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November
19, 2002:
The Speed of Life
Interview
with James Gleick, author of Faster
Mike
Carruthers:
It certainly seems that the pace of life is faster than it used
to be. Perhaps it's human nature.
James
Gleick:
Given a choice between slowing down and speeding up, we choose
to speed up. Given a choice between doing less and doing more,
we almost always choose to do more, and that gives rise to a
really pervasive sense of acceleration.
James Glick,
author of the book Faster,
says this faster pace isn't necessarily good or bad, but some
of this increased speed of life has to be questioned.
Action
films have sped up every year for the past two decades. A car
chase in any given film today, it's much faster in the edited
sequence that we're looking at. Television commercials, at the
same time, have sped up in the same way so that we're bored
if we're see a television commercial in the style of the 1960s
or even 1970s. Even solitaire is a fine example: there are an
astounding number of people who find it too boring and too slow
to play solitaire these days with cards because they can play
it a little bit faster and more conveniently on their computer
screen.
One of the
driving forces behind this increased speed of life is that by
doing things faster, we're hopefully saving time.
And then
at the end of the day, wondering, "Where's the payoff?
Where's all the time that I'm supposed to have saved? Where
did it accumulate and when do I get to spend it on what I want?"
At somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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