 Hello everyone and welcome back to our Meet the Author series and I'm so happy as you will see a big smile on my face to welcome Jason Farman who's a professor at the University of Maryland and also director of the Design Cultures and Creativity program there and he's the author and that's the reason of his visit of a absolutely amazing book that I cannot recommend highly enough. The book title is Delayed the Art of Waiting from the ancient to the instant world delayed response. My friends actually are already annoyed because I talked so much about this book among friends and I also shared a bunch of copies so I need some royalties from you I guess as a gift. It's such a pleasure to have you here and when I read this book late last year I was reflecting on all the books I've read in 2018 and I have to say this is the book that had the deepest impact on my thinking last year so thank you for that and congratulations. So this book for those of you who haven't read it I recommend it there are copies out there to buy is a book that is some sort of counterintuitive. We all live in a time of real-time communication of instant communication and just looking at my own behavior if I have to wait somewhere let's say I want to cross Massaf and red is light I would immediately pick up my phone and try to you know check emails or do something because the waiting feels like a waste of time and yet here is Chasen and this book a complete eye-opener to take a different alternative look at waiting at the thing in between messages but also in between action and so we will talk more about this idea that waiting actually becomes meaningful is a message in itself that we generate and that you beat meaning to how it is shaped by context and cultures but of course also by technology importantly and but to start with I was just wondering how did you become interested in waiting something that most people try to avoid get annoyed by or otherwise try to hack how did come about yeah so most of my scholarship prior to this was in mobile technologies my first book was about mobile media and when I first started as a professor teaching undergraduate students I began to notice that even with their standard feature phones they were sending up to a couple of hundred text messages each day which to me was really this mind-blowing choice and I would talk to them why don't you just simply pick up the phone and call the person you're trying to get in touch with why do you send so many text messages in a given day it's about 13 years ago or so and the thing that stood out to me was the power of the message in our lives and the choice to engage in medium that made us wait it really fit with contemporary society at the time and in our own moment as well where a phone call that you place to someone especially over a mobile device is no longer calling to a place it's calling to a person and when you're calling to that person you don't know what their context is you might be interrupting some important meeting therein or they might be lecturing in a class or you don't really know what the context is so mobile messages allow us to connect with people throughout the day and they can respond when they get a chance but the end result is that it makes us wait messages the choice of messages is the choice of a medium that inserts waiting into our social lives and it has been predominantly that way since 2009 2007 in the US in 2009 globally where we're using our mobile devices more for messages and data exchange than we are for voice communication so this is the insertion of wait times into our lives so this began sort of this fascination with asynchronous communication rather than synchronous communication the power of that and then the ultimate impact of those wait times our lives how the question really for me began with how do these wait times shape who we are as social beings if we're choosing a medium that makes us wait how does that shape our intimate lives how does that shape our social interactions with people and who we are and then how do we occupy those times if all of a sudden here we are in our contemporary moment spending much of the day waiting for the people we're closest with to respond to us what do we do with those times and how do we imagine the use of wait times or even imagine it as potentially wasted time and and maybe how to recuperate that how to think differently about wait times when they become such a dominant experience for us in our instant age and we will drill deeper on all of these topics of course to start with maybe as you suggested and you started with like the cell phone instant culture texting generation but in the book you actually take the reader on a journey you go back all the way to the first set of mobile technologies which were messaging sticks used by Australian aborigines you walk us through letters and the different response times during the Revolutionary War you cover all sorts of technologies but also cultural context you travel to Japan you went to Paris but also traveled across the US and as you were some sort of exploring different technologies and cultural contexts and contexts of waiting what's that what are some of the lessons learned from that journey what stood out to you as of you know both some sort of the evolution nature of waiting and and how it interacts with people yeah the the follow-up to even the first answer ties in with this where the book process began researching this book it was actually here in Cambridge when I was interacting with a scholar at MIT who studies Japanese popular culture and he made an off hand remark to me about an emerging practice among teens in the country he said the the thing that's happening now is that teens in romantic relationships especially are sending each other blank text messages so the idea is that if you're in a relationship with someone you send them just a blank text no words no messages or videos or anything along those lines you just send them a blank message and their response as your partner was to respond with another blank text message with as little time elapsed as possible reminds me of my balls but yes so the the wait time here is actually the content of the message and that's one of the things that echoes throughout the book and across all of these examples is that wait times are