Is truth worth waiting for?
The Limerick woman’s study, carried out at The James Cook University in Singapore, concluded that constant use of smartphones and tablets has speeded up our own processing power.
“I’ve found some indication interacting with technology and technocentric societies has increased some type of pacemaker within us.”
Confusingly, this is actually buying us time. Dr McLoughlin found that a smartphone user can sit in a room for 50 minutes but perceive an hour has passed, with all the processing we are capable of.
Yet, there is a paradox between our live experience of time and how we remember it, so over the longer term we wonder where the time has gone. We can’t believe it’s Monday again already, or that Easter is just around the corner. We appear to be gaining and losing time at the same time.
So, can we spare 40 seconds for technology to check if a goal has been correctly awarded? Maybe we have all the time in the world. But can we tolerate the wait?
When it comes to football, all we want, even more than time, is consistency, so initial reaction to the trial of a video assistant referee in Spain’s midweek friendly win over France has been overwhelmingly positive.
There has been widespread satisfaction it ‘only took 40 seconds’ to rule out Antoine Griezmann’s header and later to award Gerard Deulofeu’s goal after the offside flag had wrongly gone up. This relative brevity has been happily contrasted with the protracted discussions that take place when a rugby referee ‘goes upstairs’.
And yet, our experience of live football and the mind- bending trickery of time should bring caution.
We know well the greatest of all frustrations: That infuriating, debilitating moment when a player kicks the ball out of play to allow treatment for an opponent, just as that opponent clambers conveniently to his feet, right as rain.
The strength-sapping rigmarole of throwing the ball back to a ripple of applause must follow and many will concede that these futile episodes bring about the longest 10 seconds of their busy lives.
Do these people really have the temporal stamina to regularly watch a referee talk to his watch for 40 seconds in the cause of justice? There is little point making comparisons with rugby, where much of the time is spent kicking the ball out of play, where their patience is always being tested.
The law of unintended consequences suggests too there must be a danger of spin-off time suckages. Each time a flag goes up, to halt a player haring through on goal, will the referee allow the chance to be finished just in case the lino has got it wrong? Will he only book the player for time wasting if the flag was correct?
And might it be these five-second suspensions of reality that eventually drive us to distraction and forget to ever look back from the phone to the match?
Eventually football be come to wonder if we really wanted the truth that badly. However, it’s swings and roundabouts. It looks as though we will continue to gain and lose time at the same time. Just as football demands an extra 40 seconds from us, the GAA is about to give it back.
Word arrived this week, via a discussion at a Westmeath County Board meeting, that the traditional pre-match minute’s silence is to be cut to 20 seconds.
The recommendation appears to have come from Croke Park’s match presentation committee, for reasons yet unknown.
The timing, if you like, of this news could have been better. It is not a great look, on paper, to make it known, just as the game that has sold its soul a million times is finding the time and patience for the truth, that you are in too big a hurry to remember the dead.
Broadcasting phobia of dead air has been blamed in some quarters, though RTÉ head of sport Ryle Nugent says the idea certainly isn’t theirs. It is a concession to modern restlessness, presumably. And maybe another effort to combat The Few Apes in every ground, who regard silence as the big stage.
Certainly the minute’s silence is not a great TV spectacle. And it’s poignancy and power, even on a lovely day in a full stadium, rarely makes its presence felt within the first 20 seconds.
The composer John Cage created 4’33’’, a piece of music that consists entirely of silence. He was encouraged by a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, where he should have heard no noise, but actually heard two sounds, one high and one low.
The engineer in charge told him the high sound was his nervous system in operation and the low one his blood in circulation. Cage — one of the great chancers — knew then that 4’33’’, empty as it was, would be full of sound.
In this day and age, we don’t have four and a half minutes to spare, but often, in that sweet spot during a minute’s silence — maybe between 30 and 40 seconds in — a curious peace settles.
We might spare a thought. For the person remembered or maybe somebody else altogether. Or some other game. Anticipation jumbles with memories and context in a way that, somehow, gets us in touch with what is in our blood. It might even be worth waiting longer for than the right decision.
