A body's alloted time is finite and therefore rather precious. Until we come up with anti-death serum, this part won’t change. But when it comes to equating time with money, much has changed already.
Old think
Remember Titanic? That film took a lot of time to make. People time, coordinated by the director, James Cameron. We used to equate the hours of human life consumed in the making of an epic film with great value. We forked over money (earned with hours of our lives) to see Titanic, told our friends to spend their time-money on it and, in some cases, repeated the cycle until we decided to spend our riches elsewhere. A simple formula, really: human life (in hours) it takes to make Titanic translates into human life (hours devoted to getting the paycheck) consumers are willing to give up to have it.
New think
Enter Web 2.0 with media-rich social networking. It’s all about time. Post a video of your baby laughing on YouTube and the time you put into it (relatively speaking, zilch) can yield high viewing time by YouTube fans. Except for the cost of web access, money is irrelevant here. Lots of time is spent in a lopsided spiral. You spend a pittance of your finite life on your baby’s video debut. Millions of baby lovers and laugh addicts spend their finite life hours to see and spread it.
Looks like time doesn’t always equal money anymore. Now small time investment can translate into big time return and every PR guru is out to figure what meme will stick and how to nurture the knack of predicting the next viral spiral.
Artists are not immune from old-think or new-think. We of little money can be smugly proud of using precious ‘time’ making unique masterpieces while our materialistic friends spend their ‘time’ getting all that money which must be spent on useless toys that weigh down the tree-lawns on garbage day. But (secretly) we might like to find an easy way to take the Zeitgeist by storm whereby zillions of appreciative time-owners line up to purchase our humble creation with time-extravagant ready cash, and tell their friends to send us even more money.
Ah, how very hypocritical of us. We claim time is more precious than money, but don’t care to share this gift of time. Consumer money would save us time. We could spend less time scrounging around, more time creating masterpieces. In the end, artists can be just as fond of the idea of time=money as anyone else and welcome the internet’s promise to get us both.
Newer think
Web 3.0 is coming and, politics willing, hope is on the move. We’ll live to see the hive of social mediacs move too. One thing we’ve established is that as long as we’re peering at a bunch of pixels, we’re not grazing the isles of big box emporiums that fill our time and space with junk. It doesn’t appear too likely we'll up and abstain from the wonders of the web, addicted as we are to its virtues. But all is not well. The internet is a great place to put your nonrenewable time stamp unless you happen to derive pleasure from all your senses, including a sense of responsibility for a life well lived. Observers decry the multiple screen sucking ploys that steal our precious time.
The future I see is this. Artist-geeksters reinvent what’s possible online, underscore the finitude of hours, emphasize the sensual breadth of experience and keep in mind the worth of time. In short, we celebrate time as the new wealth. CEOs cease to duke it out over the biggest wad of cash; their reputation will rise and fall on how much they enhance stakeholder time. We’ll see this attitude reflected on the ticker tape, replacing the blingfest. Hey, once the roof’s sound, the body’s whole, and the kids are OK, what’s the point of the gilded life?
Time is the new currency. Though some are slow to notice, money’s lost its luster.
public domain painting Willy Stöwer
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