Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

It is precisely this combination of paid and unpaid work that makes time poverty so widespread among working women. As I have already elaborated, a major cause of time pressure is the growth of dual-earner households, which supply more working hours to the labor market than ever before. Especially in the context of the intensified expectations of parenting, mothers in full-time employment are particularly busy juggling the conflicting demands of work, family, and leisure.

This is not only a matter of the length or duration of time. Caring and attentiveness cannot be reduced to linear time as though they involve a sequence of tasks that in principle could be delegated to machines. What is colloquially referred to as “quality time,” or being temporally present with children, requires a cadence that is not subject to acceleration. Just as one cannot ask an orchestra to play twice as fast as the score requires, the character or intensity of giving and receiving time contributes to the experience. For example, we have seen that women’s leisure time is “less leisurely” than men’s, as women are more likely to combine leisure with looking after children. What presents itself in public as a discussion about a reduction in working hours conceals the ways in which timescapes are still diferentiated along sex-specific lines.

However, even this critique of the gendered nature of work does not go far enough. Attempts to revalue domestic labor still operate as if the distinction between the public and private domains can be clearly delineated. Technology barely figures in any of these discussions about the politics of time, except as an external factor that eats into leisure. But the pervasiveness of ICTs into every aspect of our lives poses the profound question of whether the dichotomy between work and personal time still holds in a digital age. This issue is at the core of the concerns that I expand on below.

Work-Life Articulation

We cannot have a serious discussion about working time today without interrogating the way that ICTs confound the distinction between “my time” and “work time.” Just as the standard five-day work week has been heavily eroded, so too have the time and place of work. Whereas the old industrial clock regulated our lives in discrete blocks of time and space, with the separate spheres of public and private life, the constant connectivity and global reach of mobile, digital technologies erase time zones and specific work places. The traditional time/space of the week and weekend and their characteristic social relations are now porous as people increasingly work, play, consume, and interact anywhere, anytime.

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Throughout the book I have argued that ICTs create a multiplicity of temporalities and modes of everyday living, as people craft new understandings of themselves and their relation to others. Time cannot be thought of as an abstraction, divorced from a socially situated materiality and embodiment. We make and measure time with and through instruments, tools, and techniques. But it does not follow that accelerating technologies inevitably hasten the pace of all social domains. The way artifacts evolve in relation to time practices crucially depends on how they become embedded in our institutions and the vicissitudes of ordinary life.

The very same machines that can make us feel harried also free up time, allowing for much greater autonomy, flexibility, and versatility in how we organize human afairs. Recall our discussion of the smartphone, the quintessential time-space compression mechanism. Not only does it both save and consume time, it also transforms linear, sequential timescapes, and all this simultaneously. I have argued that the experience of harriedness takes a variety of forms, depending on which aspect of temporality is being squeezed. Problems of temporal disorganization, the dificulty of coordinating shared social practices with others, loom large with the growth of dual-earner households. So it is not surprising that people have actively embraced and appropriated cell phones in order to microcoordinate and synchronize their multifarious activities. By softening schedules and making time more fluid, these devices ofer unique techniques for alleviating this aspect of time pressure.

Indeed, I have debunked the notion that we have all become cyberserfs, technologically tethered workers with no control over our own lives. In chapter 4 I considered the complex entanglement of contemporary work practices, working time, and the materiality of technical artifacts. I showed that neither the smartphone nor even the sheer volume of e-mail trafic drives the speed of work. People overloaded with work reach for their electronic gadgets in an attempt to relieve the pressure that the devices magnify but do not in themselves cause.

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This is not to deny the distinctive materiality of digital technologies and its powerful efect on organizational practices. The speed of e-mail, for example, promotes constant connectivity and instant response. This technical afordance has agency in that it contributes to the naturalization or taken-for-grantedness of this practice.

It is precisely because of this that there is a tendency among advocates of shorter working hours to presume that quality personal time entails escape from the encroachment of electronic paraphernalia. But in my view, digitalization provokes a radical rethinking of the standard terms of the work-life balance debate, which pitches work against life and public against private. ICTs make possible new combinations of previously distinct temporal zones, new forms of mediated intimacy, and new ways of doing family. Mediated relationships have not supplanted embodied mutual presence, but rather exist alongside them. The phenomenological experience of being in the presence of others at a distance can invigorate and intensify communication, rather than detract from it. Contrary to much of the hype, we may well have more time to talk.

Digital technologies, then, must be understood as more than simply tools for exchanging data and coordinating human interaction. They do not just make existing forms of social action more eficient. As material objects or sociotechnical assemblages, they reconfigure the temporal and spatial dynamics of how people think and act. People may welcome the permeability of these boundaries for the flexibility and control it ofers rather than primarily fearing work intrusion into leisure time.

