Time Pressure

Innovation, Acceleration and the Speeding-Up of Everyday Life

Bibliographic Data

ID23637340
AuthorsDale Southerton (0000-0002-1561-5521, University of Bristol, corresponding author)
Year2020
Pages69-93
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueTime, Consumption and the Coordination of Everyday Life (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/978-1-349-60117-2_4
OpenAlexW3082478595
ISBN9781349601172
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited29

Popular science books diagnose a chronic speeding-up of more or less all aspects of social lives. This chapter explores contentions that life is getting faster and in so doing leads to experiences of time pressure. The idea that societies are accelerating as a consequence of technological innovations has been popular throughout the modern period. Acceleration in the nineteenth century was associated with technological advances in transport and communications, the rapid circulation of goods and the emergence of fashion as a means of expressing lifestyle and identity. Further technological innovations in travel and communications in the post-Second World War period further accelerate the pace of modern life to the extent that some theorists claim that the only stable feature of late-modern societies is their constant and rapid change. The rate of technological innovations constantly increases, the speed of change outstrips the pace at which social institutions (e.g. the family, occupational structures and forms of governance) can respond, and together mean that everyday lives come to be an overwhelming experience of speed and time pressure. Digital technologies bring with them new expectations of ‘instantaneous’ access to knowledge, goods and services, and in the process fragment and intensify activities. They also offer scope for new ‘temporalities’ based around ‘network time’. Empirical studies, however, provide limited corroboration of activity fragmentation or intensification, and research into interactions with email, mobile phones and the internet suggest that such technologies afford forms of deceleration and control juxtaposed with experiences of acceleration and feelings of being overwhelmed by competing demands on one’s time.

Acceleration · Classical mechanics · Everyday life · Physics · Political science · Computer Science · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience · Mind wandering and attention · Psychology

Tools

Open DOILibgen