Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

Our own sense of time has been profoundly altered by the convergence of telephony, computing, and broadcasting technologies into a pervasive environment of instant and simultaneous information and communication. So it is not so surprising that, in the face of such an intense phase of time-space compression, and the resulting changes in our time consciousness, many social scientists herald a new social order.

The problem, as I will show, is that theories about social acceleration are too schematic to capture the multiple temporal landscapes, both fast and slow, that come into play with digital devices. The prose is all about “virtual” networks and ubiquitous computing, which are conceived of as borderless disembodied spaces and ethereal instantaneous times. This has the efect of rendering invisible the tangible human and social time dimensions of everyday life as “banal, repetitive, and trivial.”9 In other words, the quotidian time of intersubjectivity, in which actual women and men coordinate their time practices in real-world contexts, gets completely obscured.

The Network Society

Perhaps the best-known example is Manuel Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society. For him, the revolution in ICT has given rise to a new information age, a network society in which labor and capital are replaced by informational networks and knowledge. Information is the key ingredient of organizations and flows of electronic messages and images between networks now constitute the basic thread of social structure. He defines the space of flows as the technological and organizational possibility of practicing simultaneity without contiguity. These circuits come to dominate the organization of activity in individual places such that the site of networks and their relationship to other networks become more important than the characteristics of place itself. For Castells, the information age, in which virtuality becomes an essential dimension of our reality, marks a whole new epoch in the human experience.

For our purposes, here, what is particularly interesting is his argument about the disappearance of time: that we are increasingly moving away from the clock time of the industrial age, in which time was a method of demarcating and ordering sequences of events.10 Instead, he argues, the world is increasingly organized in the space of flows: flows of merchandise, people, money, and information around dispersed and distributed networks. The sheer velocity and intensity of these global flows, interactions, and networks dissolve time, resulting in simultaneity and instant communications—what he terms timeless time. While this new timeless time emerged in financial markets, it is spreading to every realm. No wonder then, Castells opines, that life is a frantic race as people multitask and multilive by means of technology to reach “timeless time: the social practice that aims at negating sequence to install ourselves in perennial simultaneity and simultaneous ubiquity.”11 In true postmodern rhetoric, society becomes eternally ephemeral as space and time are radically compressed to the point where, at least with regard to the latter, it ceases to exist.12

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This vision of the network society, in which the accelerating speed of ICT annihilates time, has been extremely influential. For instance, echoing Castells’s concept of timeless time, John Urry argues that new technologies generate new kinds of instantaneous time, characterized by unpredictable change and quantum simultaneity. This new time is based on inconceivably brief instants that are wholly beyond human consciousness and, as a result, the simultaneous character of social and technical relationships replace the linear logic of clock time. According to Urry, instantaneous time is also a metaphor for the widespread significance of exceptionally short-term and fragmented time.

While such conceptions of time do capture something important about the extent to which the extraordinary speed of technologies is transforming the economy, financial markets, politics, and patterns of production and consumption, it is far less clear what this speeding up means for the experience of lived time. Urry does include in his specification of instantaneous time “the sense that the ‘pace of life’ throughout the world has got too fast and is in contradiction with other aspects of human experience.”13 The tenor of his discussion of instantaneous time is that it is socially destructive, yet he does not provide systematic empirical research to support this claim. One is left wondering what time “organised at a speed that is beyond the feasible realm of human consciousness” might mean to people and how it concretely relates to the actual use of ICT in everyday life.

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Let me provide just two brief examples. Surely highly mobile, “hotdesking” professionals would be a good test of the notion of timeless time, as their spatial-temporal practices are fundamentally altered. Yet according to a detailed study, rather than time disappearing, their time became dominated by a concern to connect in time and space because they considered face-to-face meetings to be the paramount means of communicating in organizations.14 As a result, one of their main uses of asynchronous technologies (such as voice mail and e-mail) was to make arrangements for synchronous communications. That the digital media industry is so geographically clustered in both London and New York similarly attests to the importance of “live” social networking.15 In this sense, local time is hardly superseded. My own research on the contemporary workplace, detailed in chapter 4, shows that while network technologies do alter the tempo of work, the myriad ways in which people deploy their devices can hardly be described as the annihilation of time.

