Talking Tuesday: Pressed for Time

Last week I read a fantastic book review about the modern experience of time and how that intersects with our heavy use of ICT (information/communications technologies).  The book, Pressed for Time, by Judy Wajcman, explores the relationship between the perceived pace of life and technology's role in making it so.  Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow notes that our present experience of time is one that is harried, frazzled, distracted, ever more fractured.  The pace of life feels too fast and we increasingly want to yell, "Stop the world!  I want to get off!"  And yet it is hard to renounce all that in an increasingly digital and hyper-connected world.  Wajcman doesn't seem so concerned by the hyper-connectivity, but rather points out that we do in fact have as much time as we ever did, but that we lack sovereignty over that time.  Likewise, our expectation of a strict dichotomy of work and family life, the public-private divide is an industrial construct.  It is perhaps one that we should not be eager to enshrine.  Tuhus-Dubrow writes:

"We don’t have less time than ever; on the contrary, life expectancy has steadily increased. What we have, at this latest point so far in human history, is more of so much else—more people, more books, more cultural products of every kind, in addition to the staggering volume of online content. We feel ever more acutely the mismatch between available time and all the possible ways we could spend it. Population growth has overlooked effects: even if Steven Pinker is right that per capita violence has declined, something horrible is always happening to someone, and thanks to our ICTs, we’re going to hear about it in “real time.” This fosters a sense of relentless drama, of the world spiraling out of control, and chronic low-grade anxiety.

"And yet, despite the ostensible constant novelty—new information, new communication, new techno-toys—there is a numbing sameness to the experience of daily life for many of us. Too much of life is spent in the same essential way: clicking and typing and scrolling, liking and tweeting, assimilating the latest horrors from the news. And this relates back to the speed of time’s passage. True experiential variety, the social scientists tell us, is what gives life the feeling of passing more slowly—getting out of our routines, having adventures. It’s when the days pass by in a barely distinguishable blur that we look back and think, “Where did the time go?”"

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Speed Kills, The Nation.com, January 13, 2015

I don't think there are easy answers to the conundrum of time and technology in the post modern world.  We can try to do things the old fashioned way, to disconnect from time to time, to do manual work when a machine could do it for us, to get away from click and scrolling through our days, every day, all day, but I think we are never going to be rid of it entirely, short of joining a monastery or abandoning modern society.  We are a communal people, and even the most determined hermit needs human contact from time to time.  There is only so much we can do to stem the tide.  But I do think it is important to do so.