Chapter Seven
Finding Time in a Digital Age
We need to de-alienate time: reconnect clock time to its sources and recognise its created machine character. As such, concern with the multiple time dimensions of our lives is no mere theoretical, academic exercise; rather, it is a strategy for living.
Bar bara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time
Almost a hundred years ago, economist John Maynard Keynes imagined that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, we in the West would only have to work three hours a day to satisfy all our needs. He anticipated that the constant growth of productivity resulting from technical progress would eventually solve the economic problem of supplying humanity’s material needs at a fraction of the existing work efort. The abundance of time thus released, Keynes hoped, would lead to a moment when the spontaneous, joyful attitude to life then confined to artists and free spirits was difused throughout society as a whole.1
Yet the reverse seems to be true. Machines have not liberated us from work in the way Keynes predicted. The unparalleled velocity of computerization, telecommunications, and transport, which was expected to free up human time, has paradoxically been accompanied by a growing sense of time pressure. Rather than inhabiting a world in which time is abundant, everyday life seems more rushed. Although the details of time scarcity vary substantially across socioeconomic groups, as a culture we have a shared experience of temporal impoverishment. This is the conundrum that I have been exploring, that we live in an acceleration
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