Lohi Telegram / Slow Down!
In 1912, at an international conference on time in Paris, a unified and global world time was introduced (the implementation of a plan first conceived in 1884). This made possible what sociologists later have called a “placeless definition of time”, by which they mean that time established itself as an independent dimension of the world, on an equal (and eventually even superior) footing with space.
At the same time, the construction of networks of roads and canals increased the volume of freight and distance it could be carried. The average speed of private carriages on French roads more than doubled from 1814 to 1848, from 4,5 to 9,5 kilometres per hour. In Prussia, during the same period of time, the mail coach journey from Berlin to Cologne shrank from 130 to 78 hours.
What was happening was the disentanglement of time from space; before, people thought of the two as intertwined, but with technological advancements in transportation, production, and communication, time has (in the words of Karl Marx) come to annihilate space, which is why so much of the contemporary “cultural wars” seem to be between the two groups of “anywheres” (globalists well adapted to change) and “somewheres” (people more locally rooted).
It was in David Goodhart’s The Road Somewhere that these two concepts were first introduced. A contemporary classic, the book put into words what many had already been experiencing. This was the context in which Lohi Journal was first created; in the polarisation between time and space, where time was moving so rapidly that local specificity no longer seemed to matter, we wanted to form a kind of resistance; we wanted to create an imperative to slow down.
During a recent visit to Stockholm, I was struck by how many who were using headphones. In certain areas, it seemed as though almost everyone I passed on the street or who sat next to me on the metro were embedded in their own universe, cut off from the rest of us while listening to a podcast or their favourite Spotify playlist.
The headphone phenomenon is not new, I remember how cool I thought Walkmans were in the 80s, and portable CD players in the 90s. But even back then, there was something eerie about being shut off from the rest of the world, not being able to hear what was happening around me.
The current headphone trend has developed out of screen culture. Digital screens are a blessing and a cure – I’m using a screen to write this, and you’re using one to read it. In Sweden today, one in four 15-year-olds are illiterate and most young people are incapable of understanding the context of a text.
Last week I attended a student presentation session at a university. There was not even one without spelling errors, and when I pointed this out, not a single student could spot the mistakes. They weren’t used to seeing words in writing, and so they didn’t know what they were supposed to look like. And during a recent seminar at the same university, I heard a colleague telling the students that if they find the course literature too difficult, they should search for it on YouTube, where they could watch a summary instead.
During the height of the blog era, images and texts were still quite evenly distributed, but with social media, and Instagram in particular, images are now the dominant form of expression. TikTok and Youtube put the images in motion, and today, what’s most prevalent on people’s screens are short clips, creating vast kaleidoscopes of entertainment, never-ending links of films gathered from all around the world, cute cats and funny accidents and conspiracy theories, together with recipes, travel guides and garden tips. There’s no ending and no beginning, only a continuous scrolling.
When reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of of Lost Time, the scene that impacted me the most was when the narrator sees an airplane in the sky for the first time and realizes that the world forever has changed and that the past world order is forever lost. The airplane made the world smaller; it was now possible to see the world as birds do, and to travel over vast spaces in very little time.
Proust described it as the beginning of the mechanical age, defined by technology and speed, and through his description of the modern era, this is how I began seeing the world around me as well. What Proust described was how mass-produced machines began to affect people’s lives and eventually alter the entire foundation of modern society. Thanks to technology, everything became more flexible, or (again in the words of Marx) as summarized in a catchier way: “all that is solid melts into air”.
A related argument is that visual culture became more detailed. Modern advertising appeared in the newspapers and magazines, commercial messages appeared on the façades of many of the city’s buildings, with images of goods for sale, while large neon signs shone their artificial light at night, disturbing the natural order.
During my time in Stockholm, I was constantly bumping into people. They stopped to scroll, to text, to change playlists, oblivious to the fact that they were surrounded by other people. With their eyes on the screens and headphones in their ears, their connection to others had been lost, they had forgotten what place they were in.
Not to sound like a Luddite, but connecting the dots from Proust’s airplane to the clumsy Swedes, I can see how, through “the annihilation of space”, people are disconnecting from even the small physical place that they’re presently in.
Being based in two countries, Sweden and Italy, makes it possible for me to compare the two countries. If in Sweden digitalization has made people more invested in social media than physical space, in Italy it’s often the opposite.
After my return to Italy from Stockholm, one of the first things I noticed was a lack; very few people carry a cell phone in their hands, and not even half the people I pass on the streets are wearing headphones. When walking their dogs, they seem to actually just be doing that, and when buying groceries, they’re not simultaneously watching a clip on youtube.
As I travel between the two countries, what I see is the difference between “anywheres” and “somewheres” being played out all around me, and the more I see, the less I’m sure that the phones glued to everyone’s hand in the Swedish capital really are that “smart”.