The time-warping, self-fracturing multi-modal information firehose

The information metabolism required to operate with agency in our current age has fundamentally altered how we experience time. I’m not a physicist, so I don’t understand much about time dilation. However, the acceleration of information flow and our limited capacity to process it consciously fundamentally alter our shared perception of time.

Our bodies’ constant attempts at processing collapse the boundaries between discrete moments, creating what I've come to experience as a “disorientating nowness” in which past, present, and future blur. At first glance, this may resemble what New Thought writers like Eckhart Tolle call “The Power of Now.” But on closer inspection, it feels more like we’re sleepwalking into a passivity that fractures the body from the mind. A continuous stream of data floods our consciousness, while our bodies (and nervous systems) remain suspended in a paralyzing state of anticipation for the next hit.

Our attention is trained toward inaction, and our agency is outsourced to this external flow.

McLuhan understood media as extensions of our senses, but couldn’t have anticipated how cognitive architecture would shift when bombarded by multiple sensory channels. This restructuring of consciousness privileges rapid context-switching over sustained attention.

What Postman feared about television’s erosion of discourse now feels quaint. We’ve moved beyond mere entertainment into something more insidious: a perpetual state of partial attention that fragments our focus and sense of self. We know more than ever, but understand less.

Reality itself has become elastic. We inhabit personalized ecosystems that construct divergent realities despite physical proximity. We can see the water we're swimming in, even as the current pulls us further from shore. Why don’t we try to swim out?

“Holistic nowness” demands reintegration. Mind and body, perception and action, must begin to move together.