Tyranny of the Moment

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Description

The turn of the millennium is characterised by exponential growth in everything related to communication – from the internet and email to air traffic. Tyranny of the Moment deals with the most perplexing paradoxes of this new information age.



Who would have expected that apparently timesaving technology results in time being scarcer than ever? And has this seemingly limitless access to information led to confusion rather than enlightenment?



Eriksen argues that slow time – private periods where we are able to think and correspond without interruption – is now one of the most precious resources we have.
Preface

Introduction: Mind the Gap!

2. Information Culture, Information Cult

3. The Time of the Book, the Clock and Money

4. Speed

5. Exponential Growth

6. Stacking

7. The Lego Brick Syndrome

8. The Pleasures of Slow Time

Sources

Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 août 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783716234
• Langue: English

Extrait

Tyranny of the Moment
Tyranny of the Moment
Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
First published 2001 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Thomas H. Eriksen 2001
The right of Thomas H. Eriksen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 1775 5 hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 1774 8 paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1623 4 ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1624 1 Mobi
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland.    Tyranny of the moment : fast and slow time in the information age / Thomas H. Eriksen.       p. cm.    ISBN 0–7453–1775–8 (cloth) — ISBN 0–7453–1774–X (pbk.)    1. Information society. 2. Information technology—Social aspects. 3. Time—Social aspects. 4. Time pressure. 5. Computers and civilization. I. Title.    HM851 .E75 2001    303.48′33—dc21
2001003084
 
