{"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":18,"pdf_page":30,"physical_index":30,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"24f66ff40ac0f22eaa8854869a0248cb81074c95864dfad84c1b598f5032bda6"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"Our own sense of time has been profoundly altered by the convergence of telephony, computing, and broadcasting technologies into a pervasive environment of instant and simultaneous information and communication. So it is not so surprising that, in the face of such an intense phase of time-space compression, and the resulting changes in our time consciousness, many social scientists herald a new social order.\n\nThe problem, as I will show, is that theories about social acceleration are too schematic to capture the multiple temporal landscapes, both fast and slow, that come into play with digital devices. The prose is all about “virtual” networks and ubiquitous computing, which are conceived of as borderless disembodied spaces and ethereal instantaneous times. This has the efect of rendering invisible the tangible human and social time dimensions of everyday life as “banal, repetitive, and trivial.”9 In other words, the quotidian time of intersubjectivity, in which actual women and men coordinate their time practices in real-world contexts, gets completely obscured.\n\nThe Network Society\n\nPerhaps the best-known example is Manuel Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society. For him, the revolution in ICT has given rise to a new information age, a network society in which labor and capital are replaced by informational networks and knowledge. Information is the key ingredient of organizations and flows of electronic messages and images between networks now constitute the basic thread of social structure. He defines the space of flows as the technological and organizational possibility of practicing simultaneity without contiguity. These circuits come to dominate the organization of activity in individual places such that the site of networks and their relationship to other networks become more important than the characteristics of place itself. For Castells, the information age, in which virtuality becomes an essential dimension of our reality, marks a whole new epoch in the human experience.\n\nFor our purposes, here, what is particularly interesting is his argument about the disappearance of time: that we are increasingly moving away from the clock time of the industrial age, in which time was a method of demarcating and ordering sequences of events.10 Instead, he argues, the world is increasingly organized in the space of flows: flows of merchandise, people, money, and information around dispersed and distributed networks. The sheer velocity and intensity of these global flows, interactions, and networks dissolve time, resulting in simultaneity and instant communications—what he terms timeless time. While this new timeless time emerged in financial markets, it is spreading to every realm. No wonder then, Castells opines, that life is a frantic race as people multitask and multilive by means of technology to reach “timeless time: the social practice that aims at negating sequence to install ourselves in perennial simultaneity and simultaneous ubiquity.”11 In true postmodern rhetoric, society becomes eternally ephemeral as space and time are radically compressed to the point where, at least with regard to the latter, it ceases to exist.12\n\nChapter One\n\n18","previous_page":17,"next_page":19}