time and speed

This page looks at questions of time in digital environments. 

It covers -

• introduction -
• time in the digital economy
• voluntary simplicity?
• instant gratification in the attention economy?
• the pace of change - bonjour Oblomov?
• time management and reflection
• internet time
• the 33 hour day

     introduction

Early theorists about cyberspace and the 'internet economy' often suggested that time - or merely decision making - had speeded up and that attention spans had somehow radically shortened.

Pundits popularised the notion of 'internet time'.

At best that involved access to services on a 24/7 basis (whether through use of databases that operated continuously rather than traditional business hours or through communication across geographical time zones, with call centres in Mumbai for example servicing requests by consumers in Devonport, Delaware or Dusseldorf).

More fancifully, it involved claims that corporate decision-making and restructuring had speeded up, claims that often featured an exaltation of new business models and abandonment of traditional wisdom.

     time in the digital economy

Has digital technology changed perceptions of time and fundamentally altered business practice? The answer is uncertain.

Mobile phones and email have offered greater connectivity for many people in advanced economies, often with a blurring of traditional demarcations between business, social and private life. Claims that we are destined to live in an 'always on' environment however seem overstated, as individuals learn to manage their accessibility and leverage facilities such as voice-mail. As we commented to one client, mobile phones can always be switched off and email redirected.

Hype about new business models in the 'internet economy' popularised notions that new technologies could get products to market at 'light speed' and that traditional bureaucratic structures should be 'blown to bits'. Several years after the dot-com crash much of the writing such as Competing At The Speed of Light has a distinct flavour of hubris, with an over-emphasis on instant gratification, digital mantras and assumptions that development on-the-fly will offset analysis and planning.

Regis McKenna, author of Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1997), argued that in the internet economy there is no chance for pause or contemplation -

The instantaneous nature of networking allows us to participate in realtime activities. We used to sit back and reflect on things. Now there's almost no time even for planning. By the time you put out a six-month plan, the marketplace has changed.

That may be true in some sectors but overall it is woefully far from reality. Much of the concentration on time has centred on corporate burn rates, ie whether start-up funds for individual dotcoms will evaporate before each entity becomes commercially viable. Those entities are, however, only a small part of the overall economy and we have yet to see a convincing case for the abandonment of reflection, particularly given regulatory or manufacturing lead times.

A more pressing concern for many start-ups - and for many established enterprises - is 'short-termism', in particular investor expectations about quick return, burn rates and the tyranny of the quarterly report.

Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft (New York: Free Press 1998) by Michael Cusumano & David Yoffe offered the more nuanced suggestion that

Competing on Internet time is about more than just being fast. The apparent compression of time is only one dimension of life in and around the Internet. For us, competing on Internet time is about moving rapidly to new products and markets; becoming flexible in strategy, structure, and operations; and exploiting all points of leverage for competitive advantage. The Internet demands that firms identify emerging opportunities quickly and move with great speed ... managers must be flexible enough to change direction, change their organization, and change their day-to-day operations. Finally, in an information world where too many competitive advantages can be fleeting and new entrants can easily challenge incumbents, companies must find sources of leverage that can endure.

Other examples include Davis & Meyer's dotcom tract Blur - The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy (Oxford: Capstone 1999) and Charles Fines' Clockspeed: How To Survive & Flourish In The Age Of Temporary Advantage (New York: Little Brown 1998).

     voluntary simplicity?

Claims that life has 'speeded up' - and that we are all the poorer for it - are evident in works such as James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration Of Just About Everything (New York: Random House 1999), Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow (London: Orion 2004), Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle (London: Hamish Hamilton 2004), Corinne Maier's 'slacker manifesto' Bonjour Paresse: De l'Art et la Nécessité d'en Faire le Moins Possible en Entreprise (Paris: Editions Michalon 2004) and Michaela Axt-Gadermann's Joy of Laziness (London: Bloomsbury 2005).

Such claims are, however, problematical. As we note below, they have been a feature of laments since at least 1700 and embody particular cultural/economic values.

