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A review by gslife
La tirannia del tempo. L'accelerazione della vita nel capitalismo digitale by Judy Wajcman
2.0
I didn’t care for Pressed for Time. The reasons for this are a) it’s a sociology book and sociological language obfuscates a point beyond all layperson understanding; b) it has a few good points to say but can’t say them effectively. I guess that’s really the same reason.
Wajcman notes the invention of the telegraph as the first time information can travel faster than humans, which is a fascinating distinction. Past this point (and somewhat before this point) technology is generally defined as an innovation that makes an action faster. A train gets you to San Francisco faster than horses and trains demand a consolidation of time. You have to be on the platform at 8:19, or at least by the time the train departs at 8:21, or you won’t be going to San Francisco today.
I wish Wajcman would have delved more into a historical understanding of time. I can imagine that ancient peoples may have understood time as cyclical—stuff like “spring comes every year”. Day follows night, the moon waxes and wanes every 28 days, there is a time for planting and a time for harvesting. We tend to forget a lot of this stuff, especially in our unusual year where our typical delineations of time don’t apply.
The other thing I wish Wajcman had touched on more was what the acceleration of time is doing to our brains. In chapter 4, she details a study about time spent on “episodes” during a workday—essentially, time spent focusing on a single thing. 90% of these are 10 minutes or less. I’d like to read a Walter Ong-like book about the human capacity for concentration and focus in our modern era. It’s far more difficult than writing and orality, but worthy of discussion, I think. In everything from the four-minute segments of Sesame Street to the 30-second read of a tweet, our minds are constantly encouraged—if not demanded—to shift focus to something else. It becomes hard to sit down and focus on a book for an hour at a time.
Wajcman notes the invention of the telegraph as the first time information can travel faster than humans, which is a fascinating distinction. Past this point (and somewhat before this point) technology is generally defined as an innovation that makes an action faster. A train gets you to San Francisco faster than horses and trains demand a consolidation of time. You have to be on the platform at 8:19, or at least by the time the train departs at 8:21, or you won’t be going to San Francisco today.
I wish Wajcman would have delved more into a historical understanding of time. I can imagine that ancient peoples may have understood time as cyclical—stuff like “spring comes every year”. Day follows night, the moon waxes and wanes every 28 days, there is a time for planting and a time for harvesting. We tend to forget a lot of this stuff, especially in our unusual year where our typical delineations of time don’t apply.
The other thing I wish Wajcman had touched on more was what the acceleration of time is doing to our brains. In chapter 4, she details a study about time spent on “episodes” during a workday—essentially, time spent focusing on a single thing. 90% of these are 10 minutes or less. I’d like to read a Walter Ong-like book about the human capacity for concentration and focus in our modern era. It’s far more difficult than writing and orality, but worthy of discussion, I think. In everything from the four-minute segments of Sesame Street to the 30-second read of a tweet, our minds are constantly encouraged—if not demanded—to shift focus to something else. It becomes hard to sit down and focus on a book for an hour at a time.