--- 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: 70 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908?start=70&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=70&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=60&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=80&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=70 | PRINTED_PAGE=58 Summing up, the idea that the pace of life is accelerating is not new. The vast technological and social transformations that took place in the early twentieth century were also accompanied by the experience of time-space compression. These sociomaterial changes in the fabric of everyday life were to be consolidated in the modern city. Life lived at a high speed became identified with progress. Our valorization of a busy lifestyle, as well as our profound ambivalence toward it, can be traced back to this period. Technology played a key role then as now. The introduction of the automobile in particular symbolized machine speed in the twentieth century and, like the telegraph and telephone, it reduced barriers of distance and made the world more interconnected. However, its promise of pure speed proved somewhat hollow. In any event, constant movement as a shared aspiration of the good life hides many realities. Speed and mobility are far from a universal condition of existence. Nevertheless, the experience of immediacy as a phenomenon of the perception of time, the awareness of everything happening in the moment, has become widespread. Whereas a hundred years ago it was the preserve of the privileged, almost everyone has become implicated, at least potentially. Worldwide simultaneity is now the taken-for-granted condition of our lives and is what the Internet lays claim to.53 The social shaping of technology and time is constantly evolving, and we need to specify how these processes coalesce in order to gain a more balanced understanding of our current digital times. My intention here has been to show that an awareness of what our social, economic, and technological arrangements owe to the past makes the acceleration society thesis more intelligible. Connecting with these earlier debates brings the realization that the questions we face today are not in themselves new. This does not detract from their urgency. But in order to develop a critical perspective on the discourses of acceleration that surround us, we need to put them in a fuller historical perspective than that which is generally acknowledged. Throughout this chapter I have argued that the discourse of acceleration tends to skim over and conceal the extent to which the pace of modern life depends on one’s resources and the choices they make possible. Chapter two 58 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=71 | PRINTED_PAGE=59 In reality, both control over time and access to mobility reflect and reinforce power. Skeggs is rightly critical of the universalizing treatise of the mobile, cosmopolitan individual postulated by social theorists, such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, and she notes the ever-widening gap between those who theorize and those who engage in empirical research.54 It is only by examining the facts on the ground that we can understand how speed and time are being lived. So this is exactly what we will do in the remaining chapters of this book. Time and Motion 59 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=72 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=73 | PRINTED_PAGE=61 Chapter Three The Time-Pressure Paradox The time we have to spend each day is elastic: it is stretched by the passions we feel; it is shrunk by those we inspire; and all of it is filled by habit. M arcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time The ability to choose how you allocate your time lies at the core of a positive notion of freedom. Idleness and abundant leisure were once markers of the aristocracy. Today a busy, frenetic existence in which both work and leisure are crowded with multiple activities denotes high status. However, just as in the past, people’s control over their own time largely depends on their personal circumstances and financial resources. While this is equally true of our relationship to technology, this chapter will focus on changing patterns of work and family life that afect men’s and women’s experiences of time pressure. A major theme of this book is that the rhythm of our lives, the very meaning of work and leisure, is being reconfigured by digitalization. But at this juncture, it is helpful to consider other, often overlooked, dimensions to and causes of harriedness. I want to bring to bear on this question some interesting and credible data about how people actually use their time. Such close scrutiny will reveal the limitation of treating all time as the same, as if we only inhabit one time-space, that of acceleration. It may also help to resolve the riddle of how it is that we often feel we have less time for the things we want to do than we actually have. 61 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=74 | PRINTED_PAGE=62 How people spend their time matters for quality of life, irrespective of the income generated, as economists and even governments have begun to grasp. An indication of this was when former French president Nicolas Sarkozy set up the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress to explore the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress. It concluded that “the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.”1 Chaired by Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the commission highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of financial resources alone. This is part of a wider recognition in economics that people do not necessarily become happier when they become richer.2 In a similar but more philosophical vein, Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom sets out to change our thinking about what makes for quality of life. According to the authors, how much time we have matters just as much as how much money we have. The book’s argument is built around one powerful idea, that being able to choose how you spend your time is central to an individual’s sense of freedom: When we say that someone “has more time” than someone else, we do not mean that she has literally a twenty-fifth hour in her day. Rather, we mean to say that she has fewer constraints and more choices in how she can choose to spend her time. She has more “autonomous control” over her time. “Temporal autonomy” is a matter of having “discretionary” control over your time.3 Conversely, the less you are able to determine