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The Internet and The Flattening of Time
Justine Bateman was on Megyn Kelly’s Sirius XM podcast this week and made a very profound point: One thing the internet has done is to “flatten” time. That is, anything that has ever happened or been said, can be presented on the internet today without context and made to seem immediate and current. Bateman described how as a young actress she would do a magazine interview and someone picking up the magazine would see the interview accompanied in the publication by ads of current fashion and other articles reflective of the zeitgeist of that time. Today, that same interview can be published online without a date and passed off as something current — totally devoid of any context that offers insight into how the meanings or message may have changed in the intervening time.
And what fresh hell will AI bring? Will it be disciplined in its examination of data? Will it consider changing context? Or will it further mask differences in meaning by being accepted as the unchallengeable information integrator? Do the coders of AI recognize this problem and, if so, how are they dealing with it?
One of the challenges of thinking about the space-time in physics is the condition where time does not exist. We seem to be approaching this, not in a black hole “frozen” way, but in contemplating the totality of everything that has ever been said as if it was current and all at once.
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I’ve seen some of that. What I also noticed was how badly she seems to have aged. I’m 7 years older, and a guy, but I still look better than her. Fast living etc, I suppose.
I see this from both left and right all the time. You’ll see someone post a video or headline with no date but still breathlessly contain the word “BREAKING” in the post.
Well it is pretty shocking for those of us beyond middle age to look in the mirror. I admire Justine for rejecting some of the beauty conventions of Hollywood. She has decided that she likes intellectual challengers beyond memorizing lines, emoting and hitting marks. Instead she creates the lines and controls direction and production. Mrs Rodin and I have often discussed the tragedy of the surgical fight to battle aging that many actresses engage in. The loss of subcutaneous facial fat in the aging of women compared to men rapidly reveals whether their fundamental bone structure preserves traditional notions of beauty, or whether some surgical aid is desirable. But far too many actresses who elect for surgery create a visage that is slightly off-putting. Justine has chosen to avoid that path and I say kudos to her.
Yes, it is very irritating. Just because it is a fresh comment doesn’t make it fresh content.
Meanwhile, this stuff happens a lot on YouTube, of course. Again today I’m seeing videos that I’d previously seen on the Forbes channel, for example, months ago and someone else is posting them again now as if Jim Jordan just “took down” someone that actually happened months ago, or longer. They might just crop the video to hide a date that might have been originally present.
I don’t use Twitter/X but I expect it’s common there too.
And I’d understood the “flattening of time” business for quite a while already, probably long before Justine did, so I didn’t really need to pay attention to what she said.
I think she has aged normally. I’m pushing 60 hard and, if I was single, would be quite happy to ask her out.
The only way you could be looking better than Megyn would be if you were a tranny with a time machine. I’m not buying it.
Someone on X mentioned that he follows a particular athletic team…can’t remember which team it was or even which sport…and was researching the team’s history on some Internet site. The team was one of those that had had to change its mascot and logo for reasons of wokeness. He said that the site had changed history, so that an article on the Washington Redskins in, say, 1980, would have been modified to refer to them by their current woke-approved name of Washington Commanders.
As they used to say in the Soviet Union, the future is known, but the past is always changing.
Pretty sure he was talking about Justine but the sentiment is the same
I meant Justine. But have you seen Megyn without her studio makeup? Or Dana Perino?
Winston Smith is still on the job!
She’s had a long history of eating disorders. Common problem, for actresses.
I hope she’s doing better now. But my goodness she looks emaciated…
It’s true that context provides a lot of “cultural justice” in many cases. It makes it easier to understand and forgive statements and attitudes that we would reject today. There’s always a question of degree of offensiveness, though. It’s unfair to hold a 2006 comment to the same standards we are expected to live up to today.
Some racist comments, of any era, are just that, not lovably warm expressions of affection, etc, and I think most people know that.