not an in-between time they are content in and of themselves we give them meeting their moments of interpretation so the messages between these teens and then another example is throughout the world and I focus specifically on Italy where people in the late 1990s and early 2000s would ring each other where you would just ring and hang up your phone and your caller ID would pop up on the person's phone and then that person was then supposed to ring you back with as little time left as possible something that happened throughout the world these these rings or beeps or flash messages and it's the thing that these represent is that wait times are meaningful that we give them meaning we interpret these these times and for me I came at this project thinking about waiting as an in-between time something between moments something between messages something between the content that we're exchanging and I walked away realizing that wait times are meaningful in and of themselves they are content in and of themselves silence is content we we fill it with meaning so from the very first messages humans ever exchanged it with Aboriginal message sticks which were exchanged as far back as 40 to 55,000 years ago as humans began to migrate on to the continent of Australia they use these communication technologies as a means of sharing information but also as establishing a temporal rhythm to life that's based on the journey across the land how long does it take to get between places and how long do messages take is a way of connecting the human body with its time as it moves and as it delivers message as messages are exchanged all the way up until our contemporary moment we're constantly filling these gaps with meaning so they're they're not really gaps they're moments of analysis for me they're moments to understand our personal lives our intimate lives our social lives how we build knowledge and exchange knowledge wait times are not in between they're actually content in and of themselves so that I think resonates across all of these technologies and eras and there are a lot of other things that fit with that as well thinking about the value we give time and the synchronicity that we develop with people in different eras technologies synchronize us with people especially as we're exchanging messages across geographic distances we build in temporalities of connection depending on how our media connect us and the paces of those media shape the human experience of time in a given era and we we wrap ourselves around those times in a sense where the expectations of social life are they fit with the technologies of an era and are shaped by that and we realize within that context you know what it means to wait and the delays that kind of emerge based on our expectations and and how we respond to those is really similar across eras and cultures as well sort of the disdain of waiting and in particular moments as we are wondering when the message will arrive when when will I be able to hear from this person in my archival work that something emerged that emerged over and over again people wondering what's happening on the other side of that communication gap and filling that gap with meaning and setting their their synchronization and temporality around the ways that media connect people so how we use media how they shape the human experience of time and then how we respond to that I think is something that is interesting to study across eras and it's intriguing as you describe it that there is some universality to it across cultures but at the same time as you described in the book but as I also mentioned what value or what meaning we attribute to to waiting is highly contextual I would like to stick a little bit with with the situation where we're waiting may not be appreciated many situations come to mind right one of the stories you tell in the book is actually when you have to upgrade your operating system or download something and it takes forever or if you have to wait for an elevator and can you share with us a little bit what some sort of cultural techniques and societal techniques have evolved around making us be willing to wait longer maybe or some sort of to cope with the waiting itself yeah yeah absolutely and in computing culture especially it's fascinating to see how wait times are handled on the design side of things and imagining how designers are confronting wait times we have to confront wait times we will always be waiting in some fashion or another with our technologies in the early days of computing with the Xerox star being one of the first computers that was networked and also provided a graphical user interface so people could connect with each other exchange files and how do you communicate with your user that something's happening behind the scenes so this is something that actually resonates across life and the design of everyday life we are waiting and there's complexity behind the waiting that we're not always privy to your waiting at a red light but you don't necessarily know how your wait time fits in with a larger structure of how a city functions similarly with networked computers the files how they're exchanged how that computer interacts with that file these are complex systems that designers have to put us at ease about and so you have wait cursors emerge with the Xerox star was hourglass then you eventually have Susan care the graphic designer designing for Macintosh the wristwatch wait cursor and what's fascinating is that these things that that lead up to our own buffering icons on our browsers get us to stick around about three times as long as a system that doesn't give us any kind of feedback so we need some kind of feedback to interact with which does connect to the story of the elevators as well post World War two in New York City as skyscrapers began to go up in mass around the city there were so many complaints about these wait times where we're having to sit down here in this lobby waiting for the elevators is too long there was one building where people complain to the building's manager about it and he brought in some engineers to say please solve this problem these people are waiting too long and they came back to him and said it's an unsolvable problem we just can't make things go faster it's it's complex people are stopping