The cultural value we attach to having a busy lifestyle, one rich in manifold activities and events, echoes this sentiment and it is a recurring theme in this book. As one of the leading time-use scholars, Manfred Garhammer, argues, the “ambivalent consequences of modernity distinguished by Simmel are crucial for the understanding of the time-crunchlife-enjoyment-paradox: life may become richer in terms of the number of events, and at the same time it may become poorer.”37
Simmel was acutely aware of the inherent ambiguity of modern city life, that it promotes individualization and standardization at the same time. For example, in his exploration of fashion and style, we find the dialectical interplay of individual imitation and diferentiation, the desire to be like others and the desire for diference. Fashion requires continuous reproduction to accelerate the turnover time of new commodities, making its newness its simultaneous death. As such, it exemplifies the modern cultural fixation with the “eternal present,” with immediacy, the transitory, perpetual motion. Simmel was thus highly attuned to the emergent time consciousness of the modern individual: “the dominion of presentism—erasure of the past, efacement of inherited connections, domination by the immediately invisible sublime—is an integral part of modernity.”38 The point I will return to is that this condition of immediacy is taken today as being wholly a consequence of digital technologies.
Strikingly absent from Simmel’s prescient analysis, however, is how the experience of the metropolis is highly stratified by social class, status, gender, and ethnicity, in other words, power relations. The realization of simultaneity as a phenomenon of the perception of time, the awareness of everything happening in the moment, was reserved for the privileged few. The acceleration of the pace of life was not then, and is not now, a uniform condition of existence.
Speed and mobility remain diferentially distributed, accessed and interpreted by diferent groups depending on their circumstances. If we return to the subject of the automobile, we will see that this technology itself shifts from being a sociomaterial practice of the rich to becoming, literally, a vehicle of democracy in the era of mass consumption. Once again, the speed it ofers has unanticipated consequences.
Chapter two
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