{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title":"Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780226196473","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","uuid":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title":"Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"pressedfortimetheaccelerationoflifeindigitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780226196473","isbns":["9780226196473","9780226196503"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":228,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Pressed%20for%20Time%20The%20Acceleration%20of%20Life%20in%20Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/search"},"page":{"printed_page":20,"pdf_page":32,"physical_index":32,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fc778845ee284435e1ca28e34bef78e4bd9b30119a4456ecc66d0dd9ddec7e4e"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"Let me provide just two brief examples. Surely highly mobile, “hotdesking” professionals would be a good test of the notion of timeless time, as their spatial-temporal practices are fundamentally altered. Yet according to a detailed study, rather than time disappearing, their time became dominated by a concern to connect in time and space because they considered face-to-face meetings to be the paramount means of communicating in organizations.14 As a result, one of their main uses of asynchronous technologies (such as voice mail and e-mail) was to make arrangements for synchronous communications. That the digital media industry is so geographically clustered in both London and New York similarly attests to the importance of “live” social networking.15 In this sense, local time is hardly superseded. My own research on the contemporary workplace, detailed in chapter 4, shows that while network technologies do alter the tempo of work, the myriad ways in which people deploy their devices can hardly be described as the annihilation of time.\n\nOr take the extreme case of time-space compression, finance. Even here we do not find Castells’s immaterial world where time, place, and bodies are replaced by virtual information networks. Financial trading is in fact underpinned by materiality: physical, technological, and corporeal in nature. Trading centers are large warehouses, consuming vast amounts of electric power to dissipate the heat generated by fast computing. There are relatively few staf but rows and rows of computer servers and digital switches and miles of cabling connect those servers to the matching engines and the outside world. By today’s standards, a very large data center might be a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot building demanding fifty megawatts of power, which is about how much it takes to light a small city. To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit polluting diesel exhaust. The ethereal imagery of virtual data stored in the “cloud” is belied by the brute physicality of the infrastructure it needs.16\n\nMoreover, contrary to perceived wisdom, the ultrafast reaction time actually increases the importance of spatial distance. It turns out that high-frequency trading firms rent space for their computer servers in the same building as an exchange’s engines precisely because the obdurate physical reality of colocation is still important. Time advantages of tens of microseconds become a crucial issue for traders. And these same technologies, working through diferent institutional arrangements, shape trading in very diferent ways.17 “For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.”18\n\nChapter One\n\n20","previous_page":19,"next_page":21}