Time is Up and Space is Down

It was a typical lunch with my friend. As he sat down, he set his phone face up on the table. I grimaced inside. Inevitably, the phone would ring or buzz. My friend would look at it and decide whether he should respond immediately or not. Usually, he did.

But this time, I did the unthinkable. I asked him if he would put the phone away.

Even though we were close friends, I worried that he would be offended. Would he bristle inside? Would this be our last lunch? Because my friend is the open-minded, non-defensive man I took him for, what followed was a terrific conversation about time and space. How was it that values of time were up—mainly, the need to respond quickly—and the values of space were down—a focus on those in our presence?

These choices matter—and, in our day, they are influenced by technological sources. As Neil Postman reminds us, “Every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away.”1 In these negotiations, we are always prioritizing, always putting some things above others. In the moral realm, we are always sorting out a hierarchy of values: which good is better? St. Paul famously ranked values in 1 Corinthians 13:13. There is faith, hope, and love—but “the greatest of these is love.”2

So, amidst the mediated noise of our times, what are some quieter concerns we might have missed? What is emphasized and what is neglected? What is overstated and what is understated? My argument is that one current hierarchy of values is that time is up and space is down.

Our culture tends to privilege qualities related to time—speediness, urgency, efficiency, over values of space—being in lively proximity to one another, sharing our deeper selves, supporting one another with personal presence. Because of our communication technologies, time has risen as a moral commitment and we are more willing to transgress the ethics of space. As we negotiate with technology, at this point, time is winning the debate.

In the not-so-old days, when the phone rang at dinner, any of us might interrupt a meaningful conversation to take the call. “It might be important,” we’d announce. But, usually, we’d trot back to the table and mutter sheepishly, “It was only a telemarketer. Now, ... what was it we were talking about?”

Then we got caller-ID, so we no longer had to take those calls. We said, “How wonderful!” And what happened to this freedom from interruption, this freedom to engage with others around the table? Cell phones were invented and we each got a phone. Then we all put our phones on the table, screens up, and gave higher priority to the phones (to calls, texts, emails, the Internet) than to the others in our presence. We said, “It might be an emergency!” and compulsively checked our messages.

Don’t get me wrong. I like phones. Talking across a distance is terrific. Texting can be incredibly helpful. Other communication technologies are wonderful too. Facebook keeps us connected. Skype is great, especially for seeing my grandchildren. And, of course, I’m on email all day.

But for all these advances, Postman reminds us that we need to examine any corresponding technological retreats. How does participation with these forms of communication play out? All forms of communication get us leaning in certain ways. Watching a lot of TV gets us leaning toward the value of entertainment, which we use as a significant criterion to evaluate non-entertainment situations such as friendship, church, and presidential candidates. The medium of advertising moves us to appreciate pithy slogans (whether they are in ads or not) and to think that buying something, anything, will make us happy.

Though these media might deleteriously influence us, we can become educated about how  each one pushes us, and do our best to choose when to lean and when to push back. If we don’t attend to how each medium is acting on us, we will more than likely lean in the direction the form encourages.

How Chronemics and Proxemics are Trending

Here’s the contemporary pressure. Since chronemics (the role of time in communication) is a greater perceived priority, an ethic of timely control is overstated. Timeliness has increased as a moral imperative. We prize efficiency (communication is short and to the point). We value speed (of output and response). And we feel a sense of urgency around our devices. In good Pavlovian style, we hear the ding of a text or an email and we salivate; we’re anxious to get to it, now. We can become compulsive, even physiologically addicted.3

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that not only is our attention span decreasing, our brains are  actually getting rewired toward flitting  and scanning, toward short bursts of attending—and away from thorough thinking, deep reading and intimate relating.4 We live a shallower experience, skimming over various surfaces, but not able to sustain a trip to the depths. We struggle to focus on anything complicated.

Values of timeliness accelerate the need for control. We want to send and receive messages quickly—but also on our terms, in ways we can control. We exercise power by managing our texts, editing photos, and by avoiding circumstances that might decrease our sense of control, such as interpersonal interactions with unpredictable responses. We don’t want to deal with uncertain facial reactions to our messages. (That’s one reason some of us look down at our phones when approaching people in public. We use our phones to avoid eye contact.)

I ask one of my classes every year, why is there so much anxiety in your generation? Why have appointments at the counseling center greatly increased? Why is suicide up? They are not researchers. They are just reporting what they experience as members of this group. One consistent answer is that they feel the weight of tremendous expectations. They make comparisons based on the perfect images they see on social media. They say, why don’t I have as much fun, look as fantastic, go places as exotic? They feel the pressure of higher digital standards and the need to control their own images.

Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT, has addressed these concerns in her books about screen time, and being “alone together” in American culture. In Reclaiming Conversation, she says, “what we value most is control over where we put our attention.”5 We view our phones as instrumental to this power: “Our mobile devices seem to grant three wishes ... first, that we will always be heard; second, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and third, that we will never have to be alone ... that we will never have to be bored.”6

Increasingly, as the saying goes, we’d rather text than talk. In part, I think this means that we’d rather do what keeps us in control: send a text, a Snapchat, an Instagram, to Pin it. We shy away from what’s open-ended.

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Our attention to time has come at the expense of space. Since proxemics (the role of space in communication) is not a perceived priority, an ethic of hospitable presence is understated. We would do well to recover our commitment to engagement with others. See if you resonate with the following situations.

Some circumstances regarding presence are chosen for us. At times, these circumstances are in a conspiracy against conversation and solitude. TVs fill our eyes and ears in restaurants, coffee shops, even gas stations. The message seems to be: “Look over here. I’ll keep you perpetually distracted.” Music, blaring music, shouts us down in stores and at sporting events. At a recent Rose Bowl, the music was so loud during half-time that I had to shout whatever I wanted to say—to the person right next to me. Eventually, I just gave up. Our environments often say, “Whatever you do, don’t talk!” And advertising grabs our attention in more and more places:  on entire cars and buses, on the closed doors of toilet stalls, on the screen while we are waiting for a movie to begin. I’m sure a few teenagers on first dates have thought, “What a relief! No awkward silences!”

Then there are the choices we make that are related to human presence. We are so often on our devices: at lunch with friends, on hikes “in nature,” in committee meetings (at which we might complain about the poor attention spans of our employees), and at church services, making sure that worship, too, wasteth not any time. Many of my students wake up each morning by the phone alarm, then spend the first minutes of the day in bed scanning their messages and social media. They set the tone of their day with this information. They begin the day “on” and stay “on.” Parents are often on their phones when they are with their kids. One  teacher I know says that parents often do not even acknowledge their children when they pick them up after school—because they are looking at their phones.

Important consequences follow:

The norm of interruption. Too often, no matter how much effort was made to be in one’s presence, the phone takes precedence. Urgency undermines the quality of human presence. Scanning trumps attentiveness. About a breakfast get-together, a friend reported, “The conversation felt so different. I’m not used to people paying attention to how I am.” In the  recent past, people said, “Would you mind if I took this call?” Now, they just pull away, even in  the middle of a meaningful exchange, even in the middle of a walk that has been scheduled for weeks, on Christmas, even if there is absolutely nothing urgent about the text. I keep thinking, the President isn’t calling—and Jesus isn’t on the line either.

A sense of competition: Don’t you sometimes feel a rivalry with the phone on the table? I do. I wonder, will I be able to keep the other person’s attention? Will the phone be a preferable, more arresting, more compelling, more entertaining option? How can I “up” my game, make myself more worthy than the other person buzzing in? Sometimes, in restaurants, one person scrolls through their phone while the other one, after being ignored, sighs with resignation and joins in.

The disjunction between connection and detachment: We think we can have it both ways: Be fully present and be fully connected elsewhere. We wave the banner of “Champion Multi-Tasker,” even though Stanford researcher Clifford Nass and others have repeatedly shown how poorly we multi-task.7 Sometimes we rationalize the detachment by telling ourselves, “Hey, there are a lot of people here. No one will notice me withdraw.” At the college where I work, “whenever two or more are gathered,” someone is on the phone.

We tend to forget about the power of metamessages, that extra communication that accompanies the most straightforward meaning of the “primary” message. If I say I’m fully listening but I watch the TV or computer or phone screen, my more covert metamessage conflicts with my more overt message. If I think I’m saying that being in your presence matters but I keep opting out of your presence, my metamessage is that I have other priorities. The result is that ours is an age that claims to be connected, to be exceptionally interested in connection—through “community” experiences on-line—but is often detached.

Undetected immodesties: Though we say we are only “stepping out” (in our minds just slipping away from the conversational dynamic for a moment), we are actually manifesting our narcissism: “I am the one who matters here; I am the one who will be in charge of our communication.” But let’s remember techno-Corinthians 13: If I answer my texts but have not love, I am just a dinging notification.

Space and Hospitable Presence

If urgency and efficiency are up and immediacy is down, why should the ratio change? What’s so good about space that we should raise it up? What do we gain by a commitment to presence? I offer four benefits.

