eated in the interest of expanding free time have done the opposite. We are now "accessible" both in and outside the workplace, responding to the needs of machines. However, if we pause we become impatient, we are bored. We are intoxicated by speed. Gleick places mania as the opposite of boredom and then places it into a historical context. Boredom is a relatively modern phenomenon: "The word boredom barely existed even a century ago" [270]. The author relates the concept of boredom to our cultural approach to time. We relax at speed, forever trying to scrape off a few seconds here and there so we can get something else done because there?s never enough time. This cultural acceleration is producing a generation of attention-deficit-speed freaks, a new race of multitasking superhumans, capable of simultaneously downloading files, channel surfing, and writing e-mail. Virilio?s Speed and Politics and Gleick?s Faster are essay on our culture's experience of time and speed. Both books imply that we are living in an information-culture and technology is our religion. Virilio analyses how technologies have been developed for the war economy and gives an account how those technologies have crept into and militarized civilian lives. He illustrates the interdependence between speed, technology, and war. Gleick?s meditation on hurriedness illustrates how those technologