Our obsession with doing more at once is symptomatic of the frenetic pace of life. The yellow brick road may wind through the Googleplex, with all its indoor tree houses, volleyball courts, apiaries, and giant, colored rubber balls, but over-the-rainbow Google engineers talk of needing to work smarter and harder than they could ever have imagined. Although speed and timing is of the essence, Zen masters are brought in to teach employees how to stop and take a deep breath. The typical mantra of CEOs is that technology is pushing us faster and so we have to adapt to new ways of doing business in “a world of screens, texts, cell phones, information all over you.”1
Like corporate speak, much social science sees technology as the main force driving acceleration. The idea that digitalization has spawned a new temporality is widespread and is variously described as instantaneous time, timeless time, time-space compression, time-space distanciation, chronoscopic time, pointillist time, or network time.2 There are even calls for a new science of speed or, as Paul Virilio has termed it, dromology. All of these concepts have at their core a view that life is speeding up. The spread of communication technologies in particular and their evident potential for the further speeding up of an already accelerated modernity has added urgency to the question of speed and human reactions to it.
But if acceleration defines our digital universe, what precisely does this mean? Despite the dazzling array of theories depicting the present era as one of exceptional speed, the concept remains vague and elusive. The fact that so much of the academic and popular commentary is prone to speculative hyperbole compounds the problem. This, in turn, is exacerbated by the extent to which the agenda for discussing the future of technology is set by the promoters of new technological products.
I begin this chapter, then, by disentangling the rhetoric in order to clarify the relationship between technological acceleration and the pace of life. I also present an overview of the most influential accounts of high-speed network society, which will help to expose the technological determinism implicit in such theories. Perhaps this is an unfortunate but necessary corollary of the scale and scope of the authors’ arguments. What gets downplayed or lost, however, is the extent to which the “virtual” is made up of wires, buildings, and bodies, as well as the fact that real human beings know and use (or not use) information and communication technology (ICT) in concrete, local settings. My approach contrasts these tactics by firmly grounding the discussion of how digital time is perceived, organized and negotiated in commonplace everyday situations.
Chapter One
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