborhood, information about the local restaurants – kind of food, price, quality, service – may be quite desirable. But you are only willing to go so far for a meal, and information on restaurants outside your area of interest may be not only of no use, but actually annoying, interfering with the search for the information you really want.

There are much more serious examples, and examples relevant to developing nations. It has been found for example, that crop research from Agricultural Research Stations is primarily used within a few tens of miles of the station. Crop variety selections are apparently often quite sensitive to local conditions of insolation, temperature, humidity, soils, etc. Similarly, epidemiological information on diseases of people, livestock, wildlife, and crops can be quite location specific. People in developing nations often have more Internet access to such information developed in (and most relevant to) rich countries than they do to information from their own countries. Perhaps worse, there is little chance for people in a developing nation to access information relevant to their own needs generated in another developing nation. Thus parts of Mozambique and parts of Brazil are sufficiently similar that information generated in one could be very useful in the other; and indeed both are Portuguese speaking nations. Yet the ability to share such information on the Internet is quite limited.

MetaCarta, a company financed by In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of the nearby Central Intelligence Agency sells “geo-parser” software which examines documents and looks for geographical references -- including country, city and state names, postcodes, Internet addresses, and the names of famous landmarks. The results from a gazetteer look-up are then combined using natural-language processing. The system estimates the document's corresponding location, and applies a “geotag” to it. Since, around 80% of text documents contain geographical references, according the Economist’s informant, the system can be quite helpful in linking web content with specific geographical locations.

The Economist also describes the “Geosearch” search engine which determines the geographical scope of a page by looking at the locations of pages that link to it, as well as its content. While some websites are global in scope, websites relevant to a particular state, city or region are less likely to have links from pages outside that locality.

According to the Economist, “a number of companies, including Quova, Digital Envoy, NetGeo and InfoSplit, offer ‘geolocation services’ that enable websites to determine the physical locations of individual users. This is done using a database that links internet protocol (IP) addresses of users' computers to specific countries, cities or even postcodes.” These could be useful for a Country Development Portal to develop directories of in-country development agencies and other linked organizations.

Time

The cultural aspects of time seem fascinating to me. For example, hours of standard lengths are a relatively new phenomenon, and in Roman times the day and night were divided into a set number of hours; the daytime hour got longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. What would it be like to live with ever-changing hours? Attitudes towards punctuality, appropriate times for specific activities, specific foods, all change from culture to culture. Before the advent of railroads, there was little need to synchronize times of various localities (except for a few people, such as astronomers.) Indeed, as Deva Sobel describes in her book, “Longitude,” clocks were incapable of keeping such good time anyway. Of course, once trains started approaching each other from different direction on the same track, it became important to know that if they communicated (by telegraph) their times of arrival, their clocks would be synchronized. Factories invented “shifts”, and the idea that all the workers in a shift started at the same time and ended at the same time. Cultural changes followed the invention and widespread utilization of good cheap clocks, railroad timetables, and factory work schedules.

The Internet introduces new issues. Of course the most visible is the increase in speed of so much of our communication, as email replaces snail mail. But there are other effects. I was involved Friday in a synchronous chat room with people from several Central and Eastern European nations, as well as with several others from the Washington DC area. We were working in the early morning, while our European colleagues were working in the afternoon. What does that do to the communication process?

There is also the idea of a “Flow” state that people (including this blogger) sometimes reach in surfing the Internet. It occurs when you get so immersed in the pleasurable experience of following a track on the Web that you forget to worry about time and you concentrate to the point that distractions from outside are few and far apart. I think of a cat watching a mouse hole as typifying a flow state. Thus the psychological perception of time can be influence by surfing the Internet.

The time pressure incident to use of the technology may also have affective impact. The assembly line required people to do assembly tasks fast, and on schedule, and increasingly these are computerized. Workers get stressed, especially when the line speed increases. I assume just-in-time approaches to manufacturing have similar effects. When computers are relatively expensive and shared, there will be similar time pressure to complete work; when Internet costs are relatively high, completion of searches may be under time pressure; both would be stressful!

The asynchronous nature of email introduces another element into the equation. What does it mean when asynchronous email has become so much a part of business communication, substituting for and complementing the synchronous telephone and face-to-face communication of the past.

Economic development has been very much a process by which people leave agriculture and take up other work in manufacturing, transportation or other services. This transformation only is possible when farmer productivity increases, so that each feeds more people. Similarly, ICTs are increasing productivity for some economic activities in some countries. In some cases, a smaller labor force can produce all that is wanted, freeing people to work on other things. In some cases, more efficient work makes the task more attractive, and more labor is applied. Thus ICTs have taken a lot of the drudgery out of time-keeping and payroll in businesses, but people are doing much more data mining than in the past. Thus the time per task is an important concern relating to ICTs.

Einstein, I understand, included time as well as space as dimensions of the universe. It seems certainly a dimension of our psychological universe, and perhaps we should see it as a dimension of cyberspace. The time to download a website might be quite significant; So too, whether content is fresh or dated. William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, is a visionary on the psychological perception of cyberspace, but let me suggest that psychological time is clearly a dimension of psychological cyberspace. And let me suggest that reengineering time will be one of the important cultural adaptations to the developing Global Information Infrastructure.

One interesting paper on time and ICTs is:

Time And ICTs
By Leslie Haddon, Paper presented at the workshop ‘Researching Time’, ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), University of Manchester, September 19th, 2001. (HTML)