how your time is spent, the more your being is “unfree,” or deprived. The concept of discretionary time as a measure of freedom is very appealing. It echoes earlier ideas about the desire for temporal sovereignty, or control over one’s time, as a significant measure of life satisfaction and well-being.4 Such notions support normative arguments that treat the allocation and availability of time as important dimensions of social justice and of legitimate political concern. Instead of focusing on speed, per se, to further our exploration of the acceleration society, we should be looking at changing dynamics in the distribution of time. Chapter three 62 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=75 | PRINTED_PAGE=63 Free Time and Time Pressure It is no wonder, then, that huge interest has been generated by the idea that time is in short supply in modern societies. Complaints about the twenty-four-hour day being too short to fit everything in are common in the academic and popular presses. The inexorable increase in the pace of life is viewed as a perverse symptom of late modernity, leading to increasing pressure and stress. Understanding why time pressures have increased is a critical social question not least because of the consequences for physical and mental health outcomes. Sparking this debate was Juliet Schor’s book The Overworked American.5 It claimed that from the 1970s through the 1980s, Americans were working longer, and that this applied generally across the spectrum on income and family type. Her argument was echoed by many others, including Arlie Hochschild, whose book title The Time Bind entered general currency. The finding that American workers are logging more time at the workplace than their parents and grandparents touched a chord in the popular imagination. Whereas economic progress and increased prosperity were supposed to deliver more leisure time, instead time scarcity and the paucity of leisure time seem to be the result. Media exposure of notions like the “time squeeze” and “time famine” rapidly became part of the folk narrative about the pressure of time in modern life. A linked concern was whether, as a consequence, parents are spending fewer hours with their children. Most Americans agree or strongly agree to survey questions asking whether “parents today don’t spend enough time with their children.”6 The cultural image of the modern mother changed from the devoted homemaker to the frenzied, sleepless working mom. The conventional wisdom accompanying this change is that today’s mothers, who juggle the dual roles of worker and family caregiver, spend less time with their children and receive relatively little help from fathers. Social commentators worry about the quality of family life. The politics of time has thus become a major issue that has largely taken the form of a discussion about work-family balance and the quality of contemporary life.7 The Time-Pressure Paradox 63 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=76 | PRINTED_PAGE=64 How Much Time? But how can we measure the pace of life? As a subjective state, an acceleration of the speed of life afects people’s experience of time. It causes individuals to consider time to be scarce, to feel rushed and pressed for time. In other words, people feel that they can no longer find time to complete the tasks and activities most important to them. That time pressure is a common experience is evidenced by the fact that an increasing proportion of the population report feeling short of time. Since 1965, the US time-use researcher John Robinson has been asking adults, “Would you say you always feel rushed, even to do things you have to do, only sometimes feel rushed, or almost never feel rushed?” The proportion of Americans reporting that they always feel rushed rose from 25 percent in 1965 to 35 percent forty years later.8 Almost half now also say that they almost never have time on their hands. According to most evidence, people perceive leisure time as scarcer and more hectic. And this is also true cross-nationally, where there has been consistent historical growth of busy feelings through the last part of the twentieth century. Do these widespread perceptions of time pressure reflect the behavioral evidence of how people spend their time? Has leisure time actually decreased?9 Let us begin by looking at trends in the hours of paid work. Several commentators have shown that there is surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting Schor’s claim that the average length of the workweek has changed appreciably in recent decades. The issue is still a matter of controversy, at least at the margins, as diferent methodologies yield somewhat diferent conclusions, and there is significant variation between diferent countries. In the United States, average hours have held broadly constant for many years, as they have for example in Australia, Finland, and Sweden. In European countries, such as France and Germany, they declined as a result of deliberate government policies designed to reduce working hours.10 As a result, in France and Germany, employees work only about 80 percent as many hours a year as employees in the United States. Overall, however, in both the United States and Europe, there has been no straightforward increase in working hours over the last fifty years. Chapter three 64 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=77 | PRINTED_PAGE=65 Indeed, between 1965 and 2010, when over one-third of Americans felt rushed, their free time had actually increased.11 Using data from time diaries, the most direct and reliable methods of measuring free time, this finding has been replicated in multiple surveys across nineteen countries. The long-term growth in leisure for the working-age population is evident in nearly every country for which we have appropriate evidence. So how do we account for this mismatch with people’s experience of a rising deficit of time? A range of explanations has been profered to account for this paradox. They all contain partial truths, and indeed are not mutually exclusive, so it is worth considering the contrasting approaches here in some depth. Let us begin by considering those that point to economic change as the root cause of a time squeeze. One key to this paradox lies in distinguishing between the amounts of time available to diferent groups of people within a country. While the average workweek has barely changed over the last few decades, the overall trend is one of an increasing polarization of working time, between those who work very long hours and others who work few or no hours.12 Long hours in some groups are countered by growing