at different floors there's no way to speed the system up there was a psychologist in the building who said he got permission from the building's manager for a bit of an experiment and with permission the psychologist had mirrors put up all around the lobby so people while they waited for the elevator could look at themselves and look at the other people waiting and the complaints disappeared completely and some people actually applauded the building's manager for solving the problem so as we wait to give some kind of feedback something to look at something to occupy our attention gets us to be a bit more patient about three times as long as systems where we are we don't know what to do with our attention we don't know where to pull our attention and cognitively it's very interesting to think about how our brain adapts to these wait times that are introduced with different technologies a colleague of mine at the University of Maryland Ben Schneiderman has done some studies on the cognitive experience of waiting for these technologies and if there's nothing that pulls our attention back in nothing to stare at a buffering icon or to look at myself in the mirror our brains move on pretty quickly at about the two second mark we're off to something else unless something calls us back in so designers realize this that if you're waiting for that content to load on your browser you're going to be gone five seconds later about 20% of your users are gone and that number just continues to change as as bandwidth speeds change as well so what are the designs are going to keep your customers around so waiting for me is that really interesting contradiction for the computing industry and business writ large where compete waiting is a thing that's a bug in the system that needs to be eliminated it's going to drive your customers away but then also waiting is that opportune moment to seize on your attention while you're waiting to cross the street or waiting at the red light or waiting for this event to start how do you occupy occupy your time it's a great opportunity for people to pull your attention toward their products so the contradiction in that is really interesting and how designers deal with it was really fascinating study that's a perfect segue from some sort of strategies of avoidance or coping towards the benefits of waiting and some sort of changing our own mindset as as we look at these between times and how we create meaning out of it you have a whole series of examples and stories in the book where you where you demonstrate how waiting has some sort of a constitutive role to play for knowledge creation for learning but also for empathy so it has a very productive function if if looked at it the other way around as opposed to it's just a waste or or an audience I was wondering could you share a few of these stories and maybe it's the NASA example right yeah yeah and for me those two points are really key toward recuperating wait times as beneficial rather than our predisposition toward waiting as something that's wasting our time especially when we're so there's so much time poverty we feel you know I I don't have very much time to offer you so when you're when I'm waiting or someone is wasting my time we feel that we're losing that valuable resource and I notice this in I'll begin with one anecdote that's at the very end of the book of me waiting in line at the grocery store for me waiting has become this analytic where I kind of am trying to understand society and those moments of waiting where I can study things a bit bit more I was in my hometown in Maryland at the grocery store on a Saturday morning and there was a woman who was checking out in front of me and she was paying half with cash and half with food stamps and she had a toddler in the cart and she had a bunch of coupons and they had called the manager over to kind of make sure all of these deals were being met and she went through kind of each item to make sure that she was spending her money while that you know there was a deal that didn't come up and it had to be scanned there's a affluent woman in front of me who turns around and looks at me and just like rolls her eyes like can you believe this woman and then things kind of continue and she's continuing to use her time on a very busy morning and there are two men behind me who verbalize their discontent with this situation that this woman's wasting her time and for me these wait times can potentially be a moment of us building radical empathy for others circumstances where waiting can be an investment in the social fabric of how time is unevenly distributed to people that to me was something I learned in the process of the book there's a meme that has been going around with a picture of Beyonce and says something along the lines of remember you have the same 24 hours as Beyonce does kind of like how are you spending your time while Beyonce is using those same 24 hours to be wildly successful and by the end of working on this book I realize how untrue that is that people don't have the same access to time they are asked to use their time in very distinct in different ways than I am whether that be working two jobs and having to take public transportation between those jobs and having to devote their time to having to wait in different ways being asked to wait in different ways and if in our own wait times we can imagine investing those wait times into the social fabric and I think that has the potential to build some radical empathy and that to me is has been one of the personal ways that I have taken this annoying time and tried to recuperate it and to encourage others to think about wait times as investments in the social fabric and trying to find ways of identifying injustice and power structures looking at Puerto Rico being without power being waiting for power how wait times are opportunities to identify power structures within a society how people are then asked to wait in different ways is one way that I find waiting to be deeply beneficial in my own life and knowledge exchange is another one which I think we can get into but I think focusing on the empathy is a big factor for me anyway and since you are describing this situation and also in the grocery store and already alluding to some sort of the relation between power