Pressed for time by Judy Wajcman
The acceleration of life in digital capitalism
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 the 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 experience in everyday life.
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. Interrogating
this time pressure, paradox is the central quest of my book.
As per Geographer David Harvey, the history of capitalism has been
characterized by speedup in the pace of life, while space appears to shrink to
a global village. For him, the driving forces behind social acceleration are
globalization and innovation in ICT that facilitates the fast turnover of
capital across the globe. Fast capitalism annihilates space and time.
Time becomes beyond control as distance disappears in a world of
instantaneous and simultaneous events.
Such discussion 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 production of goods and services, the
greater the power of capital to expand or valorize itself. With capitalism,
time is money and when time is money, then faster means better. Technological
innovations play a key role in that improvement 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.
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 faster than human reaction times, which typically range from around 140
milliseconds for auditory stimuli to 200 milliseconds of visual stimuli. In this
context, even a 5 second pause can seem like a very long time. Indeed, the
exponential growth in Internet transmission speed over the last 100 years is
accelerating to the point where data can be transferred at a sustained rate of
186 Gbps, a rate equivalent of moving 2 million GB in a single day.
Trading centers are large warehouses, consuming vast amounts of
electric power to dissipate the heat generated by fast computing. There are
relatively few staff, 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 up a small city.
Moreover, contrary to perceived wisdom, the ultra-fast reaction
time actually increases the importance of spatial distance,. It turns out that
high-frequency trading firm's rent space for their computer servers in the same
building as an exchange engineer precisely because the obdurate physical
reality of collection is still important. 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 systems ever was.
French philosopher Paul Virilio, for whom issues of speed and
technology are pivotal. For Virilio, speed, the cult of speed is the propaganda
of progress and its consequences are devastating. Refreshingly, although
Virilio is known as the ‘high priest of speed, he argues that speeding up is
not unique to the digital age. 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 19th century transport (trains, cars, and
airline) that dramatically shortened travel time, 20th century transmission
(the telegraph, telephone, radio and computer & satellite communication)
that have replaced succession and duration with simultaneity and instantiation
that compress time by providing xenotransplantation and nanotechnology. Each of
these technological innovation enhances the independence of the social
relations of time from space and the body.
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 conflict may ensue, because acceleration affects different
individuals, groups, and classes in uneven ways. For instance, traffic jams and
waiting time do not have the same impact on everyone as they money rich but
time poor can use their wealth to purchase speed.
The more we become connected and dependent upon inter-connectivity
in our jobs and other aspects of our lives, the more we will live in an
accelerated mode. The most influential commonsense assumption about the
relationship between technology and society is technological determinism. The
key here is the idea that technology impinges on society from the outside that
technical change is autonomous and itself causes social change.
We tend to overrate the impact of new technologies in part because
older technologies have become absorbed into the furniture of our lives, so as
to be almost invisible. Take the baby bottle. This technology might be thought
of a classic time-shifting device as it enabled mothers to exercise more
control over the timing of feeding. It also functions to save time as bottle
feeding allows for someone else to substitute for the mother’s time.
The paths opened by the Internet are determined not by
technological capabilities alone, but through a multitude of intricate social
process in which a diverse array of actors with various goals participate in a
rapidly evolving ecology of games. For example, search engines like Google,
predispose uses to access well-linked and highly connected website and exclude
poorly linked and less connected websites.
According to Carey, the telegraph was the critical instrument in
making time the new frontier for commerce. Before the telegraph, markets were
relatively independent of one another and the principle method of trading was
arbitrage: buying cheap and selling dear by physically moving goods around. When
the prices of commodities were equalized n space as a result of the telegraph,
however, commodity trading moved from trading between places to trade between
times, shifting speculation from space of time, from arbitrage to futures.
In order to develop futures markets required three conditions:
that information moved faster than products, that prices were uniform in space
and decontextualized and that commodities be separated from the receipts that
represent them and be reduced to uniform grades. The shift of market activity
from certain space to uncertain time was the first practical attempt to make
time a new frontier, a newly defined zone of uncertainty and to penetrate it
with the price system. In a sense the telegraph invented the future.
Economic historians Tim Leunig and Hans-Joachim Voth argue that
mechanizing the production process of the car was a as valuable in terms of
consumer welfare as inventing the internet and much more valuable than
inventing mobile phone.
The popular promise of automobile speed was to be short lived as
more and more car hit the road. The automobile and its infrastructure dominate
most North American cities in the literal sense that vast tracts of land are
required to accommodate it. Not only for the roads, but also for bridges,
service stations and parking spaces. Half of all urban space is dedicated to
the automobile. Rather like the experience of surfing the internet at a
computer screen, the driver is both stationary and mobile at the same time.
As David Morley notes, despite all the talk of global flows,
fluidity and hybridity and mobility, it is worth observing that in the UK at
least, there is evidence that points to continued geographical sedentarism on
the half majority of the population. Over half of British adults live within
five miles of where they were born. Even in the more geographically mobile USA,
two out of three people do not have a passport.
“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 filled by
habit.” - Marcel Proust, In search of Lost Time.
When we say that someone has more time than someone else, 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.
Flexible working hours, 24/7 working time and contract work create
coordination problems, as working times and locations are increasingly
deregulated and scattered. Middle class tends to meet more by prearrangement,
the working classes use public spaces to meet where there is a strong
likelihood of meeting network members by chance. The widespread use of
partially and totally prepared food reflects the desire to save time, as those
with more money and less time buy more of it. While family meals retail
their symbolic scheduling problems in getting people together in the same place
at the same time. For a significant proportion of people, planning to meet
people becomes a major preoccupation.. While the market for convenience foods
has increased exponentially, so too has the practice of eating out, even though
it requires temporal and spatial coordination, Today half of the money used to
buy food in the USA is spent in restaurants.
The pew internet survey describes most working Americans as
networked workers because they use the three basic tools of the information
age: internet, email and cell phone. Networked workers' jobs have also become
more complex and demanding as they are continually required to update their
skills to keep up with the latest technology.
Electronic technologies are integral to our experience of space,
time, communication and consciousness, crystalline new ways of being, known and
doing. They as much reflect our high speed culture as shape it. There is a
disjunction between the cultural allure of speed and the common experience of
always feeling rushed, but this can be a source of creative tension,. Smart,
fast, technologies provide an unparalleled opportunity for realizing a more
humane and just society, only we need to keep in mind that busyness is not a
function of gadgetry but of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set.
Now is the moment to contest the euphoria of speed and the technological
impulse to achieve it, harnessing our inventiveness to take control of our time
more of the time.