numbers of employees working relatively short weeks. The increased dispersion means that the proportion of those with substantial increases in workloads has grown. Critically, long workweeks impinge disproportionately on dualcareer families, as both members of a couple with a very long (combined) workweek are more likely to be highly educated and in high-status jobs. The fifty-plus-hours week is thus predominantly a characteristic of the professional and managerial class, those “likely to shape the terms of public discussion and debate.”13 When theorists of the acceleration society refer to the hastening pace of life, they have in mind the abstract subject. They are not attuned to the detailed manner and circumstances in which time is organized into daily routines by gendered individuals and negotiated within households. Consequently, they fail to see that what happens to an individual’s average hours of work is not the same as what happens to work collectively within households. The vicissitudes of scheduling and the intricacy with which our lives are tied to others can only be fully understood by treating the household, rather than the individual, as the unit of analysis. One of the greatest social changes of the second part of the twentieth century has been the widespread participation of women in the workforce. While the contribution of men has significantly declined in the UK, the United States, and most industrial countries, the hours that women (especially mothers) contribute to the labor market have significantly increased.14 This has led to dual-earner families outnumbering malebreadwinner families. Today, roughly 60 percent of two-parent households with children under age eighteen have two working parents.15 The generalization of dual-earner couple is not limited to the United States but is a trait of every economically advanced country. Discussions about average working hours thus mask a dramatic redistribution of paid work between the sexes. The Time-Pressure Paradox 65 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=78 | PRINTED_PAGE=66 It is as if much of the paid work has been transferred from men to women. The resulting dual-earner households are supplying more working hours to the labor market than ever before. Time pressure is especially strong in families with dependants, where both husband and wife are in full-time employment. The widespread perception that life has become more rushed, therefore, has as much to do with real increases in the combined work commitments of family members as it is about changes in the working time of individuals. “What, for more than a decade, has been taken to be a controversy about overwork (i.e., trends in individual hours)  .  .  . is actually a manifestation of the dificulties of reconciling (paid) work and family responsibilities, following the historical demise of the male breadwinner model.”16 This transformation in family composition and gender relations is central to explaining the time deficit. In order to understand our experience of living in an acceleration society then, we need to consider how households are organizing their working and nonworking lives and be attuned to gender diferences in time pressure. Feminist scholars have long argued that the squeeze placed on women’s time is due to combining paid employment with their responsibility for the household’s operation.17 Indeed, time-use data suggest that time poverty is a particularly widespread experience among working mothers, who juggle work, family, and leisure. Unsurprisingly, single mothers feel the worst about the time they allocate to their children and their numbers have expanded greatly since the 1960s.18 The breakdown of marriages involving children can radically exacerbate time pressure if a lone parent is forced to serve as both breadwinner and homemaker. When children are reared outside a twoparent home, fathers are much less likely than mothers to shoulder the day-to-day responsibility of caregiving—that is, fathers are far likelier than mothers to drop the parental role altogether. Mothers cope by reducing their hours of paid work, especially when the children are young, in order to perform the household work and child care. As lone mothers are overrepresented among the poor, they are also unlikely to be able to buy paid domestic help. Lone parents, then, have much less discretionary time than dual-earner couples, with or without children. Chapter three 66 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=79 | PRINTED_PAGE=67 Time Spent with Children For people with children, spending time with them is regarded as one of the most desirable uses of discretionary time. We want both enough time and “quality time” with our children. Let us first consider the amount, as there is a widespread view that time pressure is squeezing out precious time with children. For example, Hochschild claims that family time is being crowded out by long hours of paid work. In fact, time-use data show that both mothers and fathers are spending more time with their children than ever before.19 Although there are variations between countries, overall, parents are averaging more time with their children, despite working longer hours. So how is this possible? This aspect of the time-pressure paradox is addressed by Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson, and Melissa Milkie in Changing Rhythms of American Family Life: “although parent-child time has remained steady or increased over the years, almost half of American parents continue to feel they spend too little time with their children.”20 The explanation, as we shall see, centers on the cultural ideals of intensive parenting combined with the nostalgia for a mythical past of more quality family time. But let me first report their extensive findings on feelings about time. Among employed mothers, almost half (47 percent) feel they spend too little time with their children, whereas only 18 percent of nonemployed mothers report this. Working mothers are also the most likely to feel most time pressured and that they are constantly multitasking. Married fathers are significantly less likely to feel “always rushed.”21 Where the authors found very large diferences was between mothers and fathers in feelings of “too little time” for oneself. Some 57 percent of married fathers and 75 percent of employed mothers expressed this. And whereas married mothers craved more time alone and with their husbands, married fathers wished they had more time with their children. The Time-Pressure Paradox 67 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bff2be14-96b0-46f1-8e61-474593cba908.md?start=80&limit=10)