Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 074531774X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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Communities of monasteries to largescale industrial society. Modern societies are characterised by a particular kind of complexity. It is not the only one possible. Indian caste society and traditional Australian world-views are two spectacular examples of social and cultural complexity, respectively. Nonetheless, modernity was, in the latter half of the twentieth century, in a uniquely important position; it was hegemonic on the verge of becoming universal. It synchronises and standardises an.
Standardises, chops up and eradicates subjectivity. The noisy, fast and anonymous life characterising the productive process, communication technology and – increasingly – the consumption of the second half of the nineteenth century, was perceived as something new. Not everybody was equally impressed. Speed 57 The novelist Knut Hamsun, who lived and worked in the USA for several years in the 1880s, was at the outset impressed by the great technical advances of the country. In a letter to a.
Production of 62 Tyranny of the Moment goods) with environmental concerns as a starting-point, or by referring to the lifespan of products or that rather vaguer category called ‘quality’. A common anecdote about the relationship between the USA and Great Britain is the one about lawns. ‘How should we go about getting lawns as nice as the ones you have?’ asks the impatient American. The Englishman answers, ‘Start 400 years ago.’ Many products can be made faster and more efficiently without a.
Born in the 1940s teach someone born in the 1970s about personal computers and their use? How can an older person in their forties even contemplate explaining the challenges of multi-ethnicity to a 15-year-old? And what do mum and dad really know about the importance of travelling to the Far East and Latin America before one goes on to university, or why any healthy teenage girl has to send several SMS messages every day to her friends in order to remain in touch and not be socially isolated; or,.
However, as indicated indirectly in the previous chapters, the outcome has been the exact opposite. E-mail and mobile telephony creates a kind of flexibility entailing that one is expected to be accessible at any time. One is, in a sense, never properly out of the office. Suppose I have been physically out of the office for a day; I return, turn on the computer, and receive an avalanche of e-mails. Several of them end on the ominous note: ‘Call me before 1:30 this afternoon.’ Furthermore, those.