Amazon’s Jef Bezos, with the aid of drones. Dinner kits are also taking of. E-commerce businesses, such as Plated, will buy, measure, cut, chill, box, and ship every ingredient for a meal to your door. All the customer has to do is to order online. As one of their spokesmen put it: “Food is one of the last pieces of daily life that is still analog. We want to bring it into the digital age.”
Ironically, some of these futuristic developments hark back to the past. During the nineteenth century, household deliveries and mailorder catalogs were common. As I outlined in chapter 5, the industrial revolution in the home and the advent of the car, paradoxically, increased shopping time. For all the e-commerce today, shopping and domestic travel times show a rising trend. Even sophisticated domestic appliances, such as the washing machine, have been more successful in time shifting and raising standards than in reducing housework. Rather than compressing labor time, such machines radically alter expectations of comfort, cleanliness, and convenience. Routine household work is consequently still time-consuming, and that is why the cash-rich, timepoor employ paid domestic workers and fast food outlets flourish on busy main streets.
In the end, the relationship between technological change and temporality is always dialectical: the simultaneous production of fast time spaces with those of remarkable slowness. Speed and slow down have always coexisted in modernity, although the meanings and values attached to them have shifted.
Notwithstanding this recursive interplay, the predominant emphasis in social and cultural theory is on the acceleration of everything. As outlined in chapter 1, this new temporality is variously described as one of immediacy, instantaneity, simultaneity, timelessness, chronoscopic, or network time. Ben Agger has gone so far as to label it iTime, a manic, compulsive, deeply compressed time “weighing heavily on the person who always has too much to do, not enough time to do it.”13
For John Tomlinson, too, this telemediated culture is a novel historical phenomenon, a unique way of being.14 “Immediacy”—the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies—changes the nature of consumer culture entirely. It is characterized by instantaneity, proximity, and expectations of immediacy that are linked to “assumptions of instant delivery and efortlessly achievable abundance.” Accordingly, “delivery” itself rather than satisfaction becomes the telos of consumption; “something new is always on the way and so it is not necessary—nor does it do—to invest too much into the thing of the moment.” While Tomlinson highlights the usual critiques of accelerating consumption, such as debt, waste, and maintenance of the capitalist status quo, his real concern is that the culture of immediacy is incapable of generating “new imaginations of the good life.”
Finding Time in a D igi tal Age
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