This vision of the network society, in which the accelerating speed of ICT annihilates time, has been extremely influential. For instance, echoing Castells’s concept of timeless time, John Urry argues that new technologies generate new kinds of instantaneous time, characterized by unpredictable change and quantum simultaneity. This new time is based on inconceivably brief instants that are wholly beyond human consciousness and, as a result, the simultaneous character of social and technical relationships replace the linear logic of clock time. According to Urry, instantaneous time is also a metaphor for the widespread significance of exceptionally short-term and fragmented time.
While such conceptions of time do capture something important about the extent to which the extraordinary speed of technologies is transforming the economy, financial markets, politics, and patterns of production and consumption, it is far less clear what this speeding up means for the experience of lived time. Urry does include in his specification of instantaneous time “the sense that the ‘pace of life’ throughout the world has got too fast and is in contradiction with other aspects of human experience.”13 The tenor of his discussion of instantaneous time is that it is socially destructive, yet he does not provide systematic empirical research to support this claim. One is left wondering what time “organised at a speed that is beyond the feasible realm of human consciousness” might mean to people and how it concretely relates to the actual use of ICT in everyday life.
Hig h-Speed Society
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