One example of how the internet changed things has nothing to do with politics. Remember when (supposedly; this was the oversimplification in the press of the day) Tom Cruise tanked his career by jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch? 2005, I think. Fact is, Cruise’s problem was he had a lucrative Paramount deal written up when Hollywood was still marinated in DVD and cable revenue. As those profit centers receded, Paramount was looking for excuses.
Again, rewind the timeline. Witnesses at Winfrey’s studio didn’t notice or expect anything out of the ordinary. A male star went all-out to make the afternoon ladies scream and laugh; another day at the office on that show. But something new had changed things: YouTube and other online video clips. That’s what made it different from publicity tours that Cruise had been doing since Risky Business in 1982: Millions of people could look the clip up for themselves. It wasn’t really his fault; like the OP says, now, if you do it once on camera, you do it forever.
I think she might be some kind of vegan/low meat/protein diet… Just my thought, I can’t find anything on the web to support that… (not that I looked all that hard)
Flatten time, I agree with the concept, but I tend to think of it as an immediacy bias. We view our media a few hours or a day old – but rarely look back on an interview or documentary that’s not recent. This is why traditional media is having so much trouble – most of their content takes months or years to produce. So even when freshly released its no longer Immediate… A TV episode might take 6 months to a year to produce or even worse a movie that could take years to produce. Law & Order – back in the day – once promoted the show as “Plots ripped from the headlines”… Which was frequently true, but those headlines would be years old by the time NBC could exploit them…
I don’t know about that. If a single TV episode took somehow months or even years from writing to completion/broadcasting, how could they possibly do 20 or more in a year? Even if they were paralleled or something, that would mean it would take months or years for the FIRST episode to be shown, even if they THEN had a pipeline for WEEKLY episodes. But TV shows even now routinely have a pilot done by summer and then can be producing weekly episodes by September.
Well, I would be the opposite of emaciated, lol
Exactly. When I read “memory-hole” in George Orwell’s 1984 just a couple of years ago I realized that what had become a common saying in the internet age had its antecedent use in the 1940s.
Its an assembly line. Look at IMBD for any series, dozens of writers, a dozen directors.
For example look at “Suits” … 9 seasons, 134 episodes… 2 dozen directors nearly 3 dozen writers… Weekly episodes are shot in a week, but was written months earlier.
But to produce the first episode can take years – just to find a network to green light the production, but yes, once they find a distribution channel, a pilot can be quickly produced.
For that strange period between the end of WW2 and the popularity of cable news, people got used to there being just enough in the world that was Important (TM) to fit in daily, weekly and monthly publications. Reading the paper of a morning was an activity like cleaning one’s teeth or having breakfast, although of much less actual use. A certain type of person, however, liked to infuse the ritual with more meaning than it actually contained: I’m not just measuring out my life with coffee spoons, I’m Keeping Up With Current Events; I’m Well-Informed. The current reversion to reality- that people who write or talk for a living have agendas just like everyone else, except that theirs also involve persuading you to continue to consume their words – leaves such folks twisting in the epistemological wind.
In any event, time (“media time”, to coin a phrase) was always somewhat arbitrary. If the word goes out early in the New Year that the Romanian election is important then everyone will be talking about that as if it has just happened, rather than something that occurred weeks ago.
People forgot that “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
Justine Bateman has been doing delightful posts, taking the online rants of deranged folks (lefties chiefly), AOC among them, and subject cinematic criticism. Evaluating the writing, lighting, camerawork, etc. Quite fun stuff.
I just turned 68 and I look fantastic! Then I remembered that my eyeballs have aged and deteriorated at the same rate as my body. 😖😆
I thought time was a flat circle?
Time may be a flat circle, but the squiggle on that coffee cup is not a flat circle.
Turn it sideways.
The surface of the cup is curved.
Joe Biden hardest hit.
It’s not unusual for Hollywood actresses and models to look ordinary without their makeup . . .
What the hell does her looks and how she’s “aged” have anything to do with the point of this post?
I’m sure you’re an Adonis. Thanks for sharing your opinion of a 58-year-old woman’s looks.