Hospitable presence offers the potential of a high and holy reward:  the gift of undivided attention. When I was in graduate school, I frequently went to see my favorite professor, Dominic LaRusso, in his office. Most of the time, someone got there before me. So, I would wait. And wait. After what seemed to me to be “long enough,” I paced back and forth in front of his door so he’d be sure to see me. I’d think, “Don’t you know I’m waiting out here? Can’t you wrap up this conversation?” Dom never acknowledged me in the hall. He never even made eye contact. The nerve! But here’s what I finally learned. When it was my turn, when I sat in the longed-for chair, he gave me the same uninterruptible attention he had given the previous student—that, in fact, he gave to every student. He valued immediacy. Being in another’s presence meant something important. And I felt valued by him because he gave me this gift of undivided personal interest.

Hospitable presence involves a dynamic uncertainty: open-ended conversations, interesting lines of inquiry and a lack of predictability. In his book on improvisation in art and life, Stephen Nachmanovich says that “Every conversation is a form of jazz.”8 I love this metaphor. You lay down a topic, a theme. I take it up and play my variation then send it  back to you. You add your riff on the refrain—and on and on it goes. The most meaningless conversations are formulaic scripts: “Hey, what’s up?” “Nothing. How are you?” “Good. What are you doing over the weekend?” “Just hangin’ out.” “Cool.” These conversations are extended ways to say hello. And though they aren’t immoral or destructive, they are usually forgettable. Occasionally, memorably, we play our vocal instrument in a jazz conversation. The dialogue moves and grows and creates tunes we never dreamed we’d hear.

Hospitable presence involves the whole person: emotions, intellect, values, and the senses: eye contact, sound, smell, touch, even (at a meal) taste. It’s the whole enchilada of humanity—well, if that’s what you ordered. Emailing and texting are so easy and efficient that we can work for  years next door to someone and never cross the threshold of their office door.

Hospitable presence promotes the joys of empathic relationships: identifying with one another, sharing our lives by “rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep.” Though we might be increasingly nervous about deep human contact, our desire to be known, to be remembered by others, is still essential to our soul.

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One tragic irony of our times is that these benefits are the very reasons we avoid deeper presence. The costs of undivided attention, spontaneity, wholeness and empathy seem overwhelming and frightening.

Because we have not arrested our self-centeredness, we do not want to give the gift of undivided attention. As Ariana Grande sings repeatedly in her hit song “Focus” (which has received over 500,000,000 views on Vevo as of 2016), “Focus on me, f-f-focus on me.” We get the idea.

In Awakening the Quieter Virtues, I suggest how the virtue of modesty contends with this preoccupation with the self.9 Although most of the time we see self-focus as a bragging and dominating kind of arrogance, it can also manifest itself in disparaging self-references. We can be the center of the universe by drawing attention to ourselves with self-pity (“I’m terrible”) or self-loathing (“I  hate myself”). Modesty captures a paradox. It means that we temper a sense of our fullness with a recognition of our emptiness. Our current technological options make tempering our sense of fullness more difficult these days.

Because we want control, we fear unpredictability. We want to edit our experiences, amend our messages and photos. We don’t want what’s unstructured, unpredictable, spontaneous. Students used to get their food in the Dining Commons then look around, sometimes anxiously, for a group to join. Now they text their friends before the meal. No risk, no fuss.

Because we have leaned away from presence, we feel increasingly insecure about and wary of engaging the whole person. As the use of texting increases, the pressure not to call increases. The caller worries that the voice is an intrusion, even when the voice is desired by the other or  when a call would be a better resolution than a dozen texts. Strategically, we avoid more intimate contact. Some researchers argue that because we are less frequently in one another’s presence, we are losing the ability to interpret traditional nonverbal cues. What does that facial expression mean? How do I deal with silence?

Because we maintain our distance, we are in fact distant. Turkle writes about a “lost practice in the empathic arts: learning to make eye contact, to listen, and to attend to others.” She says that there is, in the young, a “flight from empathy.”10 Sadly, we have all had many conversations in which we are not asked a single question. Not one. The divide remains a divide.

Public and Private Hospitality

We need a renewed commitment to hospitable presence, a pledge to cherish it, to respect it, to take actions necessary to keep it alive and healthy. We understand Face-Time. We need to revive Face-Space.

Public hospitality involves respect for place. Public areas are not the same as private areas. A classroom is not a bedroom, a restaurant is not an isolated reception desk, a shared meal is not a solitary meal. When my now-deceased mother-in-law met a food-server or a cashier or a bank teller, she usually asked for his or her name. She treated each as a person not as a robotic servant. I know what you’re thinking. What’s a bank teller?

