Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices

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

The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus. 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’. … 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: Connects to claims about sensory/attention fragmentation in attention-economy literature beyond the book. — connects to: Postmodern culture mirrors anterograde amnesia, clinging to old certainties while newness stays unnavigable — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 122; Memory-loss films reflect cultural anxiety about identities being upgradeable like software; Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory (+7 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 53

Related

• A generation born into digital micro-sliced media experiences time as disconnected presents. (similarity 0.95)
• Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory (similarity 0.90)

Broader Connections

• A generation born into digital micro-sliced media experiences time as disconnected presents. #expands (0.95) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 53
• The stuttering GIF defines twenty-first century digital temporality against Nineties smooth loops #exemplifies (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1332
• Dating algorithms shifted from future stability to present-moment experience #exemplifies (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 470
• Social media stories create a simultaneous temporality built on speed and impermanence #exemplifies (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 94
• Immediacy consummates video’s postmodern total-flow into a pure present with no future #exemplifies (0.72) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 195