Those values have been associated with attributes and organisations that some would consider surprising: notions of 'community', 'authenticity', 'simplicity', 'rage against the machine' (or merely the city) and antimodernism that are evident in the poujadist policies of One Nation, 1930s volkish movements and grizzles such as Clive Hamilton's fashionably miserabilist Affluenza (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2005) and Growth Fetish (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2003), Elizabeth Farrelly's Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness (Cambridge: MIT Press 2008) or Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Fear Liquid Times: Living in the Age of Uncertainty (London: Polity Press 2007).

They have spawned notions of 'voluntary simplicity' (give your goodies away and live in a hut in the wild woods) that resonate with survivalists and exponents of self-abnegation such as Wittgenstein but arguably are not viable for most people. Will a diet of nuts and berries (and the occasional squirrel) make you happier? Insights are offered in Buying Time and Getting By: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement (Albany: State Uni of New York Press 2004) by Mary Grigsby, Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2008) by Robert Goodin, James Mahmud Rice, Antti Parpo & Lina Eriksson and Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing (New Haven: Yale University Press 2008) by Russell Foster & Leon Kreitzman.

Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of Karl Marx, claimed in The Right to Be Lazy that "in capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity". Maier's predecessor Raoul Vaneigem echoed that lament with the claim that

The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs. One day, will we see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the offices and the culture centres?

Presumably they will demand Aeron chairs and an MP3 player as well.

Comments on historical periodisation - such as the 'age of the internet' - are featured here.

     instant gratification in the attention economy?

McKenna's characterisation of 'real time' as

what I am calling our sense of ultracompressed time and foreshortened horizons in these years of the millennial countdown

arguably has deeper roots, reflected in genres such as the One Minute Manager - considered here - and Readers Digest Condensed Books.

It is exemplified by Mark Breier's The 10 Second Internet Manager - Survive, Thrive & Drive Your Company in the Information Age (New York: Crown Business 2002), promoted as

All the secrets in one place - worth the time to read even if you don't think you have 30 seconds to spare.

It is also reflective of what has been characterised as the 'attention economy', in which

• consumers (or other decisionmakers) are 'time-poor' and faced by a plethora of choices and information
• marketers vie for increasingly smaller portions of attention
• solutions are offered by works such as Thomas Davenport & John Beck's The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 2001)
• the media have discovered a range of pathologies such as attention deficit disorder
• there is uncritical reception by the media of claims such as Basex's 2006 assertion that "interruptions" from email, the web and instant messaging cost the US economy US$588 billion per year (an echo of 1920s laments about the cost of allowing employees to visit the bathroom).

Michael Goldhaber, in The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net, wrote that

We are moving into a period wholly different from the past era of factory-based mass production of material items when talk of money, prices, returns on investment, laws of supply and demand, and so on all made excellent sense. We now have to think in wholly new economic terms, for we are entering an entirely new kind of economy. The old concepts will just not have value in that new context.

     the pace of change

A recurrent lament from at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is that the pace of change has increased since the preceding generation. It is thus unsurprising to see claims that the rate of technological innovation, commercial restructuring or social change in the 'age of the Internet' is unprecedented.

As we have suggested in the Revolutions profile elsewhere on this site, such claims are ahistorical. Many contemporary laments seem deeply traditional.

One writer complained that

The world is too big for us. Too much is going on, too many crimes, too much violence and excitement. Try as you will, you get behind in the race, in spite of yourself. It's an incessant strain to keep pace ... and still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen so rapidly you're out of breath trying to keep pace with who's in and who's out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature cannot endure much more!

Alas, the author was writing in the Atlantic Journal in June 1833, not in Wired, Who Weekly or the Australian in 2004.

Historical points of reference are provided by Graeme Davison's The Unforgiving Moment: How Australia Learned To Tell The Time (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1993), Harald Weinrich's Knappe Zeit: Kunst und Ökonomie des befristeten Lebens (Munich: Beck 2004), Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time & Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1983), Allen Bluedorn's The Human Organization of Time: Temporal Realities and Experience (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2002), Time: A User's Guide (London: Penguin 2008) by Stefan Klein, Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time & Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1987), Carlo Cipolla's Clocks and Culture: 1300-1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 1967) and David Landes' Revolutions in Time: Clocks & the Making of the Modern World (New York: Norton 1993).

