Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

Chapter 5 looks at how households allocate time to unpaid domestic work. Overall, time-use surveys show significant gender diferences in the amount of time spent and the type of activities performed. While fathers are doing more and women are doing less than they were, women’s labor still accounts for over two-thirds of the total time devoted to unpaid work. Is technology the solution? Will the digital home of the future finally free us from time-consuming drudgery?

This chapter will consider why “time saving” domestic technologies, such as washing machines and microwave ovens, have been surprisingly unsuccessful in lessening the domestic load. It turns out that the efect of technology has been peripheral because of changed expectations about child care, the emergence of new standards and tasks, and the durable connection of domestic activities with masculine and feminine identities. Finally, I examine the cultural imaginaries around smart houses and “caring” robots, showing how they reflect the ethos of their designers.

As well as being the site of housework, the domestic sphere is associated with personal relationships and intimacy. How communication technologies afect these dynamics is the theme of chapter 6. I begin by describing the saturation of everyday life by media technologies, for example, how people are meshing multiple devices. I then present some of my own research on the mobile phone’s role in shifting the boundaries between work and home. The main use of the mobile phone turns out to be social, with much value placed on the enhanced ability to microcoordinate the timing of complex family activities. In this way, I argue, mobile phones have become a new tool for intimacy.

More broadly, I consider the efect of the machine-mediated nature of social relationships. The significance of the move from mass communication, such as television and radio, to individual, privatized communication on personal digital devices is contentious. Opinions tend to be polarized between those who stress the new freedoms and increased individual autonomy enabled by these technologies and those who foresee a world of constant connectivity but less meaningful communication. A false dichotomy has developed between direct and mediated communication, positing them as alternatives. I argue, instead, that we need to think about the ways in which communication and afect are embedded in material objects.

Introduction

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The final chapter explores some possible directions for making more of time, like reducing working hours. Such strategies, however, require revision as portable technologies rearticulate what were once distinct boundaries between “my time” and “work time”. We see again how the very same devices that can make us feel hurried also free up time. Indeed, I suggest that digitalization provokes a radical rethinking of the standard debates about work-life balance and their oppositional character. I then turn to examine the claim that ICTs have intensified consumption and leisure, what is often described as a culture of instantaneity or immediacy. Once more I show how the story is complicated, with accelerating time frames being ofset by the emergence of unforeseen, slow ones. The relationship between technological change and temporality is dialectical, not teleological.

The cult of speed has prompted slow living movements that attempt to alter the tempo of everyday life. The exemplar is slow food, and I discuss both its appeal and shortcomings. In particular, I encourage a critical distance from the notion that rejecting high-tech systems points the way forward. Rather, I argue that ICTs make possible new and multiple temporalities. But will we get the type of technology that is best suited to this endeavor? I consider the extent to which innovation is conflated with eficiency narrowly conceived, particularly by the engineers of Silicon Valley. This shapes how social problems are formulated, the kinds of machinery that are developed, and even our sense of self. Perhaps most perniciously, our visions of the future are profoundly pervaded by their preoccupation with ever more acceleration.

Conclusion

Throughout the book, I will explore many of the complexities and nuances that structure and texture the diferent ways that people are caught within the webs of time, technology and daily life. Clearly not everyone is caught up in the accelerating dynamism of modernity in the same way. Some of these nuances will be particularly important in what follows, and I pay close attention to the role of gender, to diferent kinds of labor, and to varying patterns of technology use by age.

Tools for Time

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Inevitably, my focus on the interconnections between speed, technology, and the relationship between work life and leisure has led me to focus on predominantly Western, “overdeveloped,” industrial economies. It has also led me to focus on people who are in work within those economies. Indeed, throughout the book, where possible, I draw on my own empirical research that has largely been based within the work spaces of various Anglo American economies. But if unemployed people and people living in the global south are somewhat missing from this account, still much of what I describe is part of global and more general social trends towards urbanization and technologization.

What I very much want to do here—and what this narrowed focus has allowed me to do—is to bring technology back into the conversation about speed and time. There are numerous theories about fast, mobile capitalism that do focus on technology, but these are rarely informed by how time is actually practiced. It is my intention in this book to bridge this gulf, marrying abstract social theories about modernity and acceleration with a wide range of empirical studies. This involves developing a unique dialogue between several social science literatures that are usually kept distinct.

Only such a wide-ranging discussion will enable us to assess the acceleration thesis. While economic, technological, social structural, and cultural changes in modern societies have altered the experience of time in unprecedented ways, the picture is not uniformly one of speeding up. If we are short of time for work, parenting, friendship, leisure, and civic participation, this is not simply a function of machines, old or new. Technologies in themselves do not lead to either velocity or slowdown.

In the digital age, however, our communication patterns and interpersonal sociability are much more mediated by and distributed across a whole range of multimodal devices. In every sphere, we inhabit a technologically sufused environment in which constant connectivity is the norm. Such interconnected sociomaterial networks are transforming the pace and scope of human interaction. This is giving new meanings to temporality and reconfiguring our time practices. The social shaping perspective elaborated here ofers a framework for understanding the myriad ways in which the rhythms of our lives are intertwined with technologies.

