The final chapter explores some possible directions for making more of time, like reducing working hours. Such strategies, however, require revision as portable technologies rearticulate what were once distinct boundaries between “my time” and “work time”. We see again how the very same devices that can make us feel hurried also free up time. Indeed, I suggest that digitalization provokes a radical rethinking of the standard debates about work-life balance and their oppositional character. I then turn to examine the claim that ICTs have intensified consumption and leisure, what is often described as a culture of instantaneity or immediacy. Once more I show how the story is complicated, with accelerating time frames being ofset by the emergence of unforeseen, slow ones. The relationship between technological change and temporality is dialectical, not teleological.
The cult of speed has prompted slow living movements that attempt to alter the tempo of everyday life. The exemplar is slow food, and I discuss both its appeal and shortcomings. In particular, I encourage a critical distance from the notion that rejecting high-tech systems points the way forward. Rather, I argue that ICTs make possible new and multiple temporalities. But will we get the type of technology that is best suited to this endeavor? I consider the extent to which innovation is conflated with eficiency narrowly conceived, particularly by the engineers of Silicon Valley. This shapes how social problems are formulated, the kinds of machinery that are developed, and even our sense of self. Perhaps most perniciously, our visions of the future are profoundly pervaded by their preoccupation with ever more acceleration.
Conclusion
Throughout the book, I will explore many of the complexities and nuances that structure and texture the diferent ways that people are caught within the webs of time, technology and daily life. Clearly not everyone is caught up in the accelerating dynamism of modernity in the same way. Some of these nuances will be particularly important in what follows, and I pay close attention to the role of gender, to diferent kinds of labor, and to varying patterns of technology use by age.
Tools for Time
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