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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed on Demand in the European Union by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
1
Introduction: Mind the Gap!
2
Information Culture, Information Cult
3
The Time of the Book, the Clock and Money
4
Speed
5
Exponential Growth
6
Stacking
7
The Lego Brick Syndrome
8
The Pleasures of Slow Time
Sources
Index
List of Figures
2.1
Number of Internet users, 1995–2000
2.2
Number of TV sets in the world, 1959–97
5.1a
Number of wheat grains for the inventor of chess: the first 10 squares
5.1b
Number of wheat grains for the inventor of chess: the first 20 squares
5.1c
Number of wheat grains for the inventor of chess: the first 32 squares
5.1d
Number of wheat grains for the inventor of chess: all 64 squares
5.2a
Book titles in the UK, 1975–96
5.2b
Book titles published worldwide, 1970–90
5.3
Paper consumption in the world, 1975–2000
5.4
Amazon.com , 1995–99
5.5a
Number of air passengers in Europe, 1993–2010
5.5b
Air passengers to and from the USA, 1993–2010
5.6
Number of tourists in the world, 1950–2010
5.7
Microsoft, 1975–98
5.8
Number of WWW hosts in the world, 1994–2000
5.9
Surplus generated by the Internet, 1996–2002
7.1
E-mail received annually by T.H.E., 1994–2000
Preface
This book began with an uncomfortable feeling, which had grown steadily over the past few years and refused to go away. It seemed that this vague discomfort indirectly tried to tell me that something was about to go terribly wrong. The last couple of decades have witnessed a formidable growth of various time-saving technologies, ranging from advanced multi-level time managers to e-mail, voicemail, mobile telephones and word processors; and yet millions of us have never had so little time to spare as now. It may seem as if we are unwittingly being enslaved by the very technology that promised liberation. Concomitantly, the information revolution has led to a manifold increase in the public’s access to information, which affects hundreds of millions worldwide, certainly including everyone who reads these lines; we enjoy, or suffer from, an availability of information that was unthinkable a generation ago. Yet the incredible range of information freely or nearly freely available has not created a more informed population, but – quite the contrary – a more confused population.
This double paradox, along with a nagging suspicion that changes which ostensibly boost efficiency and creativity may in fact do the exact opposite, is the starting-point for the exploration that follows. There are strong indications that we are about to create a kind of society where it becomes nearly impossible to think a thought that is more than a couple of inches long. Tiny fragments – information lint – fill up the gaps, invade coherent bodies of knowledge and split them up, and seem certain to displace everything that is a little old, a little big and a little sluggish. People in their fifties find it difficult to sell themselves in the labour market unless they masquerade as young, dynamic, open-minded and flexible people. Nothing is more hopelessly dated than last week’s fashion. And so on. I am no romantic or Luddite – like everyone else, I am impatiently waiting for a decent company to offer me a superfast, cheap and stable Internet connection – but it is impossible to applaud the current drift towards a society where everything stands still at enormous speed.
In 1999 I was on a sabbatical from my job at the University of Oslo. For some reason I did not get much research done, but I did work diligently and indeed got a lot of desktop clutter out of the way – articles, proofs, reports, e-mails… Whenever I had cleared my desk, I might go down the corridor to fetch a cup of coffee, and just as I opened the door to re-enter the office, the mess had already begun to reappear. Eventually there was no option other than to sit down calmly to analyse how it could be that it seemed completely impossible to work continuously and slowly with a major project (at last, then, I got some research done, namely on why I couldn’t get any research done). The short answer is that there were always so many other little tasks that had to be undertaken first that I never got going with the slow, tortuous work that is academic research. This realised, I began to write what eventually grew into the present book, which exposes and criticises some unintended consequences of information technology. Given the topic, there is a danger that the book will be filed under cultural conservatism or, worse, cultural pessimism. That would be very far from my intentions. As in my previous work (most of which is unknown outside of Scandinavia), I still hold cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist, politically radical views; I am convinced that cultural and political globalisation may ultimately lead to a truly global humanism, and I also believe that ‘new work’ – the style of work typical for information society – is an advance on the routine drudgery and rigid hierarchies dominating industrial society. Tyranny of the Moment does not, in other words, intend to give voice to yearnings for a society without the Internet, a nostalgic longing for rusty factory gates or, for that matter, the sturdy pleasures of the agrarian life, or any other view of the generic ‘stop the world, let me off’ type. The aim is not and cannot be to abolish information society, but to create an understanding of its unintended consequences.
The acceleration typical of information society has a long prehistory with powerful reverberations through time. It is directly connected with the telegraph and the steam train, and it increasingly affects most aspects of our lives – from family and style of thought to work, politics and consumption. It can be described in a thousand ways and, not least, on several thousand pages. My motivation for treating the topic in a short book of this kind consists in the possibility that it might make a difference – the aim, in a word, is to contribute to a critical reflection about the kind of society we are unwittingly creating. Over the last year I have given many talks on the relationship between time, technology and human life, and audience reactions have been mixed. People who work in the IT sector or other service professions, including journalism and the bureaucracy, have generally reacted favourably to my descriptions of acceleration and hurriedness, confirming the assumption that their working days are overloaded, their leisure time is being chopped up, they are unable to work for a sustained period on a project, which in turn affects their family life, and so on. Others have been less enthusiastic. The very sensible manager of my children’s kindergarten objects that it is impossible for her staff, and for others in similar professions, to reduce their working speed and stress level. A group of local politicians and NGO representatives reacted to one of my rather hurried and fact-laden talks by saying, by way of introduction, that ‘listening to you is enjoyable’ – I am used to this kind of mock flattery, and was by then waiting for the ‘but’ clause – and indeed, ‘but this is only about a handful of people of your own kind, whose level of activity is unnaturally high’. Difficult objections to respond to? Not really. As this book hopefully shows, its topic is relevant to all of us.
A different version of this book was published in Norwegian by H. Aschehoug in spring 2001. In preparing the English version, I considered the possibility of trying to erase every visible trace of its Scandinavian origin, replacing all examples and all local flavour with UK or US equivalents. I soon thought better of it. Instead, I have opted for a compromise, replacing those Scandinavian examples which do not make sense out of context and thereby avoiding involuntary lapses into travel writing, but keeping others. Inviting an English-language readership to see the world in globalisation (or glocalisation) with Oslo as a vantage-point, just this once, will not do any harm. The issues are universal, and a Manhattan perspective is no less provincial than an Oslo perspective anyway.
Oslo, 2001 T.H.E.
1
Introduction: Mind the Gap!

0821: Scan the first page of Aftenposten , the Oslo broadsheet, while waiting for the traffic lights to change. A half-page advert entices readers with the one-liner: ‘Watch Norway’s fastest TV programme’. Thanks anyway.
0835: Buy a tabloid in the canteen. Go