An eighth of a second

Kevin Kelly is republishing his wonderfully prescient New Rules for the New Economy, first written in 1998.  I wasn't all that aware of Kelly ten years ago so it's all new to me.

In a post entitled From Places to Spaces he turns on its head an old Tom Peters maxim that cheaper products made in the developing world, American manufacturing's worst nightmare, are now just an eighth of a second away; this being the time that it takes to communicate an order from one side of the globe to the other.  But as Kelly points out: -

The good news is that those geographically far away competitors will never be any closer than an eighth of a second.  And for many things in life, that is too far away 

The trainer in me really likes this idea.  So does the comedian.  Both jobs happen in real time and I thrive on the intimacy that comes of standing at the front of a room and changing the way the audience thinks or what it feels.  By Kelly's logic the feedback loop between speaker and listener has a margin for error of less than an eighth of a second.  This is why I travel for work.

Enough of life thrives on subtle instantaneous responses that one-eighth of a second kills intimacy and spontaneity

If the secret of comedy is 'timing' then an eighth of a second is more than long enough to be the difference between success and failure, between laughter and silence.