![]() The “bandwidth” metaphor plays on the concept of hard limits, set and managed by forces outside our control - fate, or, in the literal sense, internet providers or the FCC. We almost never talk about “having the bandwidth” for something it is usually in the negative. We may not quite know what it is, but we know when we’re running out of it. This might chip away at some of our emotional bandwidth. Perhaps our commute was longer and more trying than usual, or we got a phone call with some surprising bad news. “Bandwidth” becomes a catch-all of sorts for the immaterial obstacles we face in doing what we feel we’re supposed to. This visual is useful in thinking about bandwidth, the metaphor: Many of our lives probably feel a bit like this spectrum, sliced not only into strips of time on Google Calendars, but extremely nebulous things that manage to take up abstract “space” - emotions, physical energy, a tangled web of friendships, anxiety. Many of the bands look squeezed, razor-thin and almost layered on top of each other others are big chunks of blue or pink. You can look at the United States Radio Frequency Allocation Chart, and see the spectrum of frequencies chopped up by the FCC into brightly-colored and pastel bands of different widths. In electronics, bandwidth can also mean the distance between the upper and lower frequencies on a spectrum of transmission in radio, this would be the “width” of electromagnetic frequency range at which a station can operate. ![]() Perhaps someone else on your wi-fi is also watching Netflix, and the network is clogged up by the volume of data it’s processing in real time. (Broadband, as they say!) Indeed, it’s probably not something you think about very often, unless you’re running up against its limits - say, for instance, when you’re streaming a video and it’s freezing. Though bandwidth was of great concern in the early days of the internet - a higher bandwidth had a lot of marketing power - these days, most people paying for wi-fi in the United States have pretty high bandwidth. “Bandwidth” allows you to opt out of the great sleight of hand of modern life: “making time” Generally, bandwidth is a fixed amount you can pay for more or less of it. It is expressed as a rate: bits per second, or megabits per second. It is the maximum amount of data that can be transferred from one point to another over a computer network or an internet connection in a given period of time. When used in computing, “bandwidth” refers to a fixed rate of data transfer - a capacity, really. “Bandwidth” allows you to opt out of the great sleight of hand of modern life: “making time.”īandwidth, the literal kind, can refer to a number of things, but it encompasses boundaries. This is a reality that capitalism exploits it’s something bad friends and boyfriends ignore. Of course, this is not always true, but one of the strange realities about our time is that we often can rearrange it or add to it so that we can squeeze another something into the waking hours of our day. The expression is not exactly about time, or not about time in the sense of space on the schedule, which likely could be cleared or changed if it needed to be. Or perhaps they say it to a friend about another friend, who has been going through the same sad break-up for what feels like too long, whose daily phone calls are running up against the limits of their schedule and sympathy. Or else maybe it’s in the context of a romantic relationship that’s getting a little more serious than they originally thought it would, that’s coming with some of the snarls inherent to relationships, like feelings and fights, and it’s all starting to take up a lot more time than expected. ![]() People say this and often they mean something like, “I don’t have time for that.” They might say this to their boss, about a work project they don’t really feel like they can add to their metaphorical plate. BAD METAPHORS is an ongoing series that takes a critical look at the figures of speech that shuttle between technology and everyday life.
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