The important questions for a politics of time, in our age, might have less to do with a sense of harriedness or the mixture of work and home life than with a hierarchal time culture in which status and pay measure the value of a person’s time. Being busy is valorized, while having too much time on one’s hands signifies failure. Temporal disparities are closely mapped to social inequalities, as exemplified by the demonization of the unemployed. The democratization of time would lead to a very diferent social order, one in which time priorities and restraints are equitably shouldered. I would not be the first to suggest that “the concept that everyone’s time is equally valuable is truly revolutionary.”10

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Recognizing this seems to me to be a first step toward a fairer distribution of work.

Hectic Leisure in a Self-Service Economy

Up to this point, I have focused on the length of working hours. A related but even knottier issue is the tempo of activities themselves. I have already alluded to the intensification of work and the demands of multitasking required of today’s networked workers. But what about the acceleration of other aspects of our lives, such as the instantaneity of consumption and the intensity of leisure? If we had more time, how would we make the most of it?

Leisure time is sufused with ICTs, and I have talked about the trend toward multimodal connectivity and multiscreen viewing. The vast expansion of the market for consumer electronics, such as computers, cell phones, televisions, tablets, and MP3 players, is paired with an unprecedented speed of built-in obsolescence and product abandonment. We expect instant delivery of products of all kinds, and then discard them with equal speed, typically without a thought about the conditions of their production or the waste they leave behind. Indeed, one reason that time seems scarce is because it is impossible to consume the vast array of products and services on ofer. Whether or not we view human desires as inherently insatiable, contemporary consumer culture is certainly characterized by excess. Symptomatic of this is the endless upgrading of smartphones and a World Wide Web that can be surfed indefinitely.

One rarely noted way in which technologies consume time is that their rapid cycle of renewal requires an ongoing investment in skill acquisition. Familiarizing oneself with and learning how to operate digital devices requires substantial inputs of unpaid user time. Internet use, for example, requires an infrastructure and its maintenance. As the apocryphal story goes, if General Motors automobiles seized up as often as Bill Gates’s software, we would certainly not rate them. Our lower expectations of software have been well managed by marketing, so that we often blame ourselves for its deficiency. Even shopping online, which promises saving time, can be a tiring activity squeezed into time once reserved for rest and leisure. Automated telephone answering systems are the subject of many jokes that express our frustration at being at the mercy of a technology that is saving someone else’s time and money at our expense. Consumption in an instant society can, at times, involve a temporality of remarkable slowness.

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The ascribed nexus between high-tech and eficiency is often belied even in conventional, in-the-flesh shopping. Not long ago I visited the Apple store in central London to repair my iPod. As it is over five years old, I was firmly informed that no spare parts existed for such aged machines, that it was redundant and I would have to buy a new one. OK, I said, bring me the new model in any color and I will buy it—where is the cashier? I look around but there was nowhere in the shop to purchase a product. Apple policy is a “personalized” service, so you have to wait for someone to serve you individually. In fact, it took ages. When I inquired as to why there were no such counters, I was told that the company had dispensed with them in order to avoid the appearance of long lines! In their attempt to abolish the cardinal sin of waiting, the company had inadvertently designed a slow service as the condition for purchasing the latest, fastest product. Slowness as a common condition of contemporary urban life is rarely diagnosed.

The rise of the self-service economy, whereby more and more of the work of consumption is transferred onto consumers, was first theorized in the 1970s.11 ATMs, self-service gas stations, and vending machines were spreading and promoted as being time saving for consumers. More recently, self-service tills at supermarkets and preprepared meals are on the increase. No one could have anticipated the huge growth of online shopping, let alone 3D automated manufacturing or self-driving cars. This trend is being taken to new heights by the world of Big Data that promises a future of frictionless, continuous shopping. As we are tracked and fed information on our wants and needs from online tools, services and apps, we are assured that our consumption will only get more streamlined and eficient. We will no longer need to search for anything since we are perpetually monitored, with the relevant information sent to us on the basis of perceived need.

Amazon, Google, and Wal-Mart are all moving toward same-day shipping, as people become accustomed to instant gratification, where you just type something on your phone and the next thing you know, you have what you need.12 This will soon include Sunday deliveries, boasts

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Amazon’s Jef Bezos, with the aid of drones. Dinner kits are also taking of. E-commerce businesses, such as Plated, will buy, measure, cut, chill, box, and ship every ingredient for a meal to your door. All the customer has to do is to order online. As one of their spokesmen put it: “Food is one of the last pieces of daily life that is still analog. We want to bring it into the digital age.”