Or take the extreme case of time-space compression, finance. Even here we do not find Castells’s immaterial world where time, place, and bodies are replaced by virtual information networks. Financial trading is in fact underpinned by materiality: physical, technological, and corporeal in nature. Trading centers are large warehouses, consuming vast amounts of electric power to dissipate the heat generated by fast computing. There are relatively few staf but rows and rows of computer servers and digital switches and miles of cabling connect those servers to the matching engines and the outside world. By today’s standards, a very large data center might be a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot building demanding fifty megawatts of power, which is about how much it takes to light a small city. To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit polluting diesel exhaust. The ethereal imagery of virtual data stored in the “cloud” is belied by the brute physicality of the infrastructure it needs.16

Moreover, contrary to perceived wisdom, the ultrafast reaction time actually increases the importance of spatial distance. It turns out that high-frequency trading firms rent space for their computer servers in the same building as an exchange’s engines precisely because the obdurate physical reality of colocation is still important. Time advantages of tens of microseconds become a crucial issue for traders. And these same technologies, working through diferent institutional arrangements, shape trading in very diferent ways.17 “For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.”18

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While both Castells and Urry explicitly distance themselves from a technologically determinist stance, they do not entirely succeed. At times they have a tendency to discuss the impact of electronic information systems as having major “irreversible” efects, ushering in disruptive social revolutions. The idea that technical innovation is the most important cause of social change permeates Castells’s analysis of the network society. Reflecting a common tendency in the literature on digital technologies, he argues from extremes, assuming that technologies are used in a uniform way overall and everywhere, revolutionizing work, leisure, education, family relationships, and personal identities.

Ironically, this is a form of technological determinism that sufers from a lack of interest in technology, what it is really made up of, what it consists of, and so on. What I am trying to show in this chapter is that it is precisely by focusing on technology that we can see how technology is implicated in social relations, human interests, history, and culture.

Such commentaries frame the present era as one in which the world is experiencing historically unprecedented change. Yet even a cursory glance at earlier periods of rapid technological change reveals that similar claims were made about their overpowering efects. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Anglo American culture was fascinated by the capacities of the telegraph and telephone to extend messages efortlessly and instantaneously, annihilating space with time. Indeed, the idea that inventors were ahead of their time and that science and technology were advancing faster than the ability of human society to cope was commonplace. As the next chapter expounds, a sense of increasing speed or acceleration has been a central feature of social commentaries since at least the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, detailed histories of technology immediately suggest that technologies have divergent efects, operating in diferent ways for diferent people at diferent periods in history. What Carolyn Marvin terms instrument-centered perspectives, in which the instrument determines the efect, are much too narrow, because even the history of electronic technologies

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is less the evolution of technical eficiencies in communication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the conduct of social life; among them, who is inside and outside, who may speak, who may not, and who has authority and may be believed. Changes in the speed, capacity, and performance of communications devices tell us little about these questions. At best, they provide a cover of functional meanings beneath which social meanings can elaborate themselves undisturbed.19

My intention is to examine precisely how digital technologies are reshaping our sense of time without succumbing to the common obsession with novelty. As a keen observer of technical processes, I am skeptical about overarching claims in the form of grand, totalizing narratives of postindustrial, information, postmodern, network society. Such theories tend to take the form of “techno-epics heralding techno-epochs” and treat time as an epiphenomenon with relatively little substantive content.20 While I would not diminish for a moment the importance of social theory, my feminist sensibility also attunes me to the situated and contingent character of truth/knowledge claims and the need to beware of the “god trick.”21

As I have already intimated, we can best advance our understanding of the dynamics of acceleration through scholarship that is specific, empirical, and located in concrete social settings where those efects can be most clearly observed. I have therefore chosen, in the chapters that follow, to concentrate on how technologies shape our practical perceptions, ideas, and experiences of social time in the unheroic sites of ordinary life. Doing so enables us to investigate the full spectrum of positive and negative consequences of the increased pace of life in modernity, the extent to which it is occurring, and the uneven distribution of these processes.

The Nihilism of Speed

It is worth first pausing to reflect on the work of the French philosopher Paul Virilio, for whom issues of speed and technology are pivotal. His dromology, from the Greek word for race (dromo), is a theory of the nature of speed, its conditions of emergence, its transformations, and its efects. For Virilio, “speed, the cult of speed, is the propaganda of progress” and its consequences are devastating. “Today we are entering a space which is speed-space. . . . This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming.”22 If there is fear, he tells us, it is because the earth is shrinking and space is dwindling, compressed by instantaneous time. Carried along by the headlong rush of an increasingly accelerated world, all we can do is manage and administer this fear instead of fundamentally dealing with it. “Climate chaos, stock market panics, food scares, pandemic threats, economic crashes, congenital anxiety, existential dread”—yet we are all still convinced that more speed and ubiquity are the answer.23 By this account, then, speed is nihilism in practice.

