Notes
Introduction
1 Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 18.
2 Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (1965): 114–17, described how the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit doubles every two years.
3 I do not intend to go into the vast literature on the philosophy of time. See, for example, chapter 7 of Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), where Andrew Abbott draws on Henri Bergson, George Herbert Mead, and Alfred North Whitehead to elaborate a theory of temporality as social, processual, and relational. To paraphrase, what matters is not how fast social change is occurring or that new communication technologies make interaction faster, but rather how fast these things occur relative to other things as they used to be.
4 Donald MacKenzie, Daniel Beunza, Yuval Milo, and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, “Drilling through the Allegheny Mountains: Liquidity, Materiality and High-Frequency Trading,” Journal of Cultural Economy 5, no. 3(2012): 279–96. For example, a firm that did not use it would have feared that its price quotes would become “stale” (that is, they would no longer reflect price changes in the wider market), and that those stale quotes would be “picked of” by trading firms using the new, faster, cable.
5 I refer to social shaping here simply to introduce the idea that technology is socially shaped, but society is technically shaped, too. See Donald Mac-Kenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed. (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1999). A fuller account of science and technology studies can be found in the second half of chapter 1.
6 See John Robinson and Geofrey Godbey, “Busyness as Usual,” Social Research 72, no. 2 (2005): 407–26. Details of all these studies can be found in chapter 3.
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