Chapter Two
Time and Motion
Machines and the Making of Modernity
By failing to understand our own time system we also
fail to fully understand ourselves.
H annah Gay, “Clock Synchrony, Time Distribution,
and Electrical Timekeeping in Britain, 1880–1925”
We tend to think of high-speed society as a recent phenomenon associated with the growth of digital technologies. However, claims about technology annihilating time and space are not new. Here I will consider the impact of the vast technological changes that took place over the last century or so, some of which are arguably as sweeping as those wrought by the Internet.
My aim is not to dispute that contemporary temporalities have been radically altered with ICT, but rather to inform our understanding by adding a historical perspective. After all, arguments about the increasing pace of life only make sense against a putative slower past. We will see that our present-day embrace of speed has well-established antecedents. Indeed, much that is attributed to mass migration to the online world has roots sunk deeply in earlier phases of technical evolution.
In the modern world, timekeeping is an essential and habitual activity, and we constantly monitor and check the time. Social theorists trace our obsession with measuring time to the institutionalization of clock time under capitalism. The classic text is Edward Thompson’s framing of clock time as disciplinary and as intimately related to the commodification of time as money.1 The tyranny of clocks is essential to the narrative of the
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