Might we muster the courage to speak to strangers when we are in line? Could we get off our phones long enough to notice and engage with others? Some might say that this kind of initiation is only the extroverts’ calling, but most of us can find ways to be hospitable, even if just to smile.  My darker side nudges me to walk toward someone coming at me who is phone-focused. I want to see at what point they’ll notice me and look up. But I don’t. If I’m feeling especially brave, I interrupt their mediated messaging and say hello. Many seem surprised—if they hear me through their earbuds.

We should also remember private hospitality: What can we do to invite others in, to help them to flourish? As we reflect on our dialogic experience, surely we can conclude that meaningful conversation is one of life’s greatest goods and highest pleasures. It’s not as flashy as Disneyland or Star Wars or a sunset cruise—but most of us would say that some of our best human moments have involved sitting around a table and talking, learning to know others and getting known ourselves, reminiscing with long-time friends.

Like many good things, conversation asks of us risk and skill, perseverance and creativity. It also requires protection, ethical protection. Private hospitality requires that we make good moral judgments in relationship to it. How can we keep a conversation going without dominating and without disappearing? How can we foster conviviality, communion, attentiveness, other-centeredness? If “every conversation is a form of jazz,” let’s lay down a theme, play a variation on it, and listen to how the others’ in our presence riff on the theme. Let’s praise hospitality.

***

Since we tend to lean where technology pushes us, we need reminders—counter-weights—to pull us back. Constructive patterns need to  replace destructive patterns, and these take time, community, and biblical guidance. We need ethical commitments, principled reference points,  and the virtues to support them: good habits that keep us going toward wisdom. It’s part of our spiritual formation, our moral stewardship, our responsibility to our calling to help tend the garden, to cultivate culture, to construct a civilized world. Many have encouraged these directions.11

These counter-weights include a recognition that the trend of “time is up and space is down” is an emphasis that needs correction not a reversal.

Rather than one precluding the other, one requires the other. It’s not “time bad, space good.” This is Tarzan ethics. Time needs space. If we truly want “timely control” to benefit community, we need to practice “hospitable presence.” Self-fulfillment requires community development. We stay connected to those not near in part by staying connected to those who are near.

The counter-weights also include five principles I have implied along the way:

1. When in doubt, choose life. As Deuteronomy 30 so eloquently states, discernment is  always appropriate. More than we realize in our everyday tasks, we are choosing between what is life-giving and life-taking, between what is life-nurturing and what is life-destroying. It’s a good lens for evaluating decisions of time and space.
2. If you are able, taste and see, not just see. Engage the most senses possible. Make your default choice to act on the most nonverbal elements, not the least. If you can go next door to say hello, don’t send a text. We are not just our words. We are bodies. Don’t just Instagram the roses, smell them.
3. If you need to feed the dog, don’t use a hammer. Choose the best method for accomplishing the task—and, as Turkle says, “the right tool is not always the one in your  hand.”12  Facebook when it’s the best tool. Talk when it’s the best tool. Let the form match the message.
4. Metamessages matter. We are always communicating whether we realize it or not. May our main interpersonal message be, if possible, “you have my undivided attention.”
5. Home wasn’t built in a day. Make relational choices with a view toward the long-term. A short-term orientation is a short-sighted orientation. Virtue takes the long view.

Above all, let’s keep talking about these things. Because time is up and space is down, let’s pledge to enter into open-ended, fully present, inquisitive, risk-taking conversations. It will require gospel-inspired meekness on all our parts. In The Road to Character, David Brooks highlights humility, defining it as “freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the  time.”13 That sounds like a huge relief, doesn’t it?

Originally published in the Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care, 2017, Vol. 10, No. 1, 105–113.

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1. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of  Culture  to  Technology  (New York: Knopf, 1992), 5.
2. All Scripture quotations are from the NIV.
3. See James Roberts, Too Much of a Good Thing: Are You Addicted to Your Smartphone? (Austin, Texas: Sentia Publishing, 2015), and Susan Weinschenk, “Why We’re All Addicted to Texts, Twitter  and  Google,”  Psychology  Today,  September 11, 2012: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-wise/201209/why-were-all-addicted-texts-twitter-and-google.
4. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010), 122–129 and throughout.
5. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 19.
6. Ibid., 26.
7. Ophir Eyal, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner, “Cognitive control in me- dia multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, no. 37: 15583–15587, www.pnas.orgcgidoi10.1073pnas.0903620106 PNA
8. Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1990), 17.
9. Gregory Spencer, Awakening the  Quieter Virtues (Downers Grove: InterVar-  sity Press, 2010), see 88–108.
10. Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 11.
11. See James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016); also, James Bryan Smith’s Apprentice Series (The Good and Beautiful God/Life/Community, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press) and my book Awakening the Quieter Virtues.
12. Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 324.
13. David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015), 8.