Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High–Speed Society

In 1999, James Gleick, exploring everyday life in contemporary American society, noted the “acceleration of just about everything”: love, life, speech, politics, work, TV, leisure, etc. 1 With this observation he certainly is not alone. In popular as well as scientific discourse about the current evolution of Western societies, acceleration figures as the single most striking and important feature. 2 But although there is a noticeable increase in the discourse about acceleration and the shortage of time in recent years, the feeling that history, culture, society, or even ‘time itself’ in some strange way acceleratesis not new at all; it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity as such. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck have persuasively argued, the general sense of a “speed-up” has accompanied modern society at least since the middle of the eighteenth century. 3 And indeed, as many have observed and empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speed-up of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life. In terms of its structural and cultural impact on modern society, this change in the temporal structures and patterns of modernity appears to be just as pervasive as the impact of comparable processes of individualization or rationalization. Just as with the latter, it seems, social acceleration is not a steady process but evolves in waves (most often brought about by new technologies or forms of socio-economic organization), with each new wave meeting considerable resistance as well as partial reversals. Most often, a wave of acceleration is followed by a rise in the ‘discourse of acceleration,’ in which cries for deceleration in the name of human needs and values are voiced but eventually die down. 4