and time and also the social justice aspects of the work and theory or developing here perhaps you can spend some more time on this topic which I know is close to our hearts particularly here and in 2019 and what was really interesting to me in the book is the way you basically complexify the power implications of time that is it looks almost as some sort of a paradoxical situation that on the one hand you have some sort of check-ins fast check-ins for frequent fliers right where that clearly signal well my time is more valuable than yours who has to queue over there which is some sort of an expression of status and privilege and some sort of the currency of the time units as you made the example before that my time is just something different from your time economically speaking even but then you also told the story or kind of introduced the theme that there is now a new trend where we slow down and the we being privileged people who can afford to slow down and to take offline time and things like that and so suddenly you start to understand as I was reading this book or look at it in different ways what what my own some sort of signaling is about my time so for instance I start to realize if I show up late to a meeting that may be unintentional because you know I'm running from across the campus let's say but there is also a signal effect if you know whoever the boss is in a given situation in terms of seniority or hierarchy shows up late and everyone is waiting for you that this is some sort of signaling again that yeah you can wait for me because you know my time is more valuable and so I was wondering whether you could expand a little bit on these themes and maybe also this paradox that that time becomes a privilege and you know whatever we do signals already yeah I was just talking to a professor who taught in Italy and he said in my own practice and also my mentors practice you as a professor never walk into the room first it's it's it doesn't signal correctly to the students you let people wait for you that's what I would do I would I would make my students wait for me as a reiteration of my position within this power structure between student and professor and I found that really fascinating and and you see in these moments where we are waiting for other people how power is communicated how it's exercised by making others wait and I think that's also true in our intimate lives as well as you are in a particular relationship whether it be a romantic relationship or a friendship the one who makes the other person wait is is signaling a a priority of time in that in that relationship and creating a power asymmetry over who gets to wait in and who or who has to wait in who forces others to wait and at the same time yeah there is this interesting contradiction with these movements that are asking us to pause to slow down and asking us to be more deliberate with our time whether it be slow food movement there's there's a movement within the academy for so slow research which is a resisted yeah and you know the the idea of being that in the academy especially with the tenure track there are expectations about publishing and about the pace of life and that people are trying to resist that produce certain kinds of knowledges and don't feed into other forms of knowledge production so people are trying to slow down but you know if you're an assistant professor in the room it can you slow down you know that is very unlikely within the structure as it exists slowing down as an assistant professor who's on the tenure track is not really an option you have to use your time in very specific ways and that's what the book asks ultimately is who is allowed to slow down who are those people whose time is able to pause and to to reflect in ways that others are unable to because of the pace of life so in my moments of busyness as well which I think since the book has come out has have been extreme you know busyness has been extraordinary which is this very odd experience for me as someone who's writing about the appreciation of waiting and taking these moments of wait I haven't really been able to slow down very much but in reflecting on my own busyness trying to ask who benefits from that experience of busyness why do I feel so busy and how does it feed into particular structures that ask us to use our time in specific ways and particular relationships between people who are asking me to use my time in very particular ways there's a fantastic book from a communication scholar Sarah Sharma called in the meantime where she studies the laborer kind of behind the scenes whether that be the taxi driver or the person who's cleaning up the plates from the slow food movement you know you have affluent people kind of gathering around and pausing and and being very deliberate with their food who are the people behind the scenes who are cleaning up the plates for that event are they able to pause and slow down in the same kind of way so again I think that time is distributed unevenly and we're asked to use that time in very particular ways that that both feed into the power structures in relationships and also ask us to you know and within the academy anyway produce knowledge in specific ways as well so synchronization again is a theme that emerges who are we synchronized with how are we asked to synchronize our time whether that be with the technology that synchronizes us all in this room or within relationships that ask us to synchronize our time within those structures I think are compelling questions okay taking that too hard I think the waiting is over for our audience here I would like to open it up for for questions and comments in the on and reflections you can tell this gets very philosophical and very deep quite quickly which makes it so exciting but of course has also a deep technology narrative and many other faces so wherever you would like to start and please introduce yourself I should also say that we are recording the session and we'll later pop put it online so my name is Ron I wanted to ask if you've talked in your book about waiting as a social activity meaning things like waiting in line yeah for a ticket that's not to be available until a particular time so it's also a big queue forms or waiting for a I don't know people do this anymore waiting for