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

1. Pacemaker
2. Life as Type A
3. The Door Close Button
4. Your Other Face
5. Time Goes Standard
6. The New Accelerators
7. Seeing in Slow Motion
8. In Real Time
9. Lost in Time
10. On Internet Time
11. Quick -- Your Opinion?
12. Decomposition takes time
13. On Your Mark, Get Set, Think
14. A Millisecond Here, a Milisecond There
15. 1,440 Minutes a Day
16. Sex and Paperwork
17. Modern Conveniences
18. Jog More, Read Less
19. Eat and Run
20. How Man Hours Do You Work?
21. 7:15 Tooke Shower
22. Attention! Multitaskers
23. Shot-Shot-Shot-Shot
24. Prest-o! Change-o!
25. MTV Zooms By
26. Allegro ma Non Troppo
27. Can You See it?
28. High-Pressure Minutes
29. Time and Motion
30. The Paradox of Efficiency
31. 365 Ways to Save Time
32. The Telephone Lottery
33. Time is Not Money
34. Short-Term Memory
35. The Law of Small Numbers
36. Bored
37. The End
38. Acknowledgements and Notes
39. Index

Comments

Our changing perceptions of time...

[cowboy junkie]

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.

Re:Great book, but no answers

[dlc]

Your comment reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, from Picasso: "Computers are useless. They only give you answers."

• The only downside (if there is one) is that it's all reflection and no solutions>

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!

Missing references

[dsplat]

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.

Chapter 16?

[GreyyGuy]

The chapter's name is Sex and Paperwork? You have to fill out a form now? But I HATE paperwork! ::sigh::

Gleick on Fresh Air

[wholesomegrits]

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.