{"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":89,"pdf_page":101,"physical_index":101,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"cab0fb126d19d66a659d5b5d502150d9a5eee52e8b80755f7b4b2ea4d5aabf1e"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"Looking Back in Order to Look Forward\n\nWhere better to start than with some history, including my own? It was as a student of industrial sociology in the 1970s that I first became interested in the relationship between technology and the speed of work. As I outlined in chapter 2, historians of the Industrial Revolution have written about the importance of clock time in disciplining labor and increasing productivity in early manufacturing. The emergence of the automated car assembly line was the culmination of this drive to apply technology to intensify the rate of work. Henry Ford’s renowned innovation built on the organizational principles of scientific management. Taylorism increased productivity by breaking down the labor process into component motions and work tasks, according to rigorous standards of time and motion study. Incorporating these principles, Fordism achieved dramatic gains in productivity by flowing the work to a stationary worker. The eficiency of this system of mass production was based on the subordination of workers to the momentum of the machine.\n\nAn avid participant in what became known as the labor process debate, I learned that technology is central to the control of work in a capitalist economy.2 In particular, this literature provoked my interest in the design of technology, and its influence is especially evident in the first edition of The Social Shaping of Technology.3 Rather than conceiving of technology as an autonomous force determining the organization of work, I argued that technology is itself crucially afected by the antagonistic class relations of production. While this perspective was reductionist in its own way, seeing technology as a tool of management, it did direct attention to the social relations of technology.4\n\nForensic studies of the evolution of technologies revealed that patterns of power and cultural values shape the actual processes of technological development. For example, David Noble’s famous study of the automation of machine tools showed that automation did not have to proceed in the way it did; rather, the form of automation was the result of deliberate selection. Industrial innovation is, then, a product of a historically specific activity carried out by social groups for particular purposes: “behind the technology that afects social relations lie the very same social relations.”5 In other words, technical choices are simultaneously social through and through.\n\nWorking with Constant Conne c tivity\n\n89","previous_page":88,"next_page":90}