Ironically, some of these futuristic developments hark back to the past. During the nineteenth century, household deliveries and mailorder catalogs were common. As I outlined in chapter 5, the industrial revolution in the home and the advent of the car, paradoxically, increased shopping time. For all the e-commerce today, shopping and domestic travel times show a rising trend. Even sophisticated domestic appliances, such as the washing machine, have been more successful in time shifting and raising standards than in reducing housework. Rather than compressing labor time, such machines radically alter expectations of comfort, cleanliness, and convenience. Routine household work is consequently still time-consuming, and that is why the cash-rich, timepoor employ paid domestic workers and fast food outlets flourish on busy main streets.

In the end, the relationship between technological change and temporality is always dialectical: the simultaneous production of fast time spaces with those of remarkable slowness. Speed and slow down have always coexisted in modernity, although the meanings and values attached to them have shifted.

Notwithstanding this recursive interplay, the predominant emphasis in social and cultural theory is on the acceleration of everything. As outlined in chapter 1, this new temporality is variously described as one of immediacy, instantaneity, simultaneity, timelessness, chronoscopic, or network time. Ben Agger has gone so far as to label it iTime, a manic, compulsive, deeply compressed time “weighing heavily on the person who always has too much to do, not enough time to do it.”13

For John Tomlinson, too, this telemediated culture is a novel historical phenomenon, a unique way of being.14 “Immediacy”—the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies—changes the nature of consumer culture entirely. It is characterized by instantaneity, proximity, and expectations of immediacy that are linked to “assumptions of instant delivery and efortlessly achievable abundance.” Accordingly, “delivery” itself rather than satisfaction becomes the telos of consumption; “something new is always on the way and so it is not necessary—nor does it do—to invest too much into the thing of the moment.” While Tomlinson highlights the usual critiques of accelerating consumption, such as debt, waste, and maintenance of the capitalist status quo, his real concern is that the culture of immediacy is incapable of generating “new imaginations of the good life.”

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Slow Living in Modern Times

It cannot go unremarked that, alongside the reverence accorded to a hyperkinetic, digitally fueled pace, the idea of a slower life is gaining appeal. Recent decades have spawned several slow-living initiatives, such as the Slow Food movement, Slow Cities (CittaSlow), the Society for the Deceleration of Time, the Simple Living Network, and various forms of meditation and mindfulness. Indeed, there has been considerable growth of the “mind business” within large corporations.15 There is even a manifesto for Slow Science, calling for scientists to proceed with less haste, taking time to think, to read, and to fail.16 Common practices associated with slow living include cooking and sharing a meal instead of buying fast food, growing fruit and vegetables locally, and cycling or walking instead of driving. These initiatives deliberately posit slowness or deceleration as a subversion of the cultural orthodoxy of speed.

Clearly, the resignification of slowness as a life-enhancing quality has to be understood as a response to the acceleration society. As we saw in chapter 2, the experience of slowness emerged as a positive value in response to the velocity of newly emerging machines from the midnineteenth century. The shock induced by the speed of railway travel, for instance, provoked a renewed perspective on earlier modes of travel, such that walking could be redefined as ofering leisure and heightened sensory pleasure. Slowness became recognized as a desirable or virtuous quality when it became a choice, rather than the only option, and when speed could be associated with negative characteristics such as alienation, stress, or desensitization. It is in this context that slowness could become the basis of formulating a critique of modernity: “speed created slowness, as it were.”17

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The Slow Food movement is worth considering briefly for the manner in which it treats time. Founded by the Italian food writer Carlo Petrini in response to the prospect of a McDonald’s restaurant opening in the heart of Rome, the movement focuses on the contrast between “slow” and “fast” food in an attempt to demarcate a time, as much as a practice, distinct from the pace and pressures of work. It rejects globalized technologies, as well as the homogeneity and corporate greed associated with fast food production, and instead emphasizes the values associated with enjoyment, taste, authenticity, connectedness, tranquility, and community. Patterns of conviviality centered on eating slowly are celebrated as symbolic of making time for the important things in life. The assumption is that embedded within the time-honored practices of food preparation, rest, and hospitality lies a knowledge of mindful living.

The diversity of the movement makes it dificult to pin down the politics of slowness. In general, the Leftist origins of many participants mitigate conservative nostalgia for a lost organic community. Even so, a binary conception of slow as pleasure and speed as enslavement permeates their philosophy, as expressed in their manifesto: “Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life.”18 Notably, however, in place of the fast life, slow food ofers not only the pleasure of the table—taste, flavors, regionalism, locatedness— but also international exchange. Slowness is conceived of both as an individual, private subjectivity of “self-artistry,” and as a social and political strategy for the betterment of society.

