As we move toward the final thoughts of this book, let me remind you why I would be reluctant to embrace slow living. Firstly, we cannot in fact choose between fast and slow, technology and nature. These dualisms exist and only acquire meaning in relation to each other. A fast/ slow dichotomy cannot hope to capture the simultaneous coexistence of multiple temporalities that characterizes the experience of modernity. Once we recognize this, we can begin to reimagine hybrid sociomaterial assemblages or networks for enacting diferent times in an intensely technological world.
It follows, second, that a wholesale dismissal of globalization and digitalization as necessarily spurring on acceleration is misconceived. Even eating at a McDonald’s restaurant can, in some contexts, be recuperated as a positive locale for slow eating, conviviality, and leisure. High-tech devices and systems are also great sources of pleasure and creativity. The positive possibilities for new kinds of time they generate should not be denied. Indeed, making more of time, preserving slow zones, actually requires more technological innovation.
New Technologies for Emergent Times
To argue, as I have in this book, that there is no temporal logic inherent in digital technologies is not to claim that technology is neutral or that the technical properties of objects do not matter. A sociotechnical lens on the sociology of time lays bare the highly specific materialities that make up the global network society. It demonstrates that the design and capabilities of the apparatus that become available to us, the architecture of infrastructures, have huge consequences. This has never been more so than now when every aspect of our lives is touched by information and communication technologies.
Chapter seven
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