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Refreshingly, although Virilio is known as the “high priest of speed,” he argues that speeding up is not unique to the digital age.24 Rather, he suggests that we can read the history of modernity as a series of innovations in ever-increasing time compression. His analysis of speed encompasses nineteenth-century transport (trains, cars, and airplanes) that dramatically shortened travelling time, twentieth-century transmission (the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer and satellite communications) that have replaced succession and duration with simultaneity and instantaneity, and transplantation that compresses time by providing xenotransplantation and nanotechnology. Each of these technological innovations enhances the independence of the social relations of time from space and the body.

Although Virilio’s concern is to identify broad societal trends, he is highly attuned to contradictions and countervailing tendencies, unlike the theorists referred to above. For example, new modes of transport massively compress the time of travel but also lead to standing still in trafic jams in big cities.25 Endless queues in crowded lobbies are characteristic of travel by plane, delays and cancellations an integral part of commuting by train. Virilio’s dromological law, which states that increase in speed increases the potential for gridlock, seems more and more apt. He is also aware that political conflicts may ensue, because acceleration afects diferent individuals, groups, and classes in uneven ways. For instance, trafic jams and waiting times do not have the same impact on everyone, as the money-rich-but time-poor can use their wealth to purchase speed.26

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Twentieth-century telecommunications further compress duration to zero. However, once again Virilio notes the tendency for acceleration to produce new forms of deceleration, a recurring theme of mine. Chronoscopic time, the intensive (electronic) instant, leads to an overload of information so extensive that taking advantage of only the tiniest fraction of it not only blows apart “real-time” communication but also slows down operators to the point where they lose themselves in the eternity of electronically networked information, a “black hole of globalized interconnectivity.” The actual capacity for parallel absorption of knowledge is hugely disappointing. Ironically, the same electronic capacity to be both here and elsewhere in the time of nowhere has brought the body to a standstill. While Castells and Urry, for example, emphasize the mobility and fluidity of people in network society, Virilio recognizes that, at the level of everyday life, people are increasingly stationary—sitting in front of a screen. The chronoscopic time of the ICT revolution—a temporality of instantaneous and continuous connectivity—is, paradoxically, accompanied by new forms of inertia.

Finally, in terms of the twenty-first century, Virilio identifies the time compression aforded by transplantation primarily with prostheses provided by xenotransplantation and nanotechnology. Technological time has moved from the vastness of planetary and earthly space to the micro spaces of organs and cells to what he calls “the heart of the living.” In a speculative mood, he writes that artificial rhythms replace natural ones, to be speeded up at will and paced to the dictates of the prosthetic machine. Here again he is prescient in foreseeing that the genetic modification of humans and animals raises moral and ethical issues not anticipated and in advance of regulatory frameworks. Indeed, some have speculated that the point of these technologies is to transcend a biological sense of time, in other words, to arrest time.

Human history, then, can be understood in terms of a race with time, of ever-increasing speeds that transcend humans’ biological capacity. According to Virilio, the forces of technoscience are speeding up the world to such a degree that things, even reality, are starting to disappear. Technological time is no longer part of chronological time; we have to conceptualize it as chronoscopic time. This new time encompasses the dead time of travel, the intensive time of electronic connectivity, and scarce time—as immense acceleration leads everywhere to a shortening of time limits and time to think. For individuals as well as society, this transformation in the space-time structure has fundamentally disruptive consequences. The technologies of speed bring about a “derangement of the senses” whereby real space is replaced by decontextualized “real-time” processes and intensity takes over from extensity. As humans cannot possibly absorb this overload of parallel information sources, Virilio calls for a cultural slow-down to protect against the further invasion of technology into lived human experience.

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Virilio’s highly original vision of the world provides a healthy antidote to overly economistic analyses of contemporary capitalism. He is rare among social theorists in giving war and military technology due weight, identifying the key role of rapid movement in military power as well as the significance of the military for the development of technology.27 However, in the end, his military paradigm overwhelms all other modalities and experiences of speed. We are left with a rather one-sided account of a world now out of control and a reductionist view of modern scientific knowledge.28 Perhaps this partially accounts for his dire prognosis that the ceaseless increase in acceleration is leading to nothing other than the “liquidation of the world.”

