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Faster
Thanks to Crag Pfeifer for sending a review of James Gleick's Faster. If you've ever felt like life's moving faster then ever, this is worth reading.
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
author
James Gleick
pages
324
publisher
Pantheon, 1999
rating
8/10
reviewer
Craig Pfeifer (cpfeifer@acm.org,http://www.cpfeifer.org
ISBN
0679408371
summary
An observation of some of the causes, symptoms and results of living in an accelerated age.Rating: (8/10)
The Scenario Ever feel that the pace of life today is much faster than 10 or 20 years ago? You're not alone. James Gleick offers us 37 insightful observations of the causes, symptoms and results of living in an accelerated age. Interestingly enough, this book is the victim of the condition it describes: out of the 37 chapters, not one of them is more than 12 pages long (7.36 pages on average).
If you are looking for high theory about the effects of technology on society and culture, shoot for Marshall McLuhan. If you're wondering who flipped the switch 20 years ago to push western society into overdrive, read on.
What's Bad? Absolutely nothing. The anecdotes hit their mark each time. But don't expect a precise scientific examination of the psycho/sociological effects of technology. Faster is a well-grounded reflection on the current state of society with references to relevant articles and interviews. These reflections do tend to wander slightly off course. For example, you probably didn't expect to receive a history of the major advances in modern elevator technology, in the middle of an explanation of the origin of the 'close door' button. What's Good? Gleick's perspective has the clarity of someone looking in the window of the western world, and the intimacy of a fellow participant. Gleick has a gift for expressing technical subjects with such sensitivity, passion and understanding that the topics and people come alive on the page. This is evident in Gleick's other works, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman most notably. Also, a wonderful bibliography is provided for further reading.
Summary of Selected Chapters: Pacemaker "Humanity is now a species with one watch and this is it," explains Gleick on his trip to the National Directorate of Time at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, DC. In the first chapter, Gleick takes us on a visit to the global metronome that measures time in units so small they pass before you notice they existed. Here devices track the frequencies of atoms and engage 50 other devices around the world in the same conversation millions of times a day: what time is it? We know that a day is 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds, but the length of a year changes. To account for the subtle wobble of the earth's axis and gradually slowing spin rate, they add a "leap" second whenever it is neccessary to keep everthing in synch. As time goes on, we will have to add this second more and more often.
The second half of this chapter is an overview of the 36 upcoming vignettes: Technology enables us to process more information than ever before, but it also allows us to produce more information than ever before. "500 channels" at the click of a button on a remote control, 30 different coffees at the corner coffee franchise. "What is true that we are awash in things, information, in news, in the old rubble and shiny new toys of our complex civilization, and -- strange, perhaps -- stuff means speed."
How Many Hours Do You Work? Juliet Schor calculated that the average American employee spends a full extra month working today compared with similar employees in the 1970's. Based on this, Gleick examines where all of this time went. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, payroll records show a stedy decling in weekly hours over the past four decades. But the research is inconclusive: some studies show that we're working more than ever, others show that working hours actually have decreased steadily since the 1950's. This could be due to the fact that the traditional definition of "work time" is changing. Today more people "work from home," spend more time outside of the office thinking about work, spend more time commuting, and take less vacation time than 20 years ago. Why? Gleick posits that time has become a "negative status symbol." If you have "spare time", you must not be very important. How about lunch next week? Let me check my Palm Pilot/Franklin Planner/leather-bound officious looking object that projects to everyone around me that I'm a very busy person... This week is bad, how about in two weeks? "Overwork equals importance." says Gleick. Attention Multitaskers! This chapter (weighing in at a terse 5.5 pages) hits very close to home. One of the biggest contributors to the speed up of life in the western world: multitasking. The simultaneous execution of unrelated activities (flossing and catching up on email) makes us feel more efficient that we shave seconds off of our daily routine, and ensures that we never have to sit idle. New devices have encouraged this habit: cell phones, so we can have meaningful conversations wherever we are, the remote control so we can watch 3 programs all at once, and the ultimate multitasking tool, the computer. Gleick tells us about a Bloomberg employee who is engaged in a phone conversation to a colleague in New York, and simultaneously exchanging e-mail volleys with another colleague in Connecticut. Multitasking is another way we try to do more with our vanishing time, and make sure that every second of our attention is fully utilized. So What's In It For Me? The insights are painfully true, and hit home on multiple levels. The French novelist Stendahl said "a novel is a mirror walking down a road." And that is exactly what purpose this books serves; it is a reflection of the collective choices we have made as a society over the past 20 years, for better or worse. Faster doesn't pass judgement about whether the acceleration that has taken place over the past 20 years is a "good thing" or a "bad thing," it simply points them out and presents the context which allowed them to happen.Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
Table of Contents- Pacemaker
- Life as Type A
- The Door Close Button
- Your Other Face
- Time Goes Standard
- The New Accelerators
- Seeing in Slow Motion
- In Real Time
- Lost in Time
- On Internet Time
- Quick -- Your Opinion?
