Are we pressed for time? The conventional answer is yes. As a society, we are overworked and oversaturated. Amid instant, on-demand everything, it seems we no longer have time for anything.
Yet empirical studies put these perceptions into question. By most measures, we have more time than we think. “The lack of congruence between the amount of free, discretionary time available to us and our contemporary feelings of harriedness has become known as the time-pressure paradox,” writes Judy Wajcman in Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism.
Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism
By Judy Wajcman (University of Chicago Press)
The usual explanations for this situation, from Georg Simmel to Manuel Castells, have been technological. For Paul Virilio, the history of modernity can be read as “a series of innovations in an ever-increasing time compression.” But this gets it almost exactly backward, Wajcman argues. The time pressure that we feel is real. But the conditions that produce it are cultural, not technological, at least not in the simple, material sense. The problem is not your cellphone or your email, which may be sources of both efficiency and personal connection. As for whether our “multimodal connectivity,” as Wajcman puts it, necessarily leads to a feeling of information overload, just ask a teenager if she gets too many text messages.
Technology, Wajcman tells us, is not just stuff. It is “people, materials, equipment, components, and institutions.” And how tech matters in our lives depends on every aspect of that “assemblage.” This is not to say that the stuff itself doesn’t matter. But the Internet on its own does not accelerate life; it accelerates communication.
“Feelings of time pressure are largely the result of normative changes in expectations,” Wajcman writes, and this insight applies very broadly. For example, at work and at home, people are increasingly subject to a “norm of responsiveness,” an expectation that not only your email but also your work brain is always on. What do you do when you receive an email from your boss at 2 in the morning? And what were you doing reading email at that hour? Neither answer has anything intrinsic to do with the technology that brings email into your household.
A more general lesson can be drawn: Feeling harried is not a result of having too much to do (although that, too, may be true); it is a result of being always on. As Wajcman shows through numerous sociological studies, “multimodal connectivity,” “the norm of responsiveness,” and engagement in tasks that by their very nature can never be completed are things every working parent is familiar with, regardless of whether or not she carries an iPhone. And we all know how well the old saws about housework apply to our email.
The problem, then, is not devices. It’s the expectations we bring to them. And here the history of technology is illuminating. Over the past century, technologies have promised to save us time. Washing machines, for example, were supposed to eliminate hours of drudgery every week. But, as soon as we got them into our homes, we started changing our clothes more often. According to a pioneering 1974 study by Joann Vanek, we spend as much time on laundry as our grandparents did. Wajcman’s own empirical research takes the argument further: In practice, her data shows, owning a washer/dryer actually increases the amount of time spent doing the wash.
The solution? For Wajcman, it is an “emancipatory politics of time,” which views the driving forces behind our feeling of busyness as, above all, cultural and economic. First, we need to understand that every account of time is subjective. Rich and poor do not experience time identically, nor do men and women, a point that Wajcman emphasizes. Indeed, among the wealthy and well-educated, both the feeling and the appearance of busyness are closely linked to status. The paths to solving time-pressure problems for working-class mothers holding down multiple jobs and for corporate managers with nannies are different. The two cases call for different kinds of intervention.
In neither case, Wajcman argues, is the path to emancipation a matter of “digital detox.” For her that’s just another fad diet, superficial, misdirected, and unsustainable over the long term. Wajcman instead urges us to stop worrying about speed per se. That’s always been a red herring. Slow Cities? Sure. Slow Food? Wonderful. But in these formulations, speed is mostly beside the point. The question is what one values, what one attends to. Even from a technical perspective, the phenomena of greatest interest are not those of acceleration but rather what she calls “temporal disorganization” and “temporal density.” The problem is not that things in our world go faster. It is, rather, that time-sensitive tasks in our world are everywhere overlapping and demanding.
“Rather than being endemically pressed for time,” Wajcman writes, “perhaps we are confused about what time we are living in.” The common “folk narrative” tells us we are living in accelerated time. And so it seems we need to catch up. Not so, Wajcman argues. Ours is a time of harriedness, not acceleration. Technology has a role in all of this, of course. But rather than look to technology for shortcuts, maybe we can leverage our devices for mindful lives.
In part, Wajcman’s book participates in the phenomenon that it criticizes. The subtitle, “The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism,” trades on exactly the expectations that her study seeks to debunk. Temporal density, as she describes it, may feel like acceleration to a lot of readers.
Yet the book largely comes through on its promises, providing new frames and new language in an area where truisms are dominant and historical perspective lacking.
Wajcman shows clearly that the feeling of acceleration generally associated with the digital world is much older than the devices of our time. Her book traces it back to 19th-century technologies such as the telegraph, but certainly one could continue back, to the 18th century and the rise of the popular press, and even to the 17th century, when a gentleman carried a pocket watch in the shape of a skull as a memento mori, a reminder of the limited time left to him.
And in each of those eras, as she has for the digital, Wajcman could show with empirical evidence that the fantasy of acceleration was always just that. One way or another, we always fill our time. It’s the thought that those old pocket watches were meant to elicit. And it’s something you may wish to ponder the next time you look at your inbox in the middle of the night.