For anthropological perspectives see Alfred Gell's The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images (London: Berg 1992), Pitirim Sorokin's Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time (New York: Russell & Russell 1964), Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum's History of the Hour: Clocks & Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1998) and Robert Levine's A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently (New York: Basic Books 1998). Eviatar Zerubavel's Hidden Rhythms (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1985) and The Seven-Day Circle (New York: Free Press 1985), Barbara Adam's Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press 1995), Todd Rakoff's A Time For Every Purpose: Law & The Balance of Life (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2002) and William Scheuerman's Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2004) are of particular value.

Cesare Marchetti - responsible for Marchetti's Constant - argues that from Neolithic times to our age the time spent travelling by most people each day has remained at a fairly constant 90 minutes, although the distance travelled during that time has expanded dramatically.

     time management and reflection

Weinrich's Knappe Zeit notes the antiquity of notions of time management and a time economy, which predates the vogue for 'scientific management' (or merely Fordist time & motion studies) apparent in adoption of prescriptions from Taylor, Urwick, Gilbreth, Drucker and Deming.

It is also apparent in personal nostrums such as the Filofax or PDAs and the 2006 invention of 'lifehacking', promoted to a suitably affluent audience as "Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" (aka time management for buyers of the O'Reilly Dummies genre).

Drucker announced that

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed

but in practice most lifehackers and users of Filofaxes or their digital equivalents appear averse to 'chunking' and tabulating time use. For many 'management' of the resource is something that occurs by osmosis through purchase of the status symbol, not through day to day use.

Most contemporary time management prescriptions would have been familiar to Epictetus, Emile Coue or to Ben Franklin. The latter would presumably have embraced cracker barrel injunctions such as

Take time to plan your day. You should be in control of your time, not the events of the day

If you know your best time of day is between say 9am and 11am, you should reserve this time for your most important work

Firmly decide when you will complete one or two really important tasks of the day. Block some time out to deal with these - just as you would a meeting - and don't get interrupted

You will never achieve a major objective if you do not break it down into manageable steps. Each day/week you should be nearer to your desired result

Be prepared to say 'NO' to tasks which will prevent you from achieving your objectives Learn to say 'NO' in an acceptable way.

Be assertive rather than aggressive or passive.

They are echoed in works such as Laura Stack's Leave the Office Earlier (New York: Random 2004) - "We're not talking about tidying up the desk clutter" - and David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (London: Penguin 2001), Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst: Prometheus 2008) or Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It (London: Icon 2008) by Steve Taylor.

Timothy Ferriss' fatuous The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (New York: Crown 2007) suggests that the digital elite delegate tiresome tasks, such as reading email or writing, to menials - particularly those in lower-cost places such as Bangalore. "Living?" said Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in 1890, "The servants will do that for us!" ... and don't be surprised if performance by the horrid lower orders is sometimes less than desired.

For pre-digital time management gurus see Robert Kanigel's The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor & the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking 1998), Frank Gilbreth & Ernestine Carey's Cheaper by the Dozen (New York: Cromwell 1948), Jane Lancaster's Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth - A Life Beyond "Cheaper by the Dozen" (Boston: Northeastern Uni Press 2004), Tom Lutz' Doing Nothing A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux 2006) and Anson Rabinbach's The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue & the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1990).

     internet time?

Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch promoted the notion of 'internet time' (with a Greenwich-style time meridian passing through its headquarters in Biel).

Swatch's Internet Time is the same over the globe, with no time zones or daylight saving adjustments. Its system divides the day into 1000 '.beats', each consisting of one minute and 26.4 seconds. It is of interest to fashionistas and journalists but has not had a perceptible impact in the real world.