- Decomposition takes time
- On Your Mark, Get Set, Think
- A Millisecond Here, a Milisecond There
- 1,440 Minutes a Day
- Sex and Paperwork
- Modern Conveniences
- Jog More, Read Less
- Eat and Run
- How Man Hours Do You Work?
- 7:15 Tooke Shower
- Attention! Multitaskers
- Shot-Shot-Shot-Shot
- Prest-o! Change-o!
- MTV Zooms By
- Allegro ma Non Troppo
- Can You See it?
- High-Pressure Minutes
- Time and Motion
- The Paradox of Efficiency
- 365 Ways to Save Time
- The Telephone Lottery
- Time is Not Money
- Short-Term Memory
- The Law of Small Numbers
- Bored
- The End
- Acknowledgements and Notes
- Index
The fact that we are going to get Book Reviews faster is awesome !! I for one look forward to the increased frequence of the reviews. I know some have called for a slower pace, but those requests usually come from people who read slowly. I am elated to see Slashdot cater to us fast readers.
thank you
Admittedly, I only read the first third of this book, but it was the most boring thing I've read in a long time. It's the same crap you've heard from whiney editorial columnists in newspapers for ages now. "Life is too short now. No one has time to do anything they want to do." Blah, blah, blah ad nauseum.
I really liked James Gleick's "Chaos" and "Genius", but this book (the first third of it, anyway) seemed to add absolutely nothing new to an already boring one-sided conversation.
"I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time." - Steven Wright
The only downside (if there is one) is that it's all reflection and no solutions.
The same can be said for Darwin's "Origin of the Species".
"Faster" sounds like a trend observers journal. Do we want proposed solutions to the process of life? I'm not so sure. I think that a keen observation is enough.
This way, those folks who are bothered by their ever-accelerating life-style can take steps to slow down. Others might actually get some useful hints on how to work even faster.
Doing paperwork while having sex?? Who would have thunk? Paper-cuts much be a b!tc# though.
Hey! Hacking while fscking!! The best of both worlds!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
Lunch-time doubly so.
Hours, minutes, seconds -- all were invented by man for his own convenience. How much of our perceived lack of time is just that -- pure perception? If we decide how to measure it -- if we decide to measure it at all -- do we not also decide that we do not have enough of it?
It is because They(TM) define the standard unit of time? Perhaps we should be lobbying for Open Source time instead of software?
(Yes, I'm waxing philosophical. So sue me.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's a case of unstable equilibrium. Imagine a ball on the top of a hill. It is ready to roll, but has no direction to roll in. The slightest disturbance, however, will get it rolling.
Moral to the story: use less time on your microwave--you don't want the water to be superheated!
--The basis of all love is respect
That strikes too close to home. Of course, the reason I do it is because reading my email in the morning is a habit, and I can remember to floss only if I combine flossing and reading email. I don't do it to save time, I do it to actually remember to floss!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The most important point that Gleick makes in the book is how we've moved from knowing nothing more than what season it is to having a need to use devices such as atomic clocks to mark precisely the passing of tiny fractions of a seconds, and how that increasing need for precision has altered our lives for both good and bad. It's incredible when you start thinking about it how just dividing years, months, days, hours, etc. into more precise segments has had such an amazing effect on human history.
Well, actually, I think you are missing Picasso's point -- the point that anything which presents only answers is useless. Real solutions and real knowledge only come from reflection, from the give and take of questions and answers going both ways. Yes, a computer can tell you the sine of 1, but it cannot explain it to you in a way you will understand (unless it has been specifically told how to do so).
