232 pages
English language
Published March 10, 2017 by Yale University Press.
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We have always waited for life-changing messages: whether it be the time for you to receive a text message from your love, for a soldier’s family to learn news from the front, or for a space probe to deliver data from the reaches of the Solar System. In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message.
Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman shows how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and interpreted those times’ meanings. Exploring seven eras and objects of waiting—including pneumatic mail tubes in New York, Elizabethan wax seals, and Aboriginal Australian message sticks—Farman offers a new mindset for waiting today. In a rebuttal of the desire for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can …
We have always waited for life-changing messages: whether it be the time for you to receive a text message from your love, for a soldier’s family to learn news from the front, or for a space probe to deliver data from the reaches of the Solar System. In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message.
Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman shows how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and interpreted those times’ meanings. Exploring seven eras and objects of waiting—including pneumatic mail tubes in New York, Elizabethan wax seals, and Aboriginal Australian message sticks—Farman offers a new mindset for waiting today. In a rebuttal of the desire for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.
Subjects
- Reaction time
- Philosophy