Introduction

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Such an analysis has implications for our politics. It means that there is no technical solution for our current condition. We cannot simply go on a digital diet, reject the smartphones and return to nature, as posited in some deceleration arguments. Nor should we look for promises of emancipation in technological futures populated with social robots. These cultural imaginaries themselves reflect the dominant engineering approach to time saving and time ordering. Instead, the process of technical innovation and design needs to be opened up to reflect a broader range of societal realities and concerns. Rather than digital devices pushing us inexorably into a life in the fast lane, I will argue that they can be actively appropriated and recruited as an ally in our quest for time control.

Time may appear inherently egalitarian, in that everyone has just twenty-four hours in a day, seven days a week and twelve months a year, and this will remain the case in the epochs to come. However, temporal sovereignty and suficient leisure time are important indicators of a good life. How much time we have is both a crucial aspect of freedom and individual autonomy, and a measure of equality. This book is intended as a contribution to understanding the role that technology plays in the time of our lives.

Tools for Time

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Chapter One High-Speed Society

Is the Pace of Life Accelerating?

Any attempt to make sense of the human condition at the

start of the new century must begin with the analysis of the social experience of speed.

William Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time

The relative speed of society has long been seen as one of its essential characteristics. Many of the inventions that are considered pivotal to progress, from the wheel to the microchip, have been designed to enable us to go faster. Yet it is in diagnoses of our contemporary times that acceleration features most prominently. Time-space compression, the idea that technologies have dramatically telescoped temporal and spatial distances, is a constant motif, as is the notion that economic, social, and cultural change is much more rapid than in previous eras. Things seem to happen at a relentless pace, imbuing us with a diferent sense of time.

According to the dominant narrative, our ubiquitous experience of busyness makes perfect sense as we inhabit a high-speed society. Our age is obsessed with speed: faster cars, faster trains, faster broadband, even speed dating. Speed is sexy, and digital devices are constantly sold to us as eficient, time-saving tools that promote an exciting, action-packed lifestyle. Nowhere is this more apparent than in iPhone’s Siri software, which allows you to “use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more,” while, the advertisement suggests, driving or exercising. Similarly, self-logging wristbands that track everything from heart rates and sleep patterns to mood fluctuations are marketed for a busy life on the move.

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Our obsession with doing more at once is symptomatic of the frenetic pace of life. The yellow brick road may wind through the Googleplex, with all its indoor tree houses, volleyball courts, apiaries, and giant, colored rubber balls, but over-the-rainbow Google engineers talk of needing to work smarter and harder than they could ever have imagined. Although speed and timing is of the essence, Zen masters are brought in to teach employees how to stop and take a deep breath. The typical mantra of CEOs is that technology is pushing us faster and so we have to adapt to new ways of doing business in “a world of screens, texts, cell phones, information all over you.”1

Like corporate speak, much social science sees technology as the main force driving acceleration.  The idea that digitalization has spawned a new temporality is widespread and is variously described as instantaneous time, timeless time, time-space compression, time-space distanciation, chronoscopic time, pointillist time, or network time.2 There are even calls for a new science of speed or, as Paul Virilio has termed it, dromology. All of these concepts have at their core a view that life is speeding up. The spread of communication technologies in particular and their evident potential for the further speeding up of an already accelerated modernity has added urgency to the question of speed and human reactions to it.

But if acceleration defines our digital universe, what precisely does this mean? Despite the dazzling array of theories depicting the present era as one of exceptional speed, the concept remains vague and elusive. The fact that so much of the academic and popular commentary is prone to speculative hyperbole compounds the problem. This, in turn, is exacerbated by the extent to which the agenda for discussing the future of technology is set by the promoters of new technological products.

I begin this chapter, then, by disentangling the rhetoric in order to clarify the relationship between technological acceleration and the pace of life. I also present an overview of the most influential accounts of high-speed network society, which will help to expose the technological determinism implicit in such theories. Perhaps this is an unfortunate but necessary corollary of the scale and scope of the authors’ arguments. What gets downplayed or lost, however, is the extent to which the “virtual” is made up of wires, buildings, and bodies, as well as the fact that real human beings know and use (or not use) information and communication technology (ICT) in concrete, local settings. My approach contrasts these tactics by firmly grounding the discussion of how digital time is perceived, organized and negotiated in commonplace everyday situations.

Chapter One

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Moving forward, I principally draw on literature from science and technology studies—STS for short—which, for some time, has been urging a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which technology shapes time. Taking on this lens allows us to see that society is more than its technology, but also that technology is more than its equipment. In other words, the social world cannot be reduced to the technology that makes it up. However, this is not at all to diminish the role of technology—in fact, quite the opposite. It is only by paying attention to sociomaterial practices that we can begin to see the rich interplay of technology and society.

