Mapping the Discussion
The book explores these ideas thematically and is organized in the following way. The first chapter begins by outlining the extent to which social theorists link modern society to processes of acceleration. Here we see that time-space compression is a recurring theme, with the main impetus being information and communication technologies. For some, digitalization is even generating new kinds of timeless time, or instantaneous time, eclipsing the linear logic of clock time.8 The phenomenal speed of financial trading is emblematic of this.
But what does acceleration mean and is it a constitutive trait of our era? I argue that a lack of clarity about the concept itself serves to sustain the belief that faster machines catapult us into a faster life. Accordingly, I distinguish between diferent kinds of acceleration, opening up the connections between them to scrutiny. My particular interest is in how technology afects the pace of everyday life, and I question the determinist role ascribed to it in theories of the high-speed, network society. In contrast to the sweeping, celebratory claims made by cyber-gurus, I suggest that the social studies of technology ofer a richer analysis of the reciprocal relationship between time and machines.
Talk about life accelerating only makes sense against an implied backdrop of a slower past. Chapter 2 thus provides a necessary historical perspective. Most sociologists explain our modern sense of time as dating from the commodification of time in industrial capitalism. With the exploitation of labor, saving time becomes equivalent to making profit, as expressed in Benjamin Franklin’s famous equation of time and money. These arguments focus on the economy, stressing the way that clock time becomes time, per se, and is internalized as time discipline.
However, it is in the city where speed becomes a general condition of modern life: the antithesis of the slow pace of country life. Beginning around the turn of the nineteenth century, speed itself becomes closely identified with narratives of progress. This period saw dramatic technological inventions, such as the steam engine, railways, the telegraph and the telephone, that transformed people’s consciousness of time, space, and their environment.
Introduction
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