Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

My interest in time-use studies was initially stimulated by Michael Bittman, and, together with Paul Jones, we undertook a major research project, “The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Work/Life Balance” at the instigation of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. My home institution then, the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, allowed me to devote myself to this project. I am grateful to them all. Emily Rose worked as a brilliant researcher on that project. Some of this research is reported here in chapters 4 and 6. I thank Paul for enriching conversations about the interface between media research and science and technology studies. I would like to credit Philip Sayer for the photographs that appear in the book.

Perhaps inevitably, I have to report that the writing of this book was not accelerated by digitalization. Some old and newer friends who have patiently encouraged me in this project need mentioning: Lynn Jamieson, Donald MacKenzie, Lucy Suchman, Ingrid Erikson, Martha Poon, and Tony Giddens. Jenny Earle’s wonderful style is, I hope, evident in some of the writing, and finally, I am delighted to acknowledge my son, Samuel Earle, who never seems pressed for time.

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Tools for Time

Time, it seems, is at a premium. There is a widespread perception that life these days is faster than it used to be. We hear constant laments that we live too fast, that time is scarce, that the pace of life is spiraling out of our control. Phrases such as “high-speed society,” “acceleration society,” “time famine,” and “runaway world” portray more and more aspects of our lives as speeding up.

These concerns are reflected in debates about work-life balance as people try to cope with the pressures of contemporary society, finding enough time for work, time for families, and time for leisure—even time for sleep. Indeed, the desire to slow down the pace of life increasingly features in studies of happiness and well-being. A lack of control over one’s time and unequal access to leisure are being identified as important dimensions of social justice. As leading European social scientist Helga Nowotny summed it up in her classic book Time, the challenge for modern citizens, who are liable to feel increasingly harried, is to “find time for themselves.”1

But hang on a moment. Weren’t modern machines supposed to save, and thereby free up, more time? Not so long ago, commentaries about postindustrial society predicted a “leisure revolution” driven by automation in industry and the home. Economic progress and increased prosperity would free people from having to focus on providing for subsistence needs, delivering more leisure time. Sociologists talked of the “end of work” and wondered with some apprehension how the vacant hours would be occupied.

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Instead, the iconic image that abounds is that of the frenetic, technologically tethered, iPhone- or iPad-addicted citizen. Academic discussions of the impact of digital devices, such as the Internet and the smartphone, typically confirm the popular view that technologies are speeding up life and making us busier. Rapidly evolving information and communication technologies are seen as marking a whole new epoch in the human condition. It is as if the exponential growth in computing power predicted by Moore’s law applies to every aspect of modern society.2

As technologies proliferate, we find that we do not have more time to ourselves; in fact, many of us have less. How, exactly, has technology hastened the pace of everyday life? How has it made us busier rather than making us more free? Why do we turn to digital devices to alleviate time pressure and yet blame them for driving it? This is the central paradox that I want to examine in this book.

Modern patterns of time can scarcely be conceived of without the use of technology. We rarely have a chance to live outside technologies—they are inextricably woven into the fabric of our lives, from birth to death, at home, in school, in paid work, and in leisure. From simple tools to large technological systems, our lives are intertwined with technology. We delegate tasks to devices and use them to mediate ever more complex social networks. Our actions and society itself are built on and with technical artifacts.

While sociologists emphasize that time is a social entity, formed through collective rhythms of human engagement with the world, technology is rarely accorded the same treatment.3 Technology is too often seen as outside social relations. But if time cannot be separated from the collective rhythms, assumptions, and hopes of human life, then neither can the technologies that increasingly mark and shape time for us. This may not have been an important distinction in previous eras—but in the digital age, it really matters. For example, the tyranny of the clock, with its linear measurement of the hours of the day, is basic to narratives of the accelerating world. It is as if technical devices incorporate functional time demands that determine unequivocally our uses of time.

If we have, up to now, been too quick to accept the temporal logic built into our new technologies, then we need to remember that the social determination of time is built in to those technologies, just like the size of the screen is, or the power of the processor. Consider, for example, the fiber-optic cable between Chicago and New York. While previous cables between the two cities had been laid along railway lines, the new cable takes the shortest route possible, even drilling through the Allegheny Mountains. It shaves 1.3 milliseconds of the transmission time of the earlier cables. “Speed” is thus built directly into the design: the cable was laid where it was to make transmission faster. But what compels its use by financial trading firms isn’t anything directly technical; rather, it is the structure of competition among such firms.4 Temporal demands are not inherent to technology. They are built into our devices by all-toohuman schemes and desires.

