{"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":44,"pdf_page":56,"physical_index":56,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1f67a702f84d075ca1cef3ea3eee6e42dd548623fcfa565d86f49c075923f8e2"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"But first it is befitting to reflect on the abiding connection between machine speed and progress. Although the idea of progress can be traced back to the classical world, it only becomes a powerful social ideology in the first part of the twentieth century. Our common sense notion of “modern” denotes a historical process of steady advance and improvement in human material well-being, occasioned by technological innovation. How, though, asks John Tomlinson, does speed itself become a prime mark of social progress?18\n\nOne answer is the straightforward association between the pace of mechanical production and the delivery of material improvements. The speed of manufacturing, transportation, and communication technologies saved vast amounts of physical efort and time as well as providing afordable material goods. For the first time, human ingenuity deploying mechanical power appeared to overcome the natural order, giving rise to engineering notions of control and regulation. Rational mechanical speed promised to overcome the physical realities of space, distance, and separation—obstacles to the fulfillment of human needs and desires.\n\nIn this way, speed presents itself as the prime condition for economic growth and prosperity. The associated increase in the pace of life, though it may not be attractive in itself, may appear as a matter of “pragmatic acceptance as part of the cultural ‘bargain’ with modernity.” However, there is also a quasi-moral linkage between speed as dynamism and visions of the human good. The ideological nub of progress, Tomlinson argues, is its impatience with the way things are, that human good lies in the struggle for improvement. Change thus comes to be valorized over continuity, and once this is accepted, the speed of change becomes a self-evident good. “This moral underpinning of mechanical speed combines with the material benefits if ofers and its sheer excitement, to construct a hugely powerful cultural narrative of social acceleration.”19 That notions of speed and progress are still so intertwined in contemporary political discourse is integral to the insistent sense of time pressure.\n\nAlthough our own experience of time-space compression is unique in detail, its structure is characteristically modern. The dramatic efect of the electrical telegraph on the mental maps of Europeans and Americans is illustrative of this. For the first time, a communication machine could separate communication from transportation, allowing information to move independently of—and much faster than—transport. It caused people to wonder, much as the Internet does today, about the rapid and extraordinary shifts it wrought in the spatial and temporal boundaries of human relationships. Indeed, James Carey argues that “the innovation of the telegraph can stand metaphorically for all the innovations that ushered in the modern phase of history and determined, even to this day, the major lines of development of American communications.”20\n\nChapter two\n\n44","previous_page":43,"next_page":45}