commodity to be bought, sold and invested. Societies running at different speeds produce different cultures. . As the speed of devices accelerates, we are retrained to faster rhythms. Waiting 10 seconds for an elevator feels intolerably long. We take our news in fast-food bites, and even music, the art made of time, is getting shorter. Classical stations rarely play an entire symphony any more. The 1,440-minute day is not expandable, the average American spends almost as much time per day filling out paperwork for the federal government (4 minutes) as having sex (4.5 minutes). Gleick questions what is "more" time; is it fuller or freer? Is time saved when we manage to leave it empty, or when we stuff it with multiple activities, useful or pleasant? The implications of time-saving is that we're in a rush; we've got short attention spans; everything's moving faster. Telecommunications has made the transfer of information easy and quick. Therefore, the expectation for the amount of work to be completed is higher. This evolution of time has changed our perception and experience of the world. Through fragmenting time we have become more fragmented ourselves. We have all become adept at processing millions of bits of information simultaneously, multitasking. We eliminate all pauses and try to compress everything into a single moment; television and radio interviews are routinely compressed slightly, to remove the annoying pauses and delays of human speech. We have become speed hybrids, guzzling espresso and working 18 hour days, constantly plugged into the Net and mobile phone. Our eyes have adapted to more cuts per second, and our multitasking skills have never been sharper. Speeding and multitasking is a cultural disorder. New technologies, like caffeine or amphetamines, are "additives for our engines." We want to move faster, think faster, and do several things at once. Laborsaving and convenience-oriented technological innovations cr...