And for the record I wasn't saying that the comment's poster (I don't even remember whoit was, sorry!) was getting it all wrong; I was just reminded of the quote upon initial reading of the comment. Of course we all want to hear other people's solutions. Chances are pretty good (almost 100%, in fact) that any solution to the problems discussed in the book is going to either come from someone who is not me, or someone else is going to contribute a great deal to the solution. Not seeing that is blindness, pure and simple. Well, blindness and a whole lot of egotism.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
But we are not the three-year-olds in this equation, we are the doctors, or at least we should be. The doctor understands the drug, the researched who discovered the drug understands it. What you are suggesting is more along the lines of: 3-year-old with terminal cancer finds a magic pill on the side of the road, eats it, and gets better. No one knows what the pill was, or where it came from, or how it cured her. Thoughtful analysis of the human condition is not the same as curing a terminal illness (well, some buddhists think it is, but you know what I mean).
I agree -- a cure for cancer is not useless. I think somewhere along the line we started discussing two different things. Expecting answers from a book, which was written by (effectively) a pundit (as far as I can tell, he is not a licensed metaphysician, a theologian, physicist, or anything like it), is a little like expecting your computer to start spitting out answers to all the important questions. Those answers come from interaction, intelligent reflection on the issues, and a variety of viewpoints, and definitely not from one single source.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
Your comment reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, from Picasso: "Computers are useless. They only give you answers."
But would you want someone else's solutions? I think the author's point is, "Here's some stuff I've noticed." You need to take it from there, and create your own solutions.
Personally, I'd like to see more books like this. Isn't this the kind of thing that makes for really good standup comedians? Observations? Why did so many people like Seinfeld, a self-proclaimed "show about nothing"? Because it was all observation and reflection, albeit with a humorous bent.
I definitely think I'm going to grab this book, it sounds like a great read.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
...this chapter alone is worth the price of the book. It's both hilarious and disturbingly insightful. (The title is a play off of the closing sentences of the previous chapter.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
This article kind of makes it sound like living in the modern age is a disease.
-toup
>Is that really true that the "Close Door" button on elevators was not :)
>always there but added on? When was this added to our everyday
>elevators? This really does say something about us if we feel that
>those 2 seconds we just saved by closing the elevator door a hair
>faster really affected our time management. LOL!
My condo elevators have "close" buttons, and they do work. I've also seen the kind that are mere placebos (or perhaps trigger a timer).
I tend to slyly observe people in situations like elevator rides, and I think I can say that for a lot of people it's not about
impatience, but about control. An elevator ride is already a somewhat uncomfortable situation for many people, and pressing the button (however impotently) feels better than waiting for
the doors to close at their own machine whim. When I'm not in my little tower condo I work as a sysadmin, and I'd venture to say the observation extends to a lot of other places where people have to wait on technology, especially technology they don't (and increasingly, can't hope to) understand. For my part, I rarely ride the elevators anyway, and I feel that time passes slower and qualitatively better when I take the stairs (even though the time invested averages about the same).
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
Alvin Toffler wrote about this idea several decades ago in Future Shock. He talked about the accelerating pace of our lives. He pointed out that past generations had seen a rate of change that could be ignored, or in the first half of this century slowly adapted to. That is obviously no longer the case. He spoke of obsolescent knowledge. It seems clear to me (although I haven't read it yet) that Faster explores those ideas with the perspective that several decades of living with constant change has brought.
Our rate of change carries with it twin dangers, the Scylla and Charibdis of our age. Merely to keep up, one must be an unrepentant neophile. And yet, we cannot blindly accept all that is new as a boon. I don't believe that we can keep new ideas from being distributed, nor would I approve of doing it. We need to constantly consider the consequences they may bring and prepare ourselves for them.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Even if the pace of life is accelerating now, it has been for quite a few years. Probably since WW2. Alvin Toeffler covered this in the early 70's with "Future Shock". It still is a cause for concern though. But since I've seen so much material on this subject already I don't think I'll waste my time with this book.
Trying to make adolescents abstain/wait from sex.
Eat slower and eat less
Prolong sickness/death even when 'its over'
more work = less sleep (i love sleep)
Wait longer in line
And of course, these pressures of society often cause rebellion, such as more obesity, teenage sex/pregnancy, smoking, and others. This inversion is causing more problems than began with.
My personal belief is that as more and more parents are not taking care of their child as they should be (working mothers, one-parent families, day-care, etc.), children are being weened earlier, and grow complexes and fixations.
The World War II era is the time where many women went to work, and stayed there after the war's end. They also bred many baby[-boomers]. This is now the generation that is causing such psychotic behavior, because of fixations that many did not get over. There's a huge anal-retentive generation there, and it's still being passed on down. Now everyone is going crazy...