a CD to release probably not but that that kind of thing where people deliberately get into long lines and it becomes a social event to be waiting in this line yes absolutely yeah anticipation is something that emerges a lot in the book and whether you think about the launch of the next Apple device Apple taps into this so precisely yes yeah exactly the anticipation of the launch of something is very much about how we produce our relationship with it so the leaks of the the next Apple device and then eventually the launch you know the Apple event this thing will be coming out in these months and then the waiting in line the camping out overnight the wait itself becomes an event that links us to that product and and signals our identities as particular kinds of consumers so that romantic ethic around this product that I'm going to get is going to fulfill me in these particular kinds of ways and the wait times are a way of building that relationship with it and I link that actually in interesting kinds of ways with Roland Barthes has a book called lovers lovers discourse where he talks about waiting as kind of an erotic experience as we're waiting for the people we love that act of waiting builds desire for the people that we long for but also for the products that we long for if you've ever been to sort of a massive concert as well it's also really good example of this where the you're waiting you show up early everyone's kind of mingling around and then the lights drop and then people begin to get excited and anticipate and then somebody walks on stage all of that those moments of waiting where it builds anticipation then you hear a note you know all of that is about wait times as building desire and connection and the way that I personalize this as well is to say in those moments of waiting and anticipation what do I hope comes on the other side of my waiting what will arrive what do I hope will arrive and I use this as an analytic for my own life to understand my desires a bit better what do I hope comes on the other side of my waiting what do I hope will be fulfilled how will it satiate some of those needs in my life and to understand how those desires shape who I am and who I think I am and also help kind of steer me in particular kinds of directions I think we are very much steered in directions by these kinds of anticipatory moments and connections and longings for things so yeah absolutely is a great question since we are here at Harvard Law School yeah one of the also as you mentioned before how open we are some sort of to be notched into different directions right time notches seem to play play into this quite a bit as you described yeah absolutely great this piece so I was reading something yesterday that said if you really want to know how a person is at their worst put them in front of a really slow computer yes I was wondering if you did any research or wrote anything in your book about like the type of person who is like more predicated to be patient in a situation where they feel like they shouldn't have to be waiting right yeah yeah probably the person who has very little experience with the system so doesn't already establish norms for that there's a lot of research in the field of human computer interaction or HCI around user for user frustration and it usually centers around expectations and how those expectations aren't met so I talked with an early interaction designer who popularized the percent done progress bar or the little bar that shows you how much is loaded as opposed to just the opaque spinning buffering icon and he was talking to me about this Xerox star computer that first kind of gave that feedback that things are loading with his hourglass and he said overwhelmingly people felt it was slow and it actually did things faster than we'd ever done it before it allowed us to connect and to do work at a pace that was unprecedented but we overwhelmingly had the human experience of frustration with it because in part that we set expectations for it and then when those expectations weren't met based on sort of network volatility and sort of the shifts of how the internet fluctuates then we get frustrated with it so across the board and this I saw throughout history which is so interesting to me I imagined that the human experience of time as it gets compressed in the digital age and in this mobile age where we have technologies on us at all times that we would be less patient that time would be so compressed in our moment that we would have a radically different experience of time and duration and delay but you see this across all accounts of media throughout history that as people have to wait at a pace that was not matching their expectation they're frustrated they're writing about their hostility toward the wait times that the ship took too long to arrive you know it should have arrived here instead it's quarantined in harbor and I'm not getting my mail so we as humans set expectations very early on and when those expectations aren't met that's when user frustration emerges so one of the students in my graduate seminar right now interviewed her grandparents who adopted the internet very early on and became early users and they are very impatient which humors her she's like you guys what else do you have to do you know why are you you're retired you're sitting at home it's it's a couple of seconds wait for the video to load but they get very frustrated with with slow download speeds and you know so for her you know interviewing them she's she noticed that trend of here are early adopters kind of regardless of age or demographic they said they're setting their expectations and when those aren't met user frustration emerges yeah so it's fascinating kind of tracking that across history as well there is also great story in the book where you basically bring an argument where the expectations are the other way around that it's right yes longer to be credible yeah and I think the example is price comparison sites yep yeah yeah and this first emerged for me with Facebook in 2016 they launched a security scan of your profile to kind of let you know the vulnerabilities of your profile you know who can see what what sort of permissions you're giving to other outside websites and apps and what happened was it was very lean code it did