{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908","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":"bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908","id":"bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908","uuid":"bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908","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/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908","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/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908/search"},"page":{"printed_page":178,"pdf_page":190,"physical_index":190,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0438cd4c5956f14b1406270b1d75eee13e81c9a16e5a6efd309d188ea8de7028"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"These prospective technological scenarios seem inexhaustible and figure ever more powerfully in our culture. Time was when a new consumer durable had to be marketed with conventional accompanying advertisements, while now the latest versions of smartphones are newsworthy in themselves. They are not only reported in the financial pages but are headline news framing and representing tales of individual empowerment. The “i” word is practically an intoxicant. The topic of technology is in fact by far the best predictor of the popularity of news items on Twitter.24\n\nAt one level, all this speculative hyperbole has an obvious function: these (mostly) guys are promoting a benign future in which their own products feature heavily. They are transparently selling a particular vision in which technology will solve all our ills, including the time crunch. As I write, Big Data is the tool du jour for tech-savvy companies: the irresistible technological fix or answer to all social problems.25 This idea, that we live in a technocracy in which technical rationality both defines political problems and provides the solution, has a long lineage. Frankfurt School writers like Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas were wise to it before the dawn of the computer.26 Such depictions of the “proximate future” are far from innocent. They are being mobilized as a resource to influence the direction of sociotechnical innovation in the present.27 Some thought-provoking sociology is exploring how patterns of hope, promise, and hype—the “dynamics of expectations”—are constructed, and the performative role they play in actually shaping research agendas.\n\nPerhaps less obvious than the marketing ploys of the technoevangelists is the extent to which speed itself has become the ultimate rationale for technical innovation. This in turn purveys a distorted model of the relationalities between time, technology and social change. Technologies change all the time, but this does not mean that technical change is always inventive.\n\nIn The Mantra of Eficiency, the historian Jennifer Karns Alexander traces how the modern orthodoxy that “all things should act eficiently” became dominant in Western culture. “Good” technological design is eficient, it is about making things work, efecting control over situations and events. This is “particularly apparent in the contemporary emphasis on quantifiable productivity and associated fears of waste, especially the waste of time.”28 In other words, technological inventiveness is associated with making us more eficient in the sense of being economical with time.\n\nChapter seven\n\n178","previous_page":177,"next_page":179}