{"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":22,"pdf_page":34,"physical_index":34,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"396d2b80dd60fc12715408607b35b8291629faf5414b482fc7056ecad0df3c31"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"is less the evolution of technical eficiencies in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and may be believed. Changes in the speed, capacity, and performance of communications devices tell us little about these questions. At best, they provide a cover of functional meanings beneath which social meanings can elaborate themselves undisturbed.19\n\nMy intention is to examine precisely how digital technologies are reshaping our sense of time without succumbing to the common obsession with novelty. As a keen observer of technical processes, I am skeptical about overarching claims in the form of grand, totalizing narratives of postindustrial, information, postmodern, network society. Such theories tend to take the form of “techno-epics heralding techno-epochs” and treat time as an epiphenomenon with relatively little substantive content.20 While I would not diminish for a moment the importance of social theory, my feminist sensibility also attunes me to the situated and contingent character of truth/knowledge claims and the need to beware of the “god trick.”21\n\nAs I have already intimated, we can best advance our understanding of the dynamics of acceleration through scholarship that is specific, empirical, and located in concrete social settings where those efects can be most clearly observed. I have therefore chosen, in the chapters that follow, to concentrate on how technologies shape our practical perceptions, ideas, and experiences of social time in the unheroic sites of ordinary life. Doing so enables us to investigate the full spectrum of positive and negative consequences of the increased pace of life in modernity, the extent to which it is occurring, and the uneven distribution of these processes.\n\nThe Nihilism of Speed\n\nIt is worth first pausing to reflect on the work of the French philosopher Paul Virilio, for whom issues of speed and technology are pivotal. His dromology, from the Greek word for race (dromo), is a theory of the nature of speed, its conditions of emergence, its transformations, and its efects. For Virilio, “speed, the cult of speed, is the propaganda of progress” and its consequences are devastating. “Today we are entering a space which is speed-space. . . . This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming.”22 If there is fear, he tells us, it is because the earth is shrinking and space is dwindling, compressed by instantaneous time. Carried along by the headlong rush of an increasingly accelerated world, all we can do is manage and administer this fear instead of fundamentally dealing with it. “Climate chaos, stock market panics, food scares, pandemic threats, economic crashes, congenital anxiety, existential dread”—yet we are all still convinced that more speed and ubiquity are the answer.23 By this account, then, speed is nihilism in practice.\n\nChapter One\n\n22","previous_page":21,"next_page":23}