Such an approach necessarily questions all-embracing, linear narratives about everything speeding up, pointing instead to a more complex temporal patterning of experience. It requires us to pose questions, such as when, and where, people encounter accelerations (as well as decelerations) and what the consequences for the quality of our lives are.

Acceleration Society

Although acceleration itself is rarely regarded as the central topic for sociological analysis, it is ever present in theories of contemporary society. Physicists have clear ideas about what speed and velocity mean but, in describing human experiences of time in high-speed society, the term is used to refer to a variety of phenomena. This is particularly confusing, as time compression has multiple dimensions, so that while some aspects of life are accelerating, others may not be and could even be slowing down.

One notable exception is Hartmut Rosa, who examines in detail what it means to say that Western societies are acceleration societies. I find his definition, and the distinction he draws between diferent aspects of acceleration, helpful and have adopted it here.3

The first and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of transport, communication, and production, which can be defined as technological acceleration. The second is the acceleration of social change, meaning that the rate of societal change is itself accelerating. The central idea here is that institutional stability (in the realms of the family and occupations, for example) is generally on the decline in late modern societies. The third process is the acceleration of the pace of life. It is the focus of much discussion about cultural acceleration and the alleged need for deceleration. The pace of (social) life refers to the speed and compression of actions and experiences in everyday life.

Hig h-Speed Society

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Now the most intriguing question is how these three types of acceleration relate to each other. As Rosa points out, there is clearly a paradox between the first and third process. If technological acceleration means that less time is needed (for production, transport, etc.), this should entail an increase in free time, which in turn would slow down the pace of life. Rather than time becoming abundant, however, time seems to be increasingly scarce. Accordingly, it only makes sense to apply the term acceleration society to a society if “technological acceleration and the growing scarcity of time (that is, an acceleration of the ‘pace of life’) occur simultaneously.”4 Interrogating this “time pressure” paradox is the central quest of my book.

According to this definition, most general analyses of contemporary society can be read as versions of the acceleration society thesis. In other words, they make a direct, causal link between technological acceleration, especially the speed of electronic communication systems, and the harriedness of everyday life. The fact that our social interactions in both work and leisure time are increasingly mediated by technology—that we live in a state of constant connectivity—is a recurring theme. Here I want to focus primarily on how the connection between the speed of technology and the pace of life is formulated.

There is a vast literature on what is commonly referred to as time-space compression. Geographer David Harvey classically conceived of this process as being at the heart of modernity, or, in some formulations, postmodernity: “I use the term ‘compression’ because . . . the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while . . . space appears to shrink to a ‘global village.’”5

Key to Harvey’s work on the spatial-temporal dynamics of capitalism is the notion that economic processes are accelerating. For him, the driving forces behind social acceleration are globalization and innovations in ICT that facilitate the fast turnover of capital across the globe. In contrast to industrial capitalism, which requires the exploitation of labor through strict adherence to clock time and Fordist spatial models like the assembly line, flexible accumulation requires a shift in the ways we think about time. Harvey observes that the general speed-up in the turnover time of capital accentuates the volatility and ephemerality of commodities and capital. Fast capitalism annihilates space and time. The distances that once hampered global trade are made meaningless as humans increasingly communicate using “real-time” technologies. Time becomes beyond control as distance disappears in a world of instantaneous and simultaneous events. Acceleration, then, is reflected in the substantive temporalities of human existence, in particular, the growing sense of time-space compression in everyday life.

Chapter One

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Such discussions of acceleration typically invoke Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the constant need to speed up the circulation of capital. The faster that money can be turned into the production of goods and services, the greater the power of capital to expand or valorize itself. With capitalism, time is literally money, and “when time is money, then faster means better” and speed becomes an unquestioned and unquestionable good.6 Technological innovations play a key role in that improvements in the conveyance of communication, commodities, and bodies reduce the cost and time of capital circulation across the globe (what Marx called the “annihilation of space by time”). The extent to which such time-space compression would be fulfilled, however, was unforeseen by Marx.

Developments in the speed of transport and communications have shrunk the globe, from the horse-drawn coach and sailing ship to jet aircraft today. Yet it was only with the invention of the telegraph in the 1830s that the carriage of bodies by wheel, sail, and steam was challenged by the transport of messages at speeds dramatically diferent from those that had previously existed. The telegraph meant that a message could be delivered at a tiny fraction of the time aforded by physical transport.

Electronic communication has increased this speed in exponential ways. The velocity of automated financial trading, which is now moving from milliseconds to microseconds (millionths of a second), has become emblematic. This is far faster than human reaction times, which typically range from around 140 milliseconds for auditory stimuli to 200 milliseconds for visual stimuli. In this context, even a 5-second pause can seem like a very long time.7 Indeed, the exponential growth in Internet transmission speeds over the last 100 years is accelerating to the point where data can be transferred at a sustained rate of 186 gigabits per second, a rate equivalent of moving 2 million gigabytes in a single day.8

Hig h-Speed Society

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