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This is the thesis at the heart of the book. It enables us to leave behind the old dichotomies about technologies being either inherently liberating or enslaving. By now we should have learnt to be skeptical about both extreme positions: the messianic promise of a technologically-wrought new epoch on the one hand and a blanket rejection of dominance by machines on the other. The digital world is neither exactly the same nor completely diferent from the industrial world. In order to understand our current obsession with speed, we would be better of exploring both the things that have stayed the same, and the things that are particular to our time.

To this end, a historical sense of “new” technologies is required. Machines in the industrial age recast people’s experience of time, just as they continue to do now. Yet considerations of technology’s impact on time fixate on the latest gadgets, while older dependable artifacts are so familiar as to be left forgotten in the shadows. I will call into question this implicit division between cutting-edge technologies and existing technologies, the spectacular and the ordinary. With this in mind, we will be less inclined to identify technology itself as the source of positive or negative change.

It is our own concrete social practices that generate those qualities of technologies we usually consider as intrinsic and permanent. In other words, technologies only come to life and have meaning as people adopt and use them. At the same time, technologies play a central role in the constitution of time regimes, as our very experience of human action and the material world is mediated by technology. It is simply impossible to disentangle our notion of time from our embodied habitual involvement with the sociomaterial world. We make the world together with technology and so it is with time.

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My interest throughout, then, is in exploring the mutual shaping or coevolution of new technologies and temporal rhythms. Broadly speaking, the book takes a social shaping approach to technology, regarding technological change as open-ended and unpredictable, but shaped by a range of social, economic, and political forces.5 Much work in this vein has investigated the design or materiality of specific technologies, but this book has a rather diferent focus. While recognizing that devices are designed with particular capacities or afordances, I argue that there is nothing inevitable about the way they evolve and are used. Their relation to time depends on how artifacts enter and become embedded in our institutions and the quotidian patterns of daily life—this goes for organizations, user cultures, in production and consumption, family, leisure, and work.

Feeling Harried

Why is there such intense cultural concern with the relationship between digital technologies and the speed of life? That people’s subjective sense of time pressure has become urgent is illustrated by the fact that a rising proportion of the population report feeling short of time. Numerous surveys indicate that Americans, as one example, feel more rushed, harried, anxious, and pressed for time than ever before.6 Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses associated with time strain are also growing. This evidence about the subjective experience of time suggests a widespread perception of everyday life as “time squeezed” and “harried.” Leisure time too seems intensified and scarcer.

The objective facts of the matter are, however, far from clear. Indeed, attempts to measure if and how time use has changed over the last few decades have uncovered an intriguing conundrum. The consensus among time-use researchers is that leisure time has, if anything, increased. While Americans complain ever more stridently that they are overworked, estimated average weekly employment hours changed minimally between the 1970s and the 2010s. And if you aggregate the total amount of work time (paid and unpaid), the figure of five hundred minutes a day, or just over eight hours, has remained more or less stable over the last fifty years.7 Add to this the fact that we are on average living longer, so have more years at our disposal, and this mismatch between objective and subjective time becomes even more intriguing.

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This lack of congruence between the amount of free, discretionary time available to us and our contemporary feelings of harriedness has become known as the time-pressure paradox. In this book I will expose some of the underlying myths and misconceptions about our high-speed society.

An important starting point is to recognize that there is no single story about what is happening to the tempo of people’s lives. Talking in terms of statistical averages masks major shifts in diferent directions for diverse groups whose time use is being aggregated. For example, as income inequality increases and working hours polarize, discretionary time also becomes more unevenly distributed (although not necessarily in the way one would expect, as we shall see). How much time one has and how it is apportioned can only be understood as a function of underlying social and economic patterns. And, rather than time pressure being an individual phenomenon, I will show that it is related to transformations in household composition and gender relations over the last few decades.

A more fundamental limitation of discussions to date is the narrow concentration on the quantity of time available. This is the only aspect of time that time-use studies measure. In order to explain the gulf between so-called objective and subjective time, however, we need a more nuanced understanding of the quality or character of time. Time poverty cannot simply be understood in terms of the amount of (clock) time available. How people experience and practice time is the result of the meanings and values that they ascribe to various kinds of activities. The demand for “quality time” with children is a popular expression of this. Not all activities are performed at the same pace, nor would we want them to be. The result is conflicting temporal regimes that require coordination, which, in turn, leads to time pressure. Leisure time itself may be subject to intensification because of the increasing habit of multitasking with digital devices.