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
The chapter's name is Sex and Paperwork? You have to fill out a form now? But I HATE paperwork! ::sigh::
I was really looking forward to Faster. I'm a huge fan of Chaos, but Faster doesn't quite cut it. The book is far too long, and after the first half I felt like shouting "okay James, I get it"....Gleick offers no solutions, or even opinions, and an entire book of discursive examples is pretty dull. This book would have made a great essay, but the fact that life is accelerating due to the advent of modern technology is obvious, and doesn't merit a whole book of examples. A debate about the merits of this "faster" society would have been nice, but all we see here is an a book basically saying "life is getting faster you know!"...big deal, I could have told you that for free. If you're expecting any sort of insight into an accelerating society, then look elsewhere. Disappointing.
The only downside (if there is one) is that it's all reflection and no solutions. I think the review tried to suggest this, but didn't quite pull it off. After reading about 20 chapters of ludicrous human behavior, (How many of us keep hitting the close door button on an elevator praying it might work quicker if we hit it more) - I guess I kind of was hoping for the author's opinion as to the solution, but he didn't have any. You get done with the book feeling the changes in society are permanent. And barring economic disaster, maybe they are.
Otherwise, it was a great book - I really recommend this one myself
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
LMAO! Very funny. TM your songs have improved much over the last few weeks. Although you seem to be stuck in the late 60's and early 70's, Your showing your age a little.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Hello Slashdot my old friend.
I've come to program you again.
because a haxor softly creeping,
guessed my password while I was sleeping.
And the flames
with just remnants in my brain,
don't remain,
upon the threads... of Slashdot.
In flick'ring lights I type along.
Submit my post, what was wrong?
Letters haloed by my squinting,
at the flame that I was typing.
For my eyes were blurred
by the flash of the cathode beam,
term'nal screen,
and all the trolls... on Slashdot.
And in the fuzzy light I saw
10,000 zealots, maybe more:
Zealots reading blinking,
Zealots flaming without thinking.
Zealots modding posts
that karma never shared.
(No one dared,
disturb the Perl... of Slashdot)
"Fools," said I, "you do not know.
Honest opinion makes the karma grow.
They post the rules so that I might read them.
Meta mod 'cause we ignore them."
But my words
like unread printout fell,
(Oh well...)
An echo,
On the threads... of Slashdot.
.
Take all good things in moderation, including moderation.
Hrmm, I need to use my minutes more efficiently...
If it takes 4 mins to microwave a pizza, maybe I should switch to a burrito, at 2 mins...
1,440 1,436 1,438
1,440 1,440 1,440
100% 99.7% 99.9%
Look at all of the time I could save!
.2% of my day...
It all adds up.
Eh...
"Practically speaking, if timesaving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It's really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have *lots of time*. Elsewhere, you're too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won't have to work so hard."
-Benjamin Hoff
Happy people make bad consumers.
I started reading Hemos' review prepared to argue: faster machines don't make as much difference as faster brains & people. Looks like Gleick appears to already agree with me. Spoils a good argument. I'll make it anyway because my desktop is busy processing log files. Argument: more information doesn't speed up the pce of life, because available info has far outstripped available mental resources for a long time. Question: when was the last time anyone could be a true 'renaissance man (or woman' and have a handle on everthing going on in science, politics, economics, etc? Answer: the renaissance. Even in the 1950's nobody could really keep up with everything going on around them. The speed of life is determined by the speed at which people are able to, and are willing to process info and make decisions. The speed of life picks up when more and more people are willing to work longer hours, multi-task, multi-think, multi-multi. So why are things faster now? because culture has changed, and because the avg IQ of the population has been increasing steadily over the years. No one knows why. Probably IQ is increased by a generally stimulating environment more than by formal schooling, which hasn't improved much.
Democracy is the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the others. -Winston Churchill
An AC posted a comment about hearing Gleick on Fresh Air. That's the same interview that hooked me.
Follow this link to hear the interview in Real Audio format. Gleick talks about the book and Terry Gross tries to pry into his life and a plane accident that almost killed him. It's a good interview.
The Gleick interview is towards the end of the show.
No sig is worth reading.
Since most people feel that they work harder now than corresponding people in the past, it is not surprising that Gleick should bring up the statistic that the average work week is longer now than it was in the 1970s. But a more interesting statistic to me is that our average work week now is actually shorter (by 8-10 hours) than what it was in the 1900s. Sadly, I don't remember the reference on this, but it was something reputable.