The shortcomings of the Slow Food movement are well rehearsed.19 To mention a few: there is a tension between slowness as a realm of the elite (mostly Western) individual and the need to share the pleasures of slowness equitably; the need for an international movement that is itself opposed to globalization; a reliance on old discourses of pastoral versus high-density city life; and whether slow conviviality rests on a traditional domestic division of labor. More broadly, a social movement rooted in a politics of consumption cannot fully engage with the inequalities in time sovereignty that result from money, status, and power.

Shortcomings aside, such movements do open up a political space for questioning our obsession with speed as a virtue in and of itself. In defiance of the dominant time regime, a collective culture of deceleration would foster an alternative consumption of time—not just in the sense of more time, but more meaningful, deliberate and pleasurable time. As Wendy Parkins and Geofrey Craig conclude, “The conscious cultivation of slowness may be a salutary reminder of how our rhythms and routines have the potential to either challenge or perpetuate the disafection of everyday life.”20 By placing a fluid and dynamic understanding of time at the core of its philosophy, the Slow Food movement provides an interesting case study for examining how a more time-enriched lifestyle might be narrated.

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As we move toward the final thoughts of this book, let me remind you why I would be reluctant to embrace slow living. Firstly, we cannot in fact choose between fast and slow, technology and nature. These dualisms exist and only acquire meaning in relation to each other. A fast/ slow dichotomy cannot hope to capture the simultaneous coexistence of multiple temporalities that characterizes the experience of modernity. Once we recognize this, we can begin to reimagine hybrid sociomaterial assemblages or networks for enacting diferent times in an intensely technological world.

It follows, second, that a wholesale dismissal of globalization and digitalization as necessarily spurring on acceleration is misconceived. Even eating at a McDonald’s restaurant can, in some contexts, be recuperated as a positive locale for slow eating, conviviality, and leisure. High-tech devices and systems are also great sources of pleasure and creativity. The positive possibilities for new kinds of time they generate should not be denied. Indeed, making more of time, preserving slow zones, actually requires more technological innovation.

New Technologies for Emergent Times

To argue, as I have in this book, that there is no temporal logic inherent in digital technologies is not to claim that technology is neutral or that the technical properties of objects do not matter. A sociotechnical lens on the sociology of time lays bare the highly specific materialities that make up the global network society. It demonstrates that the design and capabilities of the apparatus that become available to us, the architecture of infrastructures, have huge consequences. This has never been more so than now when every aspect of our lives is touched by information and communication technologies.

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That some technologies are favored and developed while others languish neglected operationalizes the world in particular ways, obliging us to live accordingly. It closes of some options while opening up others. Understanding this dynamic is at the core of my thesis. To quote from Susan Douglas’s social history of the radio: “Machines, of course, do not make history by themselves. But some kinds of machines help make different kinds of histories and diferent kinds of people than others.”21 We build our present and dream our future with and through tools and techniques and these visions are symbiotically reflected in them. So what forces are shaping technology today and what visions of the future are we being ofered by the engineers of Silicon Valley?

What were once the stuf of science fiction are presented in daily media as if their realization is just around the corner. This near future is one peopled by robots and posthuman subjects with brains, bodies, and clothing enhanced by technoscience. According to the geeks of Silicon Valley, we are on evolutionary path to the next stage of a morphed cyborgian existence. Domestic robots feature prominently in these futuristic discourses. Electronic gadgets will clean floors, wash windows, scrub gutters, and even prepare healthy meals. Herb (the home exploring robot butler) developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, for example, with two arms and a head-like box housing cameras and sensors, even speaks like a butler should, declaring in a Jeeves-like English accent, “I was designed to help people with household duties. One day I will help humans.”22 (This figure is especially appealing given the concurrent return of the real butler or manservant for the super-rich.)

In The New Digital Age, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, you will be roused by the aroma of freshly brewed cofee, with room temperature, humidity, music, and lighting all operating automatically, a gentle back massage administered by your high-tech bed that also guarantees a good night’s sleep by measuring your REM cycle.23 Your seamlessly interchangeable devices, some wearable, are all lightweight and incredibly fast and powerful. To paraphrase: the resulting gains in eficiency and productivity will be profound. By relying on these integrated systems, we’ll be able to use our time more efectively each day— whether that means having a “deep think,” spending more time preparing for an important presentation or guaranteeing that a parent can attend his or her child’s football match without distraction. And, of course, the self-driving car will deliver you to work while you work!

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