Space and time
The New Yorker is not something you can link to casually. If only I could point you to an article by Oliver Sacks called “Speed: Alterations of time and movement.” Sacks meditates on speededness and slowedness in parkinsonism and tourettism, as well as the speed of perception in people who are in near-death situations, and the slowness with which William James perceived the world when he took drugs. He points out that “normal” people have a “remarkable latitude and resilient” balance between speededness and slowedness, and comes to the conclusion that most humans think and act at about the same pace.
One of Sacks's points is that parkinsonians don't perceive themselves to be moving slowly within a very confined space — although non-parkinsonians will be amazed at the tiny, achingly slow movements that parkinsonians make. And victims of Tourette's, similarly, don't know how fast they're going but pity the rest of us for our slow movements. Like Nabokov was, Sacks is a great observer of nature, and he sees glorious beauty in both slow and fast powers of perception.
But we need not be held back by our neural limitations, he suggests:
We have unlocked time, as in the seventeenth century we unlocked space, and now have at our disposal what are, in effect, temporal microscopes and temporal telescopes of prodigious power. With these, we can achieve a quadrillion-fold acceleration or retardation, so that we can watch, at leisure. . the femtosecond-quick formation and dissolution of chemical bonds…
We can, with the power of visualized data, watch movies of any trend in which we're interested. Maybe, in fact, in the online world we can continue to unlock space as we unlock time. With the visualization of information, we can “see” social spaces online that we can't see with our limited terrestrial neurons. And things can happen there — formation of social bonds, to carry this metaphor for just one more sentence – that we'll be able to see in as speeded or as slow a way that we want.
Now, all this visualization won't replace text, and the legal world is full of words that need to be parsed. But there's something to be said for virtual telescopes that show us new kinds of cinematic wonders.