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December
16, 2005:
Speed Of Life
Interview
with James Gleick, author of
Faster
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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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