its job very very quickly so you would have it scan your profile would spit back the results instantly and Facebook noticed that people weren't changing any of their settings and this why aren't they changing their settings we've just told them that there's a vulnerability here in your profile you've got all of these apps using your Facebook site and you're not changing anything and they realize that people didn't trust it so what they did is they took the code it did the scan but then they told the code to build in a delay so pause just wait a second okay now give the results to the users and people overwhelmingly began to change the results because they thought it was thorough so we have this certain cultural notion of thoroughness the technology is faster than that but culturally the the people designing it had to go in and build latency so that we trust it and this is true yeah when you're on different websites finding the best deals we expect a certain level of thoroughness and it very very slight we're talking very small time scales but it's enough for us on a sort of embodied level to to build in trust based on those delays I think of waiting in the extreme I think of checkpoints waiting check at checkpoints waiting for occupations to be over and so forth yes so I'm wondering how far you can take this notion of connecting your brief way period right in the advanced societies in an international dimension or even applies you seem to have a very active imagination which is really good but I don't know how ordinary people can relate to that and hopefully they can but maybe right go into that yeah I think I was on a panel there was a conference on social life of time and it was really interesting pairing I was talking about buffering icons and my fellow panels were talking about South African apartheid and wait times you know what was parallel in those things was talking about how time is exercises power and how we are ultimately imagining something coming on the other side of our waiting what comes on the other side of waiting is where the imagination does it work it's work for thinking about different futures so it's both about identifying issues of power who is controlling my time who is asking me to wait who is forcing me to wait but also how can I imagine a different future wait times are essential toward thinking of futures that don't yet exist the cognitively where we have what's called the the default network of the brain often called the imagination network that only kicks in when you're waiting and when you're daydreaming and the the imagination network requires pauses to imagine this things that couldn't have been accessed if you searched for them wait times for me are the possibility of thinking about these two things side by side who is controlling my time who's in power of my time and how can I imagine a different way of doing things how can I imagine an alternative future and begin to imagine ways of doing that so I think your example of these longer durations of occupation of wait times of being forced to wait accomplish those two things get us to hope for different futures but also identify how structures are inhibiting those why are we delayed in infinitely here it seems like how do we get past this delay how do we get past wait times that may seem to just continue to go on and my fellow panelists that was the their takeaway about what's happening in South Africa right now how do you imagine a different future that's something you can accomplish and for them there's a bit of pessimism there as well is that it for many they're so discouraged with that future never arriving that they've begun to sort of abandon that hope that the wait time doesn't signal hope any longer it signals despair so it taps into the existential crisis that's also around waiting is that we often fear wait times are all that life is you know if you think about Samuel Beckett's waiting for God oh that's sort of the thing we wait for the thing that never arrives and life is about occupying that in-between time and how do we occupy that that in-between time so our disdain for the wait times often signal that existential crisis of what time actually means in our lives and and that it might just be waiting is at the core of it related question to that as I was reading the book one version of this question could also be that some sort of the theory that comes together in the book that you present and develop is strongest where it's it where the waiting is some sort of between messages right yeah and I was wondering as we expand some sort of the context of waiting into areas where it's it's less mediated but more other actions and behaviors that may or may not be facilitated by technology how far we can go to to take insights from you know the mediated yeah communication context towards all sorts of acts now of course you can always argue well every act is also communication act or a speech act but what have you how have you navigated this some sort of spectrum yeah so I begin with messages as a media studies scholar thinking about these wait times between the ways that we connect each other with each other and sort of exploded out into everyday life and all the ways that we're asked to wait and how we can use this this small everyday moment to understand larger issues in life and for me I think that's sort of the larger trajectory and aims of my work is to take something that's mundane and and let it represent these larger questions so the wait times for a text message is is something that's often not really studied it's felt especially if we're forced to wait if you express yourself in a very intimate way over a text message with someone and you're waiting for their response you that's significant but you can use these often overlooked moments to identify the ways that these larger issues get embedded into life there's a cultural geographer Raymond Craig who does Latin American geography and an article of his he had this line that I just use over and over again he's talking about the role of maps in our lives and he says you know sometimes the most dangerous and influential things in our lives are the things that are so common sense that they go unquestioned and for me that's where wait times sit is that it's so common sense to wait it's just so mundane and