latency

Light in optical fibre travels about two hundred kilometres every millisecond. A message to the other side of the planet arrives in a tenth of a second. If closeness were measured in milliseconds, we would never have been closer to anyone.

And yet the strange modern feeling is not that people are far away. It is that they are near and unreachable at the same time. Their names are in my pocket. Their faces update every day. I know what they ate, which song they skipped, which city they woke up in. I have not heard their voice in two years.

Engineers call the delay between a signal leaving and arriving latency. There is another latency nobody measures: the time between knowing about a person and actually meeting them. That one keeps growing. The more I see of someone, the less I feel I need to call. The feed answers the question before I can ask it. How are you? Here. Look. Fine.

Loneliness used to mean that no one was there. Now it often means that everyone is there, behind glass, at exactly the distance of a screen. You can watch the whole crowd and not be touched by a single hand.

I do not think the answer is to unplug. The wire is not the enemy. It carried my best friend's first message to me, years ago; it carried the news when her father died; it carried my reply. A wire can carry a voice, or a picture of a voice. It does not choose.

So, an experiment. Tonight, choose one name you know too much about and have not spoken to. Do not like anything. Do not react. Write are you there? and wait.

The waiting is the point. That is the latency of a real answer: longer than a tenth of a second, and worth it.

eof