Imagine a man sat in a room in front of a large screen, five hundred years from now. Using sophisticated searches he asks to see Curtain Road, London July 15th 2009 10am. Every video, photo, update and blog is checked for relevance and presented to him, he spins the clock forward 2 hours, the search engine refines and re-presents. The wealth and breath of information available to him would bring him very close to a complete sense of place and time. But more pertinently, in his current life, he is so accustomed to this virtual world that the experience is not diminished by being disembodied.
In effect we are building the ‘real world’ of the future here at the birth of the network, and in that world we are defining the rules. By building the world(s) of the future, we are choosing to embed time travel as a given. Google street view already shows us the potential to explore previously physical spaces, how often will they re-photograph and archive planet earth, making it layered not only by space, but also by time?
To put it another way, imagine a person from before the twentieth century, being put into the same space, given the same detailed information and then try convincing him that he didn’t transcend time.
So it seems almost facile to say that our perceptions change and prevent us from seeing what humans have created. Time travel is upon us, just not as predicted; we won’t need worm holes and particle acceleration where we’re going.
