--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9780226196473" library_document_id: "0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50" source_sha256: "76a6e48672ea74cbf4a478bce933f7ea7fe347bf2e5daac191fc3c1a58a56b41" pdf_physical_page_count: 228 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 40 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50?start=40&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50.md?start=40&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50.md?start=30&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50.md?start=50&limit=10" --- # Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=40 | PRINTED_PAGE=28 Being a critic of technological determinism does not entail a wholesale rejection of the profound influence that technological systems have had on the history of the twentieth century or on the way we live and who we are. No STS scholar would deny that technical innovation has social and cultural implications. Indeed, in The Social Shaping of Technology, we expressed some sympathy for a “soft” determinism: “to say that technology’s social efects are complex and contingent is not to say that it has no social efects.”35 Rather, the aim has been to reconceptualize the relationship of technology and society. In doing so, we do not mean to understate the power of technology. Quite the contrary. Whatever version of STS we do, we do it because we passionately believe in the constitutive power of technology, that our societies and our very identities are shaped together with technologies. For most social scientists, the recognition that technological change is profoundly shaped by social, economic, cultural, political, and organizational circumstances is too well established to need belaboring. The breakthrough contribution of STS scholars was to demonstrate that artifacts are socially shaped, not only in their usage but in their design and technical content.36 Crucially, such an analysis rejects the notion that technology is solely the product of rational technical imperatives; that a particular technology will triumph because it is intrinsically the best. Technical reasons are vitally important. But we need to ask why a technical reason was found to be compelling, when it could have been challenged, and what counts as technical superiority in specific circumstances. Studies show that the generation and implementation of new technologies involve many choices between technical options. A range of social factors afect which of the technical options are selected, and these choices shape technologies and, thereby, their social implications. In this way, technology can be thought of as a sociotechnical product, patterned by the conditions of its creation and use. Chapter One 28 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=41 | PRINTED_PAGE=29 In other words, technologies result from a series of specific decisions made by particular groups of people in particular places at particular times for their own purposes. As such, technologies bear the imprint of the people and social context in which they develop. It follows that political choices are embedded in the very design and selection of technology. There is now a rich field of STS, reflecting a variety of approaches to the social study of technology.37 I want to outline its distinctive perspective here, as I believe it provides the basis for understanding the complex intertwining of technology and time. One way to begin is to think about things, the stuf we have, the material world rather than technology in general. Thinking about the use of things in this way connects us directly with the world we know rather than abstract ideas about the technology of our age. It encourages us to consider what we mean when we talk about technology and to be specific about which technologies have been most significant for acceleration. For example, why do we immediately think about the latest digital gizmos when we think about speed? Why do the mundane material artifacts of everyday life, such as kitchen equipment, receive so much less attention in the narratives of technological progress? We live our lives surrounded by things, but we tend to think about only some of them as being technologies. It is common to think about technology as encompassing only very new, science-intensive things—ones with electronic or digital bits, for instance. And to think of the driving forces of history as being the steam engine, electricity, and computers rather than the washing machine, the stroller, and the condom. We tend to overrate the impact of new technologies in part because older technologies have become absorbed into the furniture of our lives, so as to be almost invisible. Take the baby bottle. Here is a simple implement that has “transformed a fundamental human experience for vast numbers of infants and mothers, and been one of the most controversial exports of Western technology to underdeveloped countries—yet it finds no place in our histories of technology.”38 This technology might be thought of as a classic time-shifting device, as it enables mothers to exercise more control over the timing of feeding. It can also function to save time, as bottle feeding allows for someone else to substitute for the mother’s time. Potentially, therefore, it has huge implications for the management of time in everyday life, yet it is entirely overlooked in discussions of high-speed society. This illustrates that the impact technologies are perceived to have on time largely depends on who is using them, and in what context, a point I return to below. Hig h-Speed Society 29 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=42 | PRINTED_PAGE=30 Social theories that announce the dawn of a new age are preoccupied with technology as major high-end technological systems rather than discrete tools or devices. The convergence of all kinds of electronic systems, broadcasting, telecommunications, and computer-mediated communications into a comprehensive ecology known as ICT is the classic case. But, even here, we need to consider specific applications in order to think about their efect on time. Let us take the example of the Internet, perhaps the prime contender for a technology of acceleration. At its basic level, the Internet is indeed a set of technical standards and capabilities that enables a “network of networks” to interlink ICTs, including computers of all sizes and a variety of mobile consumer devices and electronic multimedia. The most visible aspects of the Internet are also technological: for instance, the tools that enable searches to be made through billions of pages of information on the World Wide Web (in a matter of minutes) or multiple e-mails to be sent to colleagues and friends. Social research has shown, however, that the use of the Internet and its constituent and interlinking technologies form an intertwining, coevolving web of people, social structures, and technologies. The paths opened by the Internet are determined not by technological capabilities alone but through a multitude of intricate social processes in which a diverse array of actors with varied goals participate in a rapidly evolving “ecology of games.”39 For example, the choices that are embedded in the operating codes of search engine software, such as Google, predispose users to access well-linked and highly connected websites and exclude poorly linked and less-connected websites. This indicates that the Internet is about more than just equipment, and that the control of the Internet and related technologies is bound up with broader issues of who has access to the skills, equipment, and knowhow essential to produce, use, consume, and govern the relevant technologies. Through this web of people and technology, the Internet can redistribute the relative “communicative power” of diferent actors in households, communities, workplaces, and society at large by reshaping access not only to information but also to people, services, and technologies. Chapter One 30 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=43 | PRINTED_PAGE=31 Does it make sense, then, to think about the Internet as necessarily saving time? It certainly allows messages to be sent at amazing speeds. If technologies existed independently and outside of society, then surely faster technologies would save time as people would be doing the same things, but at a faster pace. At one level, this rings true—faster, more powerful computers enable us to process more information more quickly. Yet, paradoxically, we seem to end up with less time than before. In reality, the impact of technological innovation is far from uniform or straightforward.40 It is not only a matter of the presumed inherent capabilities of the technology in question. The extent to which its technical potency will be realized fundamentally depends on the social significance it is accorded and how it becomes embedded in its concrete and practical application. The Internet is especially open to manifold usages. In some instances, e-mail, for example, may genuinely encourage faster decision making, while in others, what is colloquially referred to as “information overload” may lead to inertia. Either way, what is clear is that technical velocity does not necessarily translate into more eficiency and convenience. As I detail in chapter 4, the significance of e-mail lies as much in the way it has transformed social expectations and standards of the time activities take as in the actual speed of communication. My point is that qualities such as speed and eficiency are not produced by technologies alone but are related to social norms that evolve as devices are integrated into daily life. Rather than simply compressing time, information technologies change the very nature and meaning of tasks and work activities. Moreover, like the mobile phone, the Internet generates new kinds of material and cultural practices, reconfiguring the temporal and spatial basis of social interaction. It makes sense, then, to think about the relationship between technology and time as one of ongoing mutual shaping. In order to understand this reciprocal process, I read technologies of all kinds as sociotechnical or sociomaterial “assemblages.” This view, that technologies are combinations of people, materials, equipment, components, and institutions, is also sometimes referred to as an ensemble, a web, or a network. Whatever the term used, the idea is that the technical is not reducible to the social, nor is the social reducible to the technical. Whereas sociology tends to give primacy to social relations, treating them as existing prior to the intervention of technology, this perspective sees society and technology as mutually constitutive. In other words, the material world makes society possible. Hig h-Speed Society 31 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=44 | PRINTED_PAGE=32 Indeed, with the development of an STS approach known as actornetwork theory, the agency of objects has taken center stage.41 What does this mean? Although I have been emphasizing the key role of users in assigning meaning to objects, some formulations of this tend towards social determinism, that is, a view of technologies as infinitely flexible and tractable. Actor-network’s conception of nonhuman objects as actors (“actants”) or agents who exercise power serves as a corrective to this view. It helps us understand how the materiality and obduracy of artifacts create boundaries to the possibilities for interpretation and usage. Consider for a moment the design phase of technological systems. In order to develop functional instruments or devices, engineers and designers anticipate the interests, skills, motives, and behavior of future users. Subsequently, these representations or configurations of users become built into or materialized in the form of the new product. In this sense, objects contain a “script” that stipulates how they can facilitate or constrain human activities, as well as relationships between people and things. This script delegates specific competencies, actions, and responsibilities both to users and artifacts. Bruno Latour’s much-cited examples of automatic doors and road bumps illustrate how technical objects can impose programs of action on users, defining actors, the space in which they move, and the ways in which they behave and interact. Fittingly called sleeping policemen, road bumps are delegated the job of reducing motorists’ speed where the rule of law does not sufice. In this way, it can be said that the material world itself exercises a kind of agency. Ironically, in this case, we see technology literally acting to achieve deceleration. This is not to imply that the way artifacts evolve and are used is predetermined or irreversible. The linear model of technical innovation and difusion, whereby innovation is an activity restricted to expert engineers and scientists, has long been revised. Long after artifacts leave the research and development laboratory, the process of design is still taking place. Users are no longer thought of as passive consumers of technology. Chapter One 32 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=45 | PRINTED_PAGE=33 To take a well-known instance, the heavy use of mobile phones by adolescents exchanging SMS texts as well as audio messages was unanticipated by its designers. Or consider how developments such as Web 2.0, open-source software, and Twitter blur the traditional boundary between production and consumption. Innovative users can radically alter the meanings and deployment of technologies. While the technical character of devices matters a great deal, the life of machines ultimately depends on the locally contingent meanings that people attribute to them, in practice. Conclusion So to recap, a conception of technology as a sociomaterial practice recasts agency as emerging from the interconnections between people and things, the ensemble of human-machine interaction.42 It moves the analytical focus away from examining how technology influences humans to exploring how materiality and sociality are constitutive of both activities and identities. From this perspective, people and things are not distinct entities but only exist in relation to each other. Technology and society are thus enacted together in a moving relational process achieved in daily “doings.” What implications does this have for understanding the dynamics of high-speed society? Does technological acceleration inexorably result in the acceleration of the pace of life? My thesis is that time practices are always sociomaterial, that the contours and rhythms of our lives are calibrated by and with machines. In other words, we cannot comprehend the social organization of time separately from technology. Neither can we treat technology as a set of neutral tools with clearly defined, functional properties that determine unequivocally our time regimes. Instead, it is our human engagement with objects that generate those temporal qualities we tend to grasp as inherent in machines. A social shaping perspective challenges the status and principal role accorded to technology in standard explanations of acceleration society. If technological change involves the interdependent activities of multiple heterogeneous agents, then it is necessarily a contingent process marked by contradictory consequences. The introduction of new machines always involves a dialectical process of promise, resistance, improvisation, and accommodation. Indeed, this process goes to the heart of who we are, as our very subjectivities and desires are articulated with technologies. Hig h-Speed Society 33 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=46 | PRINTED_PAGE=34 We experience the common feeling of being rushed as a personal condition that requires individual solutions. The natural reaction is to look to ever-faster technologies to save time. We are then mystified by the paradox of having more and better technologies and still feeling harried. It is easy to suppose that there is a temporal logic in digital technologies that is pushing us ever faster. Reifying technologies in this way makes us passive respondents to the instantaneous time of digitalization. Yet, as I will go on to demonstrate, the machines we have reflect our society and we are complicit in their design and implementation. Objects only take on their significance by way of our recurrent use of them. That is why there is no direct relationship between time saved and time gained. Our newfound need for seamless connectivity, for example, can only be understood within the extended network of sociomaterial relations through which ICTs emerge and are stabilized as an ongoing practice. Digital technologies not only speed up information and communication but also open up wholly new domains of exchange, service, and entertainment. The range of options seems to increase in inverse proportion to our capacity to realize them. For Rosa, the acceleration cycle is selfpropelling, as “the promise of acceleration never is fulfilled, for the very same techniques, methods, and inventions that allow for an accelerated realization of options simultaneously increase the number of options . . . at an exponential rate.”43 In my view, however, the way we choose to integrate such new activities and artifacts into our everyday lives depends upon the individual biographies and collective histories of both ourselves and machines. Time is both intimate and social. It is the result of our collective entanglement with the material world. As such, it is infused with power relations, such as those of gender, class, and race, which are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Our structural location and multiple identities provide us with diferential technical resources and skills that alleviate or aggravate, increase or reduce, social distinctions and distances between us. Theories of the high-speed society mistakenly assume that acceleration is occurring across all sectors of society and all dimensions of life. But if disparate groups of people relate to both time and technology in diverse ways, then we need to explore how and why this is so. How we appropriate, adapt, and actively shape digital technologies to create new timescapes is an empirical question that I probe in the course of this book. By doing this, I hope to resolve the time-pressure paradox. Chapter One 34 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=47 | PRINTED_PAGE=35 Perceptions of time do change with the emergence of new ideas and new inventions, but this always occurs in the context of preexisting ideas, habits, material apparatuses, and cultural practices. Understanding how time has been reshaped in the past may help us to become more alert to some of the profound changes in time consciousness that are still under way in our own times. As we will see in the following chapter, the idea of high-speed society is not as novel as we are led to believe. Hig h-Speed Society 35 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=48 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=49 | PRINTED_PAGE=37 Chapter Two Time and Motion Machines and the Making of Modernity By failing to understand our own time system we also fail to fully understand ourselves. H annah Gay, “Clock Synchrony, Time Distribution, and Electrical Timekeeping in Britain, 1880–1925” We tend to think of high-speed society as a recent phenomenon associated with the growth of digital technologies. However, claims about technology annihilating time and space are not new. Here I will consider the impact of the vast technological changes that took place over the last century or so, some of which are arguably as sweeping as those wrought by the Internet. My aim is not to dispute that contemporary temporalities have been radically altered with ICT, but rather to inform our understanding by adding a historical perspective. After all, arguments about the increasing pace of life only make sense against a putative slower past. We will see that our present-day embrace of speed has well-established antecedents. Indeed, much that is attributed to mass migration to the online world has roots sunk deeply in earlier phases of technical evolution. In the modern world, timekeeping is an essential and habitual activity, and we constantly monitor and check the time. Social theorists trace our obsession with measuring time to the institutionalization of clock time under capitalism. The classic text is Edward Thompson’s framing of clock time as disciplinary and as intimately related to the commodification of time as money.1 The tyranny of clocks is essential to the narrative of the 37 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50.md?start=50&limit=10)