that is where power resides in the things that you're not coerced to do but you accept as common sense this is just the way things are these are the ways I am supposed to use my time this is a common sense I'm supposed to wait here I'm supposed to wait like this and if you then pull back from the common sense and then begin to critique so much of life gets uncovered I think it and you do see it everywhere after you after you uncover that one moment then it's hard to not notice in every little aspect of life from a romantic relationship to waiting at the DMV to looking at the design of computers and how your mobile device loads particular kinds of things all the way back through historical examples and you just end up seeing it everywhere as soon as you take something as mundane as waiting and say it's not as common sense as we're led to believe there's a lot to unpack within this mundane example that we can use across life and think about time and synchronicity and power and it's certainly my experience and you should have put a warning to once you read the book you will see the wait times everywhere and you start to think more about these issues you have a lot to come to So you very eloquently describe the strong neuro-psychological effect of waiting and the phone essentially gives us a whole menu of waiting points whether it's email or text or news picking up on news and my own experience of being disappointed when I go on and it's the same pieces of news and the horrible speeding up of the news cycle yes would you actually link it to this neuro-psychological effect on our phones Yeah linking yeah I think part of it is cultural and the other part is cognitive and the cultural aspect is very fascinating though alongside that that we do have a technology that connects us in such instant ways that we then anticipate that so we build that into the cognitive experience of of wanting news and yeah when you refresh it and nothing comes that to me is why I think we're half in love with the buffering icon because it represents the promise of something that might be there and then when it's not nope same same thing I was hoping for something new but even in my own practices of turning toward instant social media feeds like Twitter for my news instead of the local news channel because it will be there faster and that expectation of pace has deep ramifications for knowledge exchange some are even pushing for pauses in the news cycle like a design that privileges the pause instead of the instant and I was listening to a scholar present on this and talk about the the desire to value pause within the news cycle and imagine how we could socially look at silences as benefits to this context and everyone in the room said nope it's just not going to happen we we're never going to go there but it's really fascinating to begin to think well what sort of social context would privilege that it's a really good question if the news cycle privileged pauses and silences instead of speed what would that look like and what would society look like how could you build in the desire for that instead of the desire for the instant is a really fundamental question I think at this juncture in history we're going to have to ask those kinds of questions so yes yeah and just as a as a quick follow-up on on this notion of potential benefits and and understanding it almost as a design challenge what meaning we we construct and attach to to waiting in in you mentioned empathy already in the conversation you mentioned some sort of the knowledge generation opportunity the imagination opportunity that it may provide one of the additional components you describe in the book or benefits is is more around problem-solving and not getting a response immediately yeah may actually may may help almost as a constraint or drive I should say right problem solving yeah you want to maybe add yeah so that I write about in the context of our communication with deep space and the spacecraft like New Horizons where delays are built into the knowledge production of this spacecraft that goes out to places we've never been before and the way times are built into how knowledge gets produced but as soon as you launch that thing into space there are constraints around the communication and how you interact with it so if you're a scientist and you're doing experiments there's one thing if you can do that in real time okay we're going to change this this part of the experiment and see the results but when you're dealing with nine hours of lag time between sending and receiving messages to a spacecraft that's three billion miles away you don't get the opportunity to be like okay let's try this thing so on the fourth of July right as New Horizons is about to do its closest flyby it's about 10 days out from doing closest approach to Pluto they lost connection with it it stopped responding they lost telemetry and so how do you respond to that so this is what I talk about in the chapter is an enabling constraint for these scientists to imagine these moments where you're going to have to create a contingency list based on the delays and those delays allow you to build and innovate in new ways that you wouldn't have you wouldn't be forced to otherwise and it's transformed the space space program in dramatic ways what it even means to measure space and to locate spacecraft are all built around delays and using those delays in productive kinds of ways and in our own lives I think the same is true where productivity innovation is not about the pace at which we can produce things and do it at a particular kind of speed it's often about the pauses that we take it's about taking the constraint of delay and using it as an enabling feature to try to build in delays in our own processes to to capitalize on creativity and innovation we can't innovate without delays and actually again this is a cognitive process too you can't move things from short-term memory to long-term memory without pause you know the the synthesis of proteins in the brain requires delays in order to move something from short-term memory to working memory to long-term memory and if you expect to innovate on knowledge you need to build in the times for that to happen and a google search and move on does not accomplish that if you are going to build knowledge and