A generation born into digital micro-sliced media experiences time as disconnected presents.

Evidence

Students’ incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation. It is, in fact, eerily reminiscent of Jameson’s analysis in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. Jameson observed there that Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia offered a ‘suggestive aesthetic model’ for understanding the fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial complex. ‘With the breakdown of the signifying chain’, Jameson summarized, ‘the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s – i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture – a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 53

Categorization

• XREF: Jameson’s Lacanian schizophrenia as aesthetic model for postmodern fragmentation connects to critiques of short-video-format attention economies and to ‘time sickness’ literature. — connects to: Political disengagement in British youth stems from reflexive impotence, a self-fulfilling prophecy, not apathy. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 45; Sustained reading is experienced as boring by students wired to constant stimulus gratification. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 51; Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 53 (+5 more)

Related

• Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices (similarity 0.95)
• Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory (similarity 0.87)

Broader Connections

• Social media stories create a simultaneous temporality built on speed and impermanence #expands (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 94
• The internet has an enduring-ephemeral temporality where images are both fleeting and eternal #expands (0.80)
• Modern life erodes integrated experience, replacing narration with information and shocks #corroborates (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 623
• Speculative technologies generate a distinct collective temporal experience analogous to Andersonian imagined community #expands (0.75)
• Small children restructure a parent’s experience of time into an enclosed present #exemplifies (0.72) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 100