Re:Modern Life is Rubbish (Score 1)

I happen to think that the "acceleration of just about everything" thesis is wrong, or at least heavily overstated. Things probably are getting faster, but not compared to the rates of change of industrialization, as ACK! points out.

I actually wrote a review of Faster for the Village Voice a few months ago that made this argument -- here's a quote from the piece:

Is there something uniquely compressed about late-twentieth century time, compared to earlier periods? Certainly our eyes have acclimated to more cuts-per-second, and our multitasking skills have never been sharper. In absolute terms, no one doubts that the age of the nanosecond is faster than the age of the town clock or the Taylorite stopwatch. But as a force weighing upon lived experience, it's conceivable that earlier accelerations were more dizzying for the people living through them. ... the switch from the task-based time of agrarian culture to the automated, abstract clock-time of industrialization (wonderfully described in E.P. Thompson's classic essay, ''Time and Work Discipline'') was powerfully felt by everyone living through it, laborers and landed gentry alike.

Granted, shoveling coal in a Manchester factory was still slower than watching the ''Ray Of Light'' video, but the *rate* of change was far more severe in the early nineteenth-century, when the majority of the population still had a trace memory of rural life. And in terms of physical motion -- bodies hurtling through the air at an ever faster clip, in trains, plains, and automobile -- the great leap forward really wound down in the first half of this century. Indeed, you can make the case that our transportation options have grown slower over the past few decades. (As Gleick himself points out, the Concorde was a failure, and the traffic has never been worse.) In recent years, the rise of the Web has resulted in a cooling down of our media experiences as well, with consumers moving from the syncopated image parades of television to the web's sluggish download times and text-based formatting. Even the sports currently in vogue right now-- baseball, golf, soccer -- drift along at a slower pace, some of them with no clock at all...