Harriedness is, thus, a multidimensional phenomenon. There are both diferent senses of feeling pressed for time and a range of mechanisms that trigger these feelings. I will explore the role that these multiple dynamics play in accounts of the time-pressure paradox.

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Mapping the Discussion

The book explores these ideas thematically and is organized in the following way. The first chapter begins by outlining the extent to which social theorists link modern society to processes of acceleration. Here we see that time-space compression is a recurring theme, with the main impetus being information and communication technologies. For some, digitalization is even generating new kinds of timeless time, or instantaneous time, eclipsing the linear logic of clock time.8 The phenomenal speed of financial trading is emblematic of this.

But what does acceleration mean and is it a constitutive trait of our era? I argue that a lack of clarity about the concept itself serves to sustain the belief that faster machines catapult us into a faster life. Accordingly, I distinguish between diferent kinds of acceleration, opening up the connections between them to scrutiny. My particular interest is in how technology afects the pace of everyday life, and I question the determinist role ascribed to it in theories of the high-speed, network society. In contrast to the sweeping, celebratory claims made by cyber-gurus, I suggest that the social studies of technology ofer a richer analysis of the reciprocal relationship between time and machines.

Talk about life accelerating only makes sense against an implied backdrop of a slower past. Chapter 2 thus provides a necessary historical perspective. Most sociologists explain our modern sense of time as dating from the commodification of time in industrial capitalism. With the exploitation of labor, saving time becomes equivalent to making profit, as expressed in Benjamin Franklin’s famous equation of time and money. These arguments focus on the economy, stressing the way that clock time becomes time, per se, and is internalized as time discipline.

However, it is in the city where speed becomes a general condition of modern life: the antithesis of the slow pace of country life. Beginning around the turn of the nineteenth century, speed itself becomes closely identified with narratives of progress. This period saw dramatic technological inventions, such as the steam engine, railways, the telegraph and the telephone, that transformed people’s consciousness of time, space, and their environment.

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Georg Simmel’s prescient analysis of the ambivalent consequences of the increased pace of metropolitan life is a rich source for this chapter. The symbolic significance and allure of speed that characterize our present condition is shown to have a long lineage. Indeed, cultural values and consumption, as well as production, afect perceptions of time scarcity, as we shall see.

To this point, I have been treating the phenomenon of acceleration as a characteristic of society as a whole. However, as I have already indicated, not everyone has a uniform experience of time. In chapter 3, I dig deeper into the empirical data to reveal how time use difers for diverse social groups (as do relationships with technology, which I consider in later chapters). It is apparent, for example, that time poverty is far greater for single parents than it is for couples without children, and that women tend to have less temporal autonomy than men. Drawing on time-use surveys, the most reliable source we have on the allocation of time, I demonstrate how changes in work patterns, household arrangements, and parenting all afect time stress. A major factor that emerges is the dificulty of arranging shared time with family and friends in a desynchronized society. Finally, picking up a thread from the previous chapter, there is the prestige attached to a busy lifestyle that swells the refrain of relentless haste in some quarters.

I then turn directly to the role that digital technology plays in shaping our experience of time. What kinds of temporal rhythms do people create with new technologies? And what diference does it make that our everyday social situations and communications are increasingly characterized by ubiquitous, multiple modes of connectedness? The rest of the book focuses on this theme, with particular emphasis on “new media,” information, and communication technologies.

Working time is the subject of chapter 4. I examine not just the length of working hours but the pace, intensity, or what one might think of as the temporal density of work. I evaluate evidence for the intensification of work and the ongoing impact of information technology in diferent occupations and industries. The volume of e-mail and the constant connectivity aforded by mobile phones are commonly seen as key causes of stress at work. Ofice life has become identified with information overload, endless interruptions, multitasking, and raised expectations of speedy response time. I question this stereotype of the technologically tethered worker with no control over his time. Instead, the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for both work-related and personal matters is shown to have positive, as well as negative, implications for men and women workers. The contemporary ofice has by my account morphed into a ubiquitous technoscape, and this has reconfigured the very nature of working time.

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