Inevitably, my focus on the interconnections between speed, technology, and the relationship between work life and leisure has led me to focus on predominantly Western, “overdeveloped,” industrial economies. It has also led me to focus on people who are in work within those economies. Indeed, throughout the book, where possible, I draw on my own empirical research that has largely been based within the work spaces of various Anglo American economies. But if unemployed people and people living in the global south are somewhat missing from this account, still much of what I describe is part of global and more general social trends towards urbanization and technologization.
What I very much want to do here—and what this narrowed focus has allowed me to do—is to bring technology back into the conversation about speed and time. There are numerous theories about fast, mobile capitalism that do focus on technology, but these are rarely informed by how time is actually practiced. It is my intention in this book to bridge this gulf, marrying abstract social theories about modernity and acceleration with a wide range of empirical studies. This involves developing a unique dialogue between several social science literatures that are usually kept distinct.
Only such a wide-ranging discussion will enable us to assess the acceleration thesis. While economic, technological, social structural, and cultural changes in modern societies have altered the experience of time in unprecedented ways, the picture is not uniformly one of speeding up. If we are short of time for work, parenting, friendship, leisure, and civic participation, this is not simply a function of machines, old or new. Technologies in themselves do not lead to either velocity or slowdown.
In the digital age, however, our communication patterns and interpersonal sociability are much more mediated by and distributed across a whole range of multimodal devices. In every sphere, we inhabit a technologically sufused environment in which constant connectivity is the norm. Such interconnected sociomaterial networks are transforming the pace and scope of human interaction. This is giving new meanings to temporality and reconfiguring our time practices. The social shaping perspective elaborated here ofers a framework for understanding the myriad ways in which the rhythms of our lives are intertwined with technologies.
Introduction
10