Name: 【TED】Abha Dawesar: Life in the "digital now" (Abha Dawesar: Life in the "digital now")
Uploaded: 2015-04-08T07:09:53.000Z
Duration: 12 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy,

Half the city was dark because of a power cut,

actually down the stairs first, for his walk,

I was also hauling gallons of bottles of water

The stores nearby were out of flashlights

But these were not the major preoccupations of my day.

It was just as critical for me to be the first person in

at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers

I started to prospect under the benches of bakeries

and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points.

Even in the rain, people stood between Madison and 5th Avenue

under their umbrellas charging their cell phones

that it was stronger than all our technology,

and yet here we were, obsessed about being wired.

to tell you what's really important and what's not,

and Sandy made me realize that our devices

The self as we once knew it no longer exists,

and I think that an abstract, digital universe

and I want to talk to you about what I think that means.

I'm a novelist, and I'm interested in the self

because the self and fiction have a lot in common.

You and I can experience things without a story.

But the larger sense that we have of our lives,

the slightly more abstract one, is indirect.

Our story of our life is based on direct experience,

A novel needs scene after scene to build,

and the story of our life needs an arc as well.

Discrete moments from our lives are its chapters.

But the story is not about these chapters.

It's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness,

and sometimes, more importantly, in spite of these,

and we change it and we change ourselves.

Our story, therefore, needs two dimensions of time:

but the one that narrates needs several moments,

Now, the flow of time is embedded in everything,

in the budding of a little bud into a rose.

I think that technology has altered that flow of time.

The overall time that we have for our narrative,

but the smallest measure, the moment, has shrunk.

It has shrunk because our instruments enable us

in part to measure smaller and smaller units of time,

and this in turn has given us a more granular understanding

and for which we need more and more complicated computers.

between what we can perceive and what we can measure

Science can do things with and in a picosecond,

but you and I are never going to have the inner experience

of a millionth of a millionth of a second.

You and I answer only to nature's rhythm and flow,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Abha Dawesar: Life in the "digital now" (Abha Dawesar: Life in the "digital now")

experience

present

time

world