Reviewed by:

• Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World by Jason Farman
• David Zvi Kalman (bio)

First you do something, then you expect a response. Sometimes the response comes quickly and sometimes it doesn't—and when it doesn't, you experience a phenomenon called "waiting." This book, meant for non-specialists, is a meditation on that waiting experience: how it is wrapped in the ever-shifting historical boundary between "timely" and "untimely," how it is used to assert power, how it is signaled (or not), and how it affects our work.

In highlighting the act of waiting and its causes, Jason Farman attempts to argue that this activity should be seen not just as an object of study, but also as a good that is being overlooked by a contemporary culture obsessed with speed and instantaneous communication. The meaning of "now" is socially determined; at the moment, communications are perceived as delayed if responses do not come in a matter of seconds (or less), but this was not always the case. Delayed Response highlights the existence of other experiences of "now" while portraying some of them as useful counterbalances to the fast pace of modern life.

Farman's book, which is structured as a series of vignettes, reviews a wide variety of contemporary and historical contexts in which waiting occurs. Farman begins by describing how he visited Japan to investigate cultural expectations about punctuality; he also interviews a number of people who could not immediately contact their relatives after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. Then, he describes the widespread use of pneumatic tubes to transmit messages within metropolitan areas in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and puts the speed of pneumatic communication in conversation with other developments in information transmission (chapter 2). Next, Farman examines the function of what might be called "wait signaling," using traffic lights and wait cursors on computers (like spinning beachballs, hourglasses, and stopwatches) as primary examples (chapter 3). He then explores the role of waiting in astronomical research, where the development of a space probe and its journey can play out over years, or even decades (chapter 4).

The following three chapters describe various types of message transmission: [End Page 1226] correspondence from the American Civil War, during which letters sometimes took months to reach their destinations; the use of seals and other forms of document authentication, like the Japanese hanko, which were necessitated by delays in message transmission; and Aboriginal Australians' use of message sticks to supplement long-distance communication (chapters 5, 6, and 7). The book concludes with Farman making a case for the importance of tolerating, if not loving, the experience of waiting.

Farman's range of subjects is impressive, his examples are thought provoking, and the work is an invitation for further investigation into the cultural significance of waiting, delays, lags, and so forth. On several occasions, Farman emphasizes the relationship between waiting and power, a subject which could surely fill a book on its own. However, Farman's research emphasis is on his case studies, rather than on theoretical analysis of his subject, and the connective tissue between his examples and the book's central idea is often quite thin. As a result, Farman's choice of research subjects comes across as somewhat arbitrary, since it is not clear what larger argument he is making beyond the thesis that waiting comes in all shapes and sizes.

As a first stab at a new subject, Delayed Response suggests that waiting requires a great deal of further study and that two kinds of systematic analyses are particularly in order. First, there is a need for a good, modern historical investigation of waiting—one that sets the subject within the already rich history of timekeeping and temporality. Second, there is a need for a synchronous, theoretical examination of waiting that understands it as an important new frontier in the philosophy of time. Both are major projects and would take years to complete. In the meantime...

审核人：

• 延迟响应： Jason Farman的《从古代到即时世界的等待》
• 大卫·兹维·卡尔曼（David Zvi Kalman）（生物）

首先，您要做一些事情，然后期望得到回应。有时反应很快，有时却没有，而如果没有，您会遇到一种称为“等待”的现象。这本书面向非专业人士，是对这种等待经验的沉思：它如何被包裹在“及时”与“不及时”之间不断变化的历史边界中，如何被用来主张权力，如何被发信号（或不），以及它如何影响我们的工作。

在强调等待行为及其成因时，杰森·法曼（Jason Farman）试图辩称，这种活动不仅应被视为研究的对象，而且应被痴迷于速度和即时交流的当代文化所忽视。“现在”的含义是由社会决定的；目前，如果没有在几秒钟（或更短的时间内）内出现响应，则通信被认为是延迟的，但并非总是如此。延迟反应突出了“现在”的其他体验的存在，同时将其中一些描述为与现代生活的快速步伐有用的平衡。

法曼的书由一系列的短篇小说构成，回顾了等待发生的各种当代和历史环境。法曼首先描述了他如何访问日本，以调查对守时的文化期望。他还采访了2011年福岛第一核电站核灾难后无法立即与其亲属联系的许多人。然后，他描述了在20世纪19世纪上半叶大都市地区广泛使用气动管传输信息的过程，并将气动通讯的速度与信息传输的其他发展进行了对话（第2章）。接下来，Farman使用交通信号灯和计算机上的等待光标（例如旋转的沙滩球，沙漏和秒表）作为主要示例（第3章）。然后，他探讨了等待在天文学研究中的作用，在那里太空探测器的发展及其历程可能持续数年甚至数十年（第4章）。

以下三章描述了各种类型的消息传输：[结束第1226页]来自美国内战的信件，在此期间，信件有时要花费数月才能到达目的地。使用图章和其他形式的文档身份验证，例如日语的hanko，这是由于消息传输延迟所必需的；澳大利亚原住民使用信息棒来补充长途通讯（第5、6和7章）。该书以法曼（Farman）的观点作为结束，说明了容忍（即使不是爱人）等待的重要性。

法曼的学科范围令人印象深刻，他的例子令人发人深省，这部作品邀请人们进一步研究等待，延误，滞后等的文化意义。法曼在某些场合强调了等待与权力之间的关系，这个主题肯定可以自己完成。但是，法曼的研究重点是他的案例研究，而不是他的学科的理论分析，并且他的示例与本书的中心思想之间的联系组织常常很薄。结果，法曼的研究对象选择有些随意，因为不清楚在论点上，他正在提出更大的论点，即等待的形态和大小各有不同。

作为应对新主题的第一门手段，延迟响应表明等待需要大量的进一步研究，并且特别需要进行两种系统的分析。首先，需要对等待进行良好的，现代的历史研究，以使该主题处于已经十分丰富的计时和时间历史中。其次，需要对等待进行同步的理论研究，以将其理解为时间哲学的重要新领域。两者都是重大项目，需要数年才能完成。同时...