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In his article “Fidget Spinners: How Buffer Icons Have Shaped Our Sense Of Time” Jason Farman makes some salient observations about the effects of the “instant gratification” that modern technology offers. As technology has advanced, pages load instantaneously, apps download in seconds, and we can instantly stream new music when it’s released. Farman argues that that these developments have actually created a culture of impatience, and that this impatience is manifested in the buffering icons of loading pages. While they were originally designed to ease our waiting process, they have in fact become triggers of anxiety. Farman believes that we should look at waiting as a core part of connection, but I see anxiety from waiting as more simply. While our aversion to waiting is informed by increasing speeds of technology, our expectations only grow in step with these increases. People aren’t averse to waiting in all contexts, even technological. We are willing to wait much longer for a movie to download or for a family photo album to upload than for a Youtube video to buffer. We close a web page that isn’t loading after 10 seconds not because we can’t bear to wait 10 seconds but because if a page doesn’t load after 10 seconds it probably won’t load after 10 minutes. Farman describes how tech companies use various waiting icons, manipulate loading speeds, and utilize other tools to dictate our “perception of time and duration”, in effect setting our expectations for how these products should perform. If technology companies are in fact the architects of our expectations as Farman claims then surely they can have no complaints when consumers expect them to be meet. While it may be useful to consider what “waiting” tells us about our relationships I ultimately see it as less significant than the author.
Bibliography
“Fidget Spinners.” Real Life, reallifemag.com/fidget-spinners/.
Stahler, Jeff. “Buffering.”