Such cultural pessimism besets much writing about the efects of digital technology on the contemporary contours of time. Barbara Adam, Britain’s leading social theorist of time, writes in a similar vein:

Control is lost due to massively increased speed, instantaneity, and networked connections. Instantaneity means “real-time” processes across the globe coupled with the elimination of linear cause-andefect relations (in a context of continued linearity). This brings with it loss of time to reflect and act in the intervening period between cause and efect. It turns masters into slaves, designers and operators into the weakest links.29

So too does Robert Hassan, who argues that digitally compressed network time, oriented toward pure speed, colonizes all other realms of life, leaving no time for reading, reflection, and resistance. It even robs us of sleep, according to Jonathan Crary’s 24/7, down from eight hours a generation ago to approximately six and a half hours for the average North American adult.30 Continuous connectivity begets more connectivity, as the devices used to coordinate the constant inflow of networked stimuli actually have the efect of stretching the individual even more taughtly over time and space. “The more we become connected and dependent upon interconnectivity in our jobs and other aspects of our lives, the more we will live in an accelerated mode.”31 Accordingly, this ever-quickening quest for speed becomes a pathology, an inescapable addiction, driving us (like Alice in Wonderland) to run ever faster just in order to stand still.

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These authors correctly identify the profound dangers posed by developments in technoscience, such as instruments for control and surveillance, and the penetration of informatics and bioscience into every corner of our lives, including, literally, our bodies. However, they only see the dark side. For example, Hassan’s depiction of the accelerated “technologic” of the network society evokes an image of “a technologically closed system that allows for no real choice or real freedom of technological expression.”32 As such, it unwittingly legitimates a passive, defensive attitude to technological change. While it is evidently true that we live our lives in a technologically infused environment unimaginable only thirty years ago, these societal theories do not provide much detail as to how, why and even if using ICT inexorably leads to the acceleration of everything.

An implicit antipathy to science and technology forecloses appreciation of the scope that digital technologies might aford for control over time, enabling people to have not only more time but time of their choice. This stance is out of step with the widespread recognition that technoscience is a feverishly contested political field. Indeed, the plea for a slow down brings to mind the ecological feminists whom Donna Haraway chided over a quarter of a century ago for wanting to return to nature rather than becoming impure, hybrid cyborgs. A leading critic of technoscience, Haraway insisted on the liberatory potential of science and technology: “The issue is no longer whether to accept or oppose technoscience, but rather how to engage strategically with technoscience while, at the same time, being its chief critic.”33

In this spirit, I want to argue that a more well-rounded understanding of the relationship between temporality and technology must inform an emancipatory politics of time. This involves the democratization of technoscience, deciding what sort of technologies we want and how we are going to use them. Resisting technological innovation and calling for deceleration or a digital detox is an inadequate intellectual and political response. Indeed, wistfully looking back to an idealized slower time and mourning its passing has long been the preserve of conservative political theory. Ironically, today, as William Connolly notes, the most virulent attempts to slow things down take the form of national and religious fundamentalism. Rather than rejecting modern speed, trying to turn the clock back, we should embrace the positive possibilities that speed contains for thought, judgment, human connection, and cosmopolitanism.34 And, to do this, we need to direct our analytical gaze beyond the dialectics of speed to encompass the politics of technology itself.

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Technology as Sociomaterial Practice

What role, then, does technology play in shaping people’s experience of time? Does technological acceleration necessarily hasten the pace of our everyday lives? To answer these questions, let us look more generally at how the relationship between technology and society has been conceived.

The most influential commonsense assumption about the relationship between technology and society is “technological determinism.” Few would explicitly subscribe to this theory, but, as I have indicated, it is pervasive. It has several versions, but in its strongest version, it is the claim that technological innovation is the most important cause of change in society. Key here is the idea that technology impinges on society from the outside, that technical change is autonomous and itself causes social change. That technology is not part of society but a separate, external sphere, so to speak.

By contrast, the founding principle of science and technology studies is that all technologies are inherently social in that they are designed, produced, used and governed by people. Perhaps it is worth saying at the outset that our objection to technological determinism was and is political as well as intellectual. Many of us who got involved in the development of this field in the 1980s had a simple polemical purpose, to shake the stranglehold that a naïve determinism had on the dominant understanding of the intertwining of society and technology. We were concerned that this view of technology, as an external force exerting an influence on society, narrows the possibilities for democratic engagement. It presents a limited set of options: uncritical embracing of technological change, defensive adaptation to it, or simple rejection of it. Against this, STS had its origins in a belief that the content and direction of technological innovation are amenable to sociological analysis and explanation, and to political intervention.

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