The Butt Ugly Weblog

Hyperlife

Joichi Ito introduced the terms m-time and p-time from Edward Hall. "P-time (polychronic) systems are characterized by several things happening at once."

I've recently noticed the same thing, too. I spend far less time on email and other linear, structured things, and suddenly I've become multi-connected, switching tasks at a very fast rate. You know, while the software is compiling, you check IRC, and RecentChanges, and a couple of blogs... But this is something I've been doing a long time anyway, and I've learned to be pretty adept at multitasking. No biggie. I've always done random things as well, with little connection to my actual life.

But oddly enough, lately I've felt like my social relationships are in p-time as well: I know a lot of people, and a lot of those people don't really know each other. So I try to balance between multiple, different social groups (and apologies to everyone whom I have been neglecting)... Someone called my blog "disjointed", that you really can't get a coherent picture of my life or what I do just by looking at it. But then again, I feel disjointed, too. It's like I am this vast hypermedia document that has links everywhere. Some you click more often, some you click less often. But they all lead to different places, and many of those documents don't know of their linkage.

I have a "hyperlife".

Perhaps it's a typical phenomenon[1] for people who lead an active online life. Or perhaps I'm just a freak.