Welcome to the Short Now

I first came across the concept of the long now on Gwern’s fascinating website, and then subsequently through The Long Now Foundation’s website. The long now movement encourages people to think on the order of centuries and millennia, as opposed to smaller scales of time like months or decades, in part to balance the cultural acceleration that technology has precipitated globally. It wasn’t an idea I immediately acted upon. Indeed, it took a few years for me to figure out how I wanted to incorporate the long now into my own thinking patterns and personal practices.

Although I’ve long been inclined towards big picture, long-term thinking, it wasn’t until I stumbled across The Long Now Foundation that I realized there are people out there who are so interested in long-term thinking at a societal scale that they’d not only make a cultural institution of it, but would go as far as dedicating their lives to it. It’s invigorating given the current societal backdrop of ever-shortening attention spans, and given my own tendency to flit between various trains of thought. To some extent, the long now is a conceptual model that I’ve begun to use to focus the way I categorize my thoughts and share them with the world.

The distinction I make between long now and short now is perhaps a generous elaboration on my part though, one that I haven’t really seen any other proponents of the long now talk about. To me, the short now seems like the most logical counterpart to the long now because both designations encompass temporal delineations that work within the model the long now provides. To perceive something as long in the first place, there must also exist a perception of not-long things that’s also relevant. I find it important to acknowledge how the short now fills in the gaps that help propel us towards the long now.

To that end, I’ve created Practicing Design as a place for my short now thoughts to live. It’s one aspect of my extended (perhaps counterintuitive) interpretation of the long now movement, and my personal endeavor to mold that movement into something broader – a mindset that fosters temporal awareness overall, especially as it relates to media interactions. As extremely important as long now thinking is, I think it’s also important to understand the role that the short now can play at individual and societal levels if we acknowledge it and wield it according to its strengths and weaknesses, as well as according to its power over people. Practicing Design is my way of doing that, in a roundabout way. Welcome!