Summing up, the idea that the pace of life is accelerating is not new. The vast technological and social transformations that took place in the early twentieth century were also accompanied by the experience of time-space compression. These sociomaterial changes in the fabric of everyday life were to be consolidated in the modern city. Life lived at a high speed became identified with progress. Our valorization of a busy lifestyle, as well as our profound ambivalence toward it, can be traced back to this period.
Technology played a key role then as now. The introduction of the automobile in particular symbolized machine speed in the twentieth century and, like the telegraph and telephone, it reduced barriers of distance and made the world more interconnected. However, its promise of pure speed proved somewhat hollow. In any event, constant movement as a shared aspiration of the good life hides many realities. Speed and mobility are far from a universal condition of existence.
Nevertheless, the experience of immediacy as a phenomenon of the perception of time, the awareness of everything happening in the moment, has become widespread. Whereas a hundred years ago it was the preserve of the privileged, almost everyone has become implicated, at least potentially. Worldwide simultaneity is now the taken-for-granted condition of our lives and is what the Internet lays claim to.53 The social shaping of technology and time is constantly evolving, and we need to specify how these processes coalesce in order to gain a more balanced understanding of our current digital times.
My intention here has been to show that an awareness of what our social, economic, and technological arrangements owe to the past makes the acceleration society thesis more intelligible. Connecting with these earlier debates brings the realization that the questions we face today are not in themselves new. This does not detract from their urgency. But in order to develop a critical perspective on the discourses of acceleration that surround us, we need to put them in a fuller historical perspective than that which is generally acknowledged.
Throughout this chapter I have argued that the discourse of acceleration tends to skim over and conceal the extent to which the pace of modern life depends on one’s resources and the choices they make possible.
Chapter two
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