Speeding up?

Todd Gitlin says we’re not, or we are in only specific ways. George Eliot complained already in 1859 that “Leisure is gone . . . even idleness is eager now,” and Nietzsche said that “Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else.”

Actual physical movement has not increased much for the last fifth years. Gitlin writes, “The speed of a jet plane has barely increased in a half century, except for the handful who fly the Concorde. High-end trains have doubled or tripled in speed over that time, and fast cars are faster, but thrilling as these vehicles are, they are mainly for special occasions.”

Still, we have the sense that the modern impulse to speed up is speeding up. Is that true at all? In two areas, Gitlin says. First, in the speed with which speedy devices are disseminated throughout our society: “It took sixty-seven years for telephones to reach 75 percent of American households (in 1957),” but “it took only twelve years for videocassette records to reach three-quarters of American households (1992); seven years for televisions (1955), and it is expected to take seven years for the Internet” (he’s writing in 2002). Things are not moving that much faster, but more people get fast technologies faster.

Second, “the most widespread, most consequential speed-up of our time is the onrush of images – the speed at which they zip throughout the world, the speed at which they give way to more of the same, the tempo at which they move. It is on screens that life seems to accelerate, even as speeding images offer manifold reasons for our bodies to stay still . . . . On the ever-multiplying screens that populate our lives there is endless motion within the frame where once there was stillness. There is staggeringly rapid movement from one frame to the next, one sequence to the next, one program to the next, and, if you like, one channel or station to the next.”