In a spatial context, what is your understanding of space-time convergence?
Answer:
The rise of civilization has seen an ever increasing mechanisation of space and time and, on the surface, an ever greater move towards convergence and standardization. In the case of time, sundials in Antiquity introduced ways of measuring variable hours. During the middle ages, clocks introduced a technology for fixed-length hours. During the Renaissance, perspective introduced a means of creating homogeneous, integrated spaces. In the nineteenth century, the advent of photography introduced a technology of capturing a given space at a given time. A combination of new technologies such as the telegraph and the train led to standardized time zones.
These developments are so central that some have effectively reduced the history of early modern science to a series of inventions relating to the measurement, representation and reproduction of space and time: from simple rulers and surveying instruments, through proportional compasses, calculators, and converters, to automatic measuring devices.
The twentieth century has seen the spread of the telephone and television whereby there is an increasing impression that tele-presence is possible: that persons in different spaces can be united in a single time. The rise of computers has greatly added to this rhetoric of convergence. Computers are integrating all the conventional measuring devices for time and space: clocks, calculators, and conversion tools for all the basic functions: area, currency, energy, length, light, mass, pressure, speed, temperature, time, and volume.
Thanks to the interchangeability of digital records, texts, photographs, films, telephones and televisions are now increasingly interchangeable. In theory, a user can speak into a microphone (sound), see the result as text on a monitor or have it printed. Alternatively a user can take a text on a screen and have it read out loud.
From this emerges a vision of the world where everything is supposedly simultaneous and at a distance: e.g. the tele-conference, tele-presence, tele-learning, tele-marketing, tele-shopping etc. With all this emphasis on real-time, we should be getting ever closer to "reality". Yet at the same time everything around is becoming virtual: the virtual-tourist, the virtual-museum, the virtual marketplace, the virtual university etc.
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