Delayed Response
The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A celebration of waiting throughout history, and of its importance for connection, understanding, and intimacy in human communication
We have always been conscious of the wait for life-changing messages, whether it be the time it takes to receive a text message from your love, for a soldier’s family to learn news from the front, or for a space probe to deliver data from the far reaches of the solar system. In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message.
Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman shows how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times’ meanings. Exploring seven eras and objects of waiting—including pneumatic mail tubes in New York, Elizabethan wax seals, and Aboriginal Australian message sticks—Farman offers a new mindset for waiting. In a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this study of the utility of waiting, media studies scholar Farman explores the modes, ideas, and technologies that enable "time to be visible." At first, the book's theme feels forced, a way to connect the author's unconnected findings and visits to Civil War battlegrounds, a California library's collection of correspondence from American soldiers in various wars, and the British National Archive's collection of wax seals, among other places. Eventually, as these investigations accumulate, they do begin to cohere. In the ancient world, a wax seal identified the sender and enabled the received to know whether the message had been opened; now technology enables the sender of a text message to know if it has been opened. Pneumatic tubes once served as the mechanism for instant messaging in New York City, a system replicated (rather than repurposed) for fiber-optic cables some half a century later. Wartime, Farman notes, delays or destroys a lifetime of plans; the long delays that were part of the Civil War postal system reflected that reality. These insights come along slowly, with their own kind of delay, in a book that often seems to take its time, but those who are patient with the author's meanderings will be rewarded with paradoxical and thought-provoking ideas.