innovate on it it requires building in a structure of delay that is an enabling constraint in your own life and I think the space program is a real great symbol of that because that's sort of the essence of it these long delays that are built into space exploration have I think direct ramifications for our own lives and how we innovate on knowledge thank you maybe one more question so I wanted to ask about the boundaries of the category of waiting yeah great I'm thinking in part about there used to be an undergraduate course here called loitering and it was like the goal was to go out and loiter great this would make you a better person and more creative and thoughtful and and so how is that different from waiting right how do some of the benefits that you describe also apply to idleness or loitering or those things but then also like what isn't waiting like you know once the concert starts you're sort of waiting for it to end you know right so I'm also curious like where when when does the waiting ender is waiting just like are you just defining like life and we're just waiting to die right yeah yes yeah that's sort of a question of the boundaries on either side yeah I think that's a line in the book we're just waiting to die actually you know but it's a great question there are many different forms that waiting takes but there are experiences of time that sit alongside waiting like the pauses like being mindful taking pauses being silent loitering I think fits within that and I think one of the differentiating features is our level of agency over those times often waiting is so frustrating because we feel powerless in it we don't feel like we own our own time while if I'm loitering I might be loitering because of the ways that someone is asking me to exercise my time in particular ways or it might be my own agency over my time I'm not supposed to wait out here but I'm going to and this is my action of of resisting being commodified in this space you're asking me to spend money I'm gonna wait I'm gonna not spend money out here I'm gonna resist that structure but that you have agency over that the mindfulness movement that's really arisen within businesses to slow ourselves down again has you have agency over that ideally you know you you may be so busy that you can't be mindful and there becomes that that tension and that contradiction in your own life over how you get to exercise your time but for the most part these are centered around how you decide to exercise your time in contrast you have something like waiting rooms at welfare offices in South America that are designed to be uncomfortable spaces with too few seats with very little feedback to emphasize your powerlessness within that society you don't have agency over how your time is being used you are forced to wait someone else is controlling your time so that's where I find a real interesting distinction between waiting and those sort of companion experiences of time that look like waiting and I think you can analyze them all together but I think there's that that distinction and I think what is not waiting is often the time that is not noticeable the time that goes by so fast the fluid time how when we feel we're productive when we feel that we're enjoying things and time flies waiting in contrast is slow and opaque we kind of trudge through it we slog through it we we feel it in a very embodied way and in contrast to what might be like productive or fun time that that just sails by and we rarely notice it while waiting we're watching the second hand slowly tick by so I think those are the contrasts you have this wonderful line and you mentioned it during our conversation already but I want to read it anyway in the act of waiting we become who we are waiting points to our desires and hopes for the future in our conversation it's also become clear that this opportunity to envision the future and what we can hope for is unequally distributed you talked extensively about the power issues to conclude what will be your recommendation what can we do as individuals some sort of yeah to make this positive view and this positive experience of waiting and it's opportunity into the future more equally distributed great yeah for me the first step is moving past the emotions of waiting which can be raw and reactive where we despise it in visceral kinds of ways and instead in those moments I encourage people to ask who benefits from you waiting asking about the benefits of waiting I think are really interesting in part you might benefit from your own waiting you have a retirement plan you've decided not to take out that money you are going to accrue that money and you are the beneficiary of your wait time on the other hand someone might benefit from forcing you to wait like in the example of the welfare office in South America the beneficiaries of those people waiting are those in power they get to reiterate that power structure so in my moments of waiting by saying who is benefiting from the fact that I'm waiting right now often if I'm at a red light it's that person who gets to go and I am again feeding into the social fabric of life allowing people to move but then again someone in a position of power might benefit from my wait times in ways that where I can identify again how time is unevenly distributed how people are put at a disadvantage and by asking the question who benefits from people waiting we can imagine ways to unearth those power structures and the social structures that do force us to use our time in uneven kinds of ways and then finally I think getting us to think about time as collective instead of individual is fundamental here where instead of you imagining your time as your resources some people can use well or misuse and rob you of instead if we imagine that time is collective and we are experiencing time in collective week in collective ways we can invest time in one another and hopefully get to the place where we have a more just use of time and just more just structures where time can be distributed more evenly to people so then they can use that time to imagine new futures and innovate and and imagine ways of doing things different that might benefit broader population thank you so much for a great conversation and for a great book thank you thank you so much appreciate it