Proponents of New Earth Time, a competing scheme, inform us that

Earth is now a place. In the future as we are more connected one to another, this place will need a new common language of time. New Earth Time, or NET, is a proposed global standard time which divides the global day with 360 degrees ... Now you can act locally in your time and globally in New Earth Time.

For the development of 'standard' time see Derek Howse's Greenwich Time & the Discovery of Longitude (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1980) and Ian Bartky's Selling The True Time (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2000). They note that the UK developed the first time zone in 1847, with Greenwich Mean Time signals being transmitted by telegraph from 1852. New Zealand beat Australia with establishment of its NZ mean time in 1868, followed by the US (with five time zones being adopted by some 200 cities prior to 1882.

Time Lord (New York: Pantheon 2001) by Clark Blaise notes the work of Canadian railway planner Sir Sandford Fleming, who in 1870 proposed a global scheme for 24 time zones - an hour apart and at at set distances from Greenwich. The 1884 International Meridian Conference under the auspices of unmemorable president Chester Arthur established Greenwich as the prime meridian and adopted a standard 24-hour universal day. Most nations thereafter adopted hourly time zones (15 degrees apart), although the absence of binding international treaties means that China and India each have only a single zone, in contrast to nine in the US and 11 in Russia.

     the 33 hour day

Marketers have promoted the notion of a 33 hour day (or 43, 36 or 32 hour day) as an indication of consumer exposure to print and electronic media.

In 2006 for example Yahoo! and OMD in the Family 2.0 report (leveraging buzz about Web 2.0) claimed that US consumers "now live a 43-hour day" that is "filled with more than 16 hours of interaction with media and technology".

During 2005 MTV more modestly claimed that a "normal" day lasts 32 hours, of which 6.5 hours were "devoted to various media".

If you can't do the maths, do not worry. The 24 hour-plus day simply signifies that individual consumers (or families) are multitasking - aka media stacking - listening to the radio or television while reading a book or newspaper, sending email or web surfing to the accompaniment of noise from MTV or an iPod and so forth. That is hardly revolutionary, as some people were multitasking from the early days of the gramophone or radio (or family piano).

Proponents of a 'higher' reality have offered deliciously zany 'alternative' time schemes. José Arguelles for example proposes replacing "linear time" with a "loom of resonances" that users navigate via a "galactic signature" based on the day of their birth, their "password in fourth-dimensional time". Uh huh. He is reported as explaining to the New York Times that

The post-2012 world will be a world of universal telepathy. We'll be literally living in a new time by a 13-month, 28-day synchronometer that will facilitate our telepathy by keeping us in harmony with everything all the time. There will be a lot fewer of us, with simple lifestyles, solar technology, garden culture and lots of telepathic communication. [Those who] have not evolved spiritually enough to know that there are other dimensions of reality [will be taken away in] silver ships.

Silver ships are presumably better than the nice men in white coats.

Other writers have used 'time' as a basis for grizzles about modernity or capitalism, with or without a genuflection to Heidegger and Virilio. Thomas Erickson fretted that modernity = speed. Speed supposedly -

• is an addictive drug
• leads to simplification and a loss of precision
• creates Fordist effects without greater efficiency
• "demands space" (filling in all available spaces in the lives of others)
• is contagious.

One reader of Eriksen's Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age (London: Pluto Press 2001) thus claimed that information technology encourages "a restless, fleeting mode of being, and a superficial, hurried culture, which is inimical to fundamental values". Head to Todtnauberg, kids, and don't take your iPod!

There are similar critiques in Soraj Hongladarom's 2002 'The Web of Time and the Dilemma of Globalization' in 18 The Information Society (2002) 241-249, Mike Sandbothe's 'Media Temporalities in the Internet: Philosophy of Time and Media with Derrida and Rorty' in 4(2) Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (1998), Heejin Lee & Jonathan Liebenau's 'Time and the Internet at the Turn of the Millennium' in 9(1) Time & Society (2000) 43-56. Other works include Ray Land's 2006 'Networked Learning and the Politics of Speed: a Dromological Perspective' (PDF) and Lance Strate's 2005 'Eight Bits About Digital Communication' (PDF).






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