While reading Delayed Response, Jason Farman’s astute book about waiting, I recalled and looked up the results from a study that Penn State sociologist Barry Ruback conducted over 20 years ago. From an observation post above the parking lot of an Atlanta mall, Ruback observed the behaviors of 220 drivers as they pulled out of their parking spaces. He found that it took an average of 27 seconds for a car to pull out of a space if no one was waiting for it, but 31 seconds if someone wanted the space. If the waiting car honked, the waiting time increased on average to 43 seconds. Further, if the waiting car was a “high status” model, the departing driver would take more time to leave than if the car was “low status.”
“While waiting is an unavoidable part of living in the world as a social being, we flee from it whenever possible because it puts us in positions of powerlessness,” Farman writes. Waiting implies submission to another’s will. Forced to remain in place, we wait for service, for information, for our freedom. The experience of waiting is so pervasive that one’s mind fumbles at finding a starting point from which to consider it. Farman gamely begins by announcing, “I intend to trace how people have given meaning to the wait times for messages back throughout human history.” The study of time as it relates to communications is called chronemics– and as Farman notes, “time is a medium that communicates” and “what time means … is always contextual.”
The urgency springing from Farman’s narrative is triggered by our culture’s expectation for instant response. He notes that the world’s 7.5 billion mobile phones are used much more frequently for texting than voice calls – a mode of communications “that has waiting designed into its very fabric.” The potential, pleasures and reassurance of “constant connection without constant vigilance,” spiked by terse message and response, are accompanied by anxieties about inconstancy.
Delayed Response intermittently proceeds as a travelogue as Farman, a professor of media studies at the University of Maryland, ventures to scout notable sites of waiting. First stop is Tokyo where waiting for news of catastrophe is a national condition, exemplified in the figure of a legendary dog named Hachiko who, the story goes, would wait for his master every day at Shibuya Station, even for years after the man’s death. These days, “meet me at Hachiko” is a common text message between friends who wait for each other to appear out of the crowd. After interviewing people about waiting for news after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Farman concludes that our mobile devices, automatically showing the time as globally standardized at the U.S. Naval Observatory, signal “a distinct era for waiting and how time is regimented. It carries on the traditions of further segmenting time that affect everything from how a workday is spent to the body’s rhythms of sleep. It extends those traditions by creating new expectations for timeliness and productivity. It also shifts the human experience of time; that is, our perception of time has shifted as each of us is synchronized with one another.”
Next, Farman visits Manhattan and the subterranean network of pneumatic tubes used by the postal system from 1893 to 1953 to shuttle mail around the city. “To understand the relationship between instantaneous culture and waiting,” he says, “it is important to explore the links between a specific place, a culture’s perception of time, and message in an era.” It’s an interesting bit of history that leads to an obvious conclusion: “The notion of the instant’ that accompanies all of these emerging technologies is never fulfilled, yet it has an extraordinary impact on how we think about our wait times for messages from one another … the time gap between our messages will always be shaped by acts of waiting.”
Chapter three begins with the first installation of traffic lights in Cleveland in 1914, and moves to consider the introduction of the Xerox Star networked computers in 1981, and the posting of wait times at Disneyworld (“almost always overestimated”). Wait cursors and buffering icons: “According to one study, after five seconds of buffering, 20 percent of people who started to watch a video will leave; after ten seconds, half will be gone. After twenty seconds, it’s up to 70 percent.” He claims that travel sites extend buffering time so users will believe their searches are thorough. Then, oddly, he inserts Roland Barthes’ notion from A Lover’s Discourse: “The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.”
By the mid-point of Delayed Response, I find myself waiting— for an accrual constituting more than assorted proof points for conclusions presented in Farman’s introduction. Relief arrives in “Space Signals,” an intriguing chapter that not only deals with the New Horizons space mission to Pluto and the excruciating wait for signals from afar, but also Farman’s pivot on the value of waiting: instant access to knowledge via search engines “may be transforming who we are and the neural mappings in our brains.” Waiting for messages from Pluto represents “the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves” and incorporates “the necessary pauses for us to process and innovate on the ideas that we find.” Waiting “gets us to imagine that which is beyond the scope of what we know in the present.” The reader is asked to regard imagining, speculating, hypothesizing, and creating as rich durations related to waiting.
Farman moves on to consider message delivery times during the American Civil War, and the use of seals among — and the spread of messages between — nobility in Britain, all generally relevant if lacking impact as his narrative nears its end. There is the obligatory mention of Waiting For Godot – and also, a provocative thought: “We see wait time as a burden and obstacle, but we rarely notice the larger reasons for this perception. We don’t truly see the larger structural reasons why waiting is so reviled. Why is waiting seen as the ultimate punishment and the hurdle to living the good life? How can we reconcile these beliefs with the fact that waiting is time’s great teacher about who we are and who we hope to become?” This is a question that perhaps would be better illuminated by a more lyrical and psycho-creative approach to the topic. Farman’s final proscriptive advisements express his conviction but function like a postscript.
There is one semi-lyrical idea in Delayed Response that sticks with me. Back in his introduction, Farman cites Harold Schweizer who “writes in On Waiting [that] our hatred of waiting might be linked to the deep fear that waiting is all there is.” Waiting entails hope, doubt, anticipation, suspicion – and back to Barthes, waiting for the other to come, and again, to come. Poets spend their lives waiting for the next poem. Here is the final stanza of “I Am Waiting” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, lines from A Coney Island of the Mind, the first book of poems that captivated me as a teenager:
I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder
[Published by Yale University Press on November 19, 2018. 232 pages, $28.00 hardcover]