--- 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: "bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908" source_sha256: "76a6e48672ea74cbf4a478bce933f7ea7fe347bf2e5daac191fc3c1a58a56b41" pdf_physical_page_count: 228 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 170 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908?start=170&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=170&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=160&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=180&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=170 | PRINTED_PAGE=158 More broadly, the Internet makes it possible to reshape “both the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ of cultural production. . . . It adds to the centralized, market-oriented production system a new framework of radically decentralized individual and cooperative nonmarket production.”48 Individuals and groups can actively participate in the process of cultural creation. This is not to suggest that the Internet guarantees an “interactive society,” as some would have it, nor to imply that broadcast media are incapable of interactivity.49 But there is little doubt that digital media open up new opportunities for the democratization of cultural production, providing important sites of self-expression in the twenty-first century. The fact that human-machine interactions characterize so much of our leisure time needs to be understood as adding a dimension to temporal experience. It certainly confounds the dynamics of when we are at work or play. The speed or instantaneity of contemporary consumer cultural is a further issue, which I will take up in my final chapter. Conclusion From the telegraph to the landline telephone, communication technologies have long shaped social interaction. However, since the advent of the mobile phone and the Internet, interpersonal relationships are routinely conducted via machines in times and places once regarded as the public domain. The customary split between the public and private is now overlaid with and complicated by another layer of electronic network connections. Sharing our most intimate lives in multiple sites beyond the physical space of the house challenges our very conception of the home. Activities that once defined the separate times devoted to family, work, and leisure are being combined in new constellations. It is my argument that digital devices open up fresh possibilities for what we can do with our time that goes beyond the fixed distinctions between work and family. Chapter six 158 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=171 | PRINTED_PAGE=159 Reformulating the issue in this way renders the common portrayal of multimodal machines colonizing our time and starving us of time to talk, as distorted. Indeed, constant connectivity has largely been welcomed, for enhancing relationships with family and friends as well as increasing contact with wider social networks. Such mediated communications do not replace embodied forms of mutual presence. Rather, these sound and screen modes of sociality coexist alongside face-to-face interaction, building new levels of connected engagement. What is striking, even among young people, is the extent to which social media like Facebook involve members who meet in the ofline world. This both afirms the distinctive quality of time spent in shared presence and suggests that the additional channels of multimedia enrich embodied encounters when they occur. Inevitably, the constant flow of communication requires negotiation over the allocation of time and attention in multiple temporal zones, causing communication congestion and conflicts. Making sense of these devices and developing norms for their habitual usage is, after all, an ongoing process involving a continuous feedback loop. Nowhere is this more critical than in relation to the ease and speed with which ICTs allow some kinds of paid work to leak into what has hitherto been regarded as our free time. Fears about $2 4 / 7$ electronic connectedness have to be understood in the context of the harsh economic climate and its attendant insecurity. Nevertheless, the same technologies that promote the extension of working time can also increase autonomy and control over when and where work tasks are accomplished. In chapter 3 I argued that one of the main causes of the time squeeze is temporal disorganization, the increased dificulty of scheduling and synchronizing social practices with others in a deroutinized society. Mobile phones in particular ofer flexibility in the timing and arrangement of activities, thereby facilitating temporal coordination. In this way, ICTs can be a potent resource for augmenting work-life integration and deepening intimacy. I will end by recalling a recent visit to my ninety-five-year-old mother in a nursing home in Melbourne. In the garden I witnessed a frail old woman, silent and slumped in a wheelchair next to her daughter, who sat with one arm around her mother while using a state-of-the-art smartphone with her other hand. My initial reaction to seeing her tapping away was rather negative, as clearly her attention was not on her aged mother but elsewhere. As I observed for longer, however, it was apparent that her mother had little consciousness of her surroundings but was probably comforted by her daughter’s arm around her. The timescape of nursing homes is extremely slow for both patients and visitors, and much of the care administered involves filling time and being present. It is not amenable to acceleration by technology. Given this context, perhaps the daughter was smart to be making the most of technology to traverse diferent time zones. Time to Talk 159 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=172 | PRINTED_PAGE=160 Chapter six 160 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=173 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=174 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=175 | PRINTED_PAGE=163 Chapter Seven Finding Time in a Digital Age We need to de-alienate time: reconnect clock time to its sources and recognise its created machine character. As such, concern with the multiple time dimensions of our lives is no mere theoretical, academic exercise; rather, it is a strategy for living. Bar bara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time Almost a hundred years ago, economist John Maynard Keynes imagined that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, we in the West would only have to work three hours a day to satisfy all our needs. He anticipated that the constant growth of productivity resulting from technical progress would eventually solve the economic problem of supplying humanity’s material needs at a fraction of the existing work efort. The abundance of time thus released, Keynes hoped, would lead to a moment when the spontaneous, joyful attitude to life then confined to artists and free spirits was difused throughout society as a whole.1 Yet the reverse seems to be true. Machines have not liberated us from work in the way Keynes predicted. The unparalleled velocity of computerization, telecommunications, and transport, which was expected to free up human time, has paradoxically been accompanied by a growing sense of time pressure. Rather than inhabiting a world in which time is abundant, everyday life seems more rushed. Although the details of time scarcity vary substantially across socioeconomic groups, as a culture we have a shared experience of temporal impoverishment. This is the conundrum that I have been exploring, that we live in an acceleration 163 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=176 | PRINTED_PAGE=164 society in which technological acceleration produces not more leisure and downtime, but in fact an ever-faster pace of life. Here, I am interested in how we can make more of time. It is not literally possible to make time in the sense of adding another hour to the day. Rather, the key to understanding the fraught and complex relationship between technology and time is the concept of temporal sovereignty, the ability to choose how you allocate your time. I have argued that having discretionary control or autonomy over your time lies at the core of some positive notions of freedom. It is a significant measure of life satisfaction and well-being. The proliferation of hypereficient ICTs that should help us take control of time, seem instead to control us. As in the classic Frankenstein myth, it is often lamented that we have lost control over the machines to which we gave birth. We wonder whether a faster life, replete with gizmos, is necessarily a better life when the trade-of between time and money seems to turn every hour into the rush hour. Certainly it is hard to disentangle the profound social changes that have occurred in our lifetime from the closely interconnected transformations in technological systems. However, it is only by examining the acceleration society thesis in some forensic detail that we can identify which aspects of life are accelerating, which are slowing down, and for whom. My social shaping framework has undermined the notion that the acceleration of work, parenting, and leisure is directly driven by technology. In tandem with technological change, I have shown that major shifts in the nature of work, the composition of families, ideas about parenting, and patterns of consumption have all contributed to our sense that the world is moving faster than hitherto. The experience of time pressure, or harriedness, then, is not simply a function of machine speed. It is therefore not amenable to resolution by means of a digital detox diet: “periodically shut down the electronic prostheses dictating our worlds and lives. . . . Shut of the cell phone; ignore e-mail; disable the answering machine and caller ID.”2 In any event, I do not subscribe to the nostalgia for a more natural, less technologically suffused past that some advocates for slow time champion. Rather, returning to Donna Haraway, I want to embrace the emancipatory potential of technoscience to create new meanings and new worlds while at the same time being its chief critic. The design of our devices and the material infrastructure we inhabit reflects, as much as shapes, the society in which we live. It embodies the dominant engineering approach to time saving and time ordering, a particular conception of eficiency. Likewise, the promises and cultural imaginaries of a technological future populated with robots and autonomous software agents project limited visions of a good society. Opening up the processes of technical innovation to encompass a broader range of societal realities and concerns is the only way to generate new devices for new times. Chapter seven 164 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=177 | PRINTED_PAGE=165 Contesting the contemporary time culture, then, cannot be thought outside of and separately from technological developments and vice versa. We make sense of and operate in the world together with the machines of our making. And while instrumental time is built into these material things, there is a complex dialectic whereby increased technical speed can simultaneously provoke new slowed timescapes. In this final chapter, I want to remind you, the reader, of the diverse ways in which technology reconfigures time, and gesture toward some possible directions for making more of time. There are two broad aspects to this time quest. Both involve shifting the emphasis away from how digital devices colonize our time to a more political orientation based on how time is allocated and how it is valued. The first issue is the familiar one of reducing working hours in favor of leisure time. This terrain has become harder to navigate as ICTs dissolve the boundaries between home and work. The second aspect is somewhat speculative, and involves examining whether we can alter the texture and tempo of life and what role technologies might play in this. I will consider these in turn. Reformulating Working Time A young colleague of mine mentioned that he was using a timemanagement app in order to use his time more eficiently. Apparently the smartphone application enables you to track exactly what you do with every minute of the day. As far as I know, he is not signed up to the quantified self movement, whose members use personal tracking technologies to monitor their every move.3 It hardly needs saying that this form of self-auditing is a highly individualized response to collective problems, but for him, the latest devices are a powerful resource that enables him to take control of time. Such apps are based on the well-worn time-management belief in the unlimited virtues of acceleration, that we should do everything faster. In other words, it reduces all time to a standard metric. Wasting time is bad and we should maximize our productivity. Finding Time in a D igi tal Age 165 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=178 | PRINTED_PAGE=166 How we use our time is fundamentally afected by the temporal parameters of work. Yet there is nothing natural or inevitable about the way we work. As we saw in chapter 2, the idea that labor is measured and regulated by linear clock time is a relatively recent feature of industrial societies. The quest for maximum speed and eficiency, the disciplined and frugal use of time, only became hegemonic in a market economy where time is money. Fewer workers clock in and out of their jobs these days, but the logic of industrial time still ticks away, shaping how we understand our lives. At one level, the most straightforward way to alleviate time pressure would be to reduce working hours. We only need to remind ourselves of the long, grinding working hours of previous eras to see how far we have come. Hours of work per person fell rapidly from 1870 to 1930, and Keynes assumed that this fall would continue. The establishment of the standard eight-hour day and the five-day week in the decades after the Second World War was a landmark achievement of twentieth-century social democracy. However, this trend to shorter working hours has stalled and, for some, it has gone into reverse. In How Much Is Enough?, Robert and Edward Skidelsky take up Keynes’s challenge and puzzle over why: “we in the rich world are four or five times better of on average that we were in 1930, but our average hours of work have fallen by only a fifth since then.”4 Their explanation for the continuation of long working hours is twofold: a capitalist economy gives employers the power to dictate hours and terms of work, and such an economy inflames our insatiable desire for consumption goods. At its root, however, our addiction to work and hyperconsumption is due to the disappearance from public discussion of any idea of the good life in which leisure would be valued for its own sake. The sociologist Juliet Schor similarly puts a new allocation of time at the centre of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.5 Like the authors above, she rails against the long-hours culture, limitless growth, and overconsumption. According to Schor, we need to revalue well-being, as millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives: “they work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in trafic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.” Chapter seven 166 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=179 | PRINTED_PAGE=167 Such arguments for reducing the incentive to work are based on the average number of hours people work. The authors are well aware of the growing disparity between the work rich/time poor and those with few or no hours of work. Indeed, they are motivated by a concern with a fairer distribution of working hours, ending the divide between those who are compelled to work longer than they want, and those who cannot get enough work.6 Nonetheless, their general point stands: the culture of today’s opulent societies is more harried, not more leisurely. Both books reflect a renewed interest in the politics of working time. I was particularly struck by this, as my own introduction to the issue was via earlier leftist arguments for a leisure society based on afluence.7 By contrast, current critiques of endless growth are inflected by the economic downturn and the need for environmental sustainability. And instead of the socialist glorification of work as the key to collegiality, solidarity and democracy, these authors question our willingness to dedicate ourselves to a life of relentless work. In doing so, they recall ideas of leisure advocated not only by Keynes and his contemporary, the philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay In Praise of Idleness (1932), but earlier by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue in The Right to be Lazy (1883).8 Unfortunately, in common with their predecessors, this vision of a progressive politics of time seems only able to invoke a peculiarly bourgeois and suburban ideal of home and family life. Missing from these attempts to reformulate working hours is any recognition of the gender dynamics embedded in how we think about time and work. A fair distribution of work would need to take into account not only the diferent patterns of employment currently found between men and women, but also the inequitable distribution of unpaid work within households. While the authors above correctly criticize the framing of time in terms of productivity growth for its own sake, they do not question the diferential worth accorded to the public use of time spent in paid work, compared to private domestic labor. Kathi Weeks reminds us that the Marxist productivist paradigm undervalued and rendered invisible the labor time of unwaged housework, caring, and emotional work. A feminist time movement “should attend to the whole of the working day by, for example, insisting that estimates of the socially necessary domestic labor time of individuals be included in both calculations of working time and proposals for its reduction.”9 Finding Time in a D igi tal Age 167 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=180&limit=10)