{"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":42,"pdf_page":54,"physical_index":54,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"78b15901264032c7871e0b0fdabda0702120481ec924a64c0f41834b7680b9c6"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"There is mounting evidence of the widespread use of clocks and timekeeping practices from the fifteenth century onward, long before private ownership of clocks and watches was commonplace, let alone the emergence of factories. In early modern England, for example, diaries and letters indicate that schools were already imposing a temporal discipline: “Now at five of the clock by the moonlight I must go to my book and let sleep and sloth alone” ran a saying that dates from around 1500 and is attributed to a twelve-year-old boy.11 Whether he actually arrived on time is lost to history. Nonetheless, there was a timetable and an intended discipline, known to the young, confirming “the sheer density of temporal infrastructure” at that time.\n\nThe issue of periodization need not detain us, but the case that Glennie and Thrift make is salient to my argument here. They eschew a linear view whereby early forms of timekeeping were wholly replaced by clock time. Instead, they stress the very diferent registers and dimensions of overlaying clock times that coexisted in the past, as they were embodied in complex sets of practices in diferent temporal communities. There was no sudden rupture, whether for better or worse, with the advent of industrialization. We were and are able to internalize and live with many diferent time notations, astronomical, biological, private and public, and so on.\n\nIt follows, therefore, that we cannot accept the influential commentaries about the preeminence and triumph of clock time. The authors subscribe neither to a story of technological supremacy in the later eighteenth century, heralding a glorious modernity, nor to a jeremiad on the imposition of strict timetables and the loss of preindustrial freedom.\n\nIndeed, they firmly reject the increasingly popular view that the procedures and practices of aggregation that we call “clock time” are to blame for all the ills of the world: “clock time has been as much a liberatory as an oppressive force. It has allowed as much as it has disciplined. New entities, capacities, and experiences have become possible which did not exist before and there is no reason to believe that all of these have been negative.”12 Fear of the omnipotence of clock time runs through contemporary narratives about the accelerating world and betrays a tragic teleological tale about modernization.\n\nChapter two\n\n42","previous_page":41,"next_page":43}