Electronic technologies are integral to our experience of space, time, communication, and consciousness, crystallizing new ways of being, knowing, and doing. They as much reflect our high-speed culture as shape it. If technologies are sites of practice, then sociotechnical orders are not predetermined but are the result of humans and nonhumans coming together to constitute society. The latest technologies can, then, be recruited as a resource in our quest for discretionary time.
Too often, however, critical reflections on the impact of digital devices are framed negatively, as if we are victims of a “crisis” that needs correction.42 Such readings make it dificult to formulate an alternative politics of time (and in particular a gendered time politics) which cannot be separated from either the emergence of digitalization, or its entanglement with the shifting temporalities of social life.
There is a disjunction between the cultural allure of speed and the common experience of always feeling rushed, but this can be a source of creative tension. Smart, fast technologies provide an unparalleled opportunity for realizing a more humane and just society, only we need to keep in mind that busyness is not a function of gadgetry but of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set. Now is the moment to contest the euphorics of speed, and the technological impulse to achieve it, harnessing our inventiveness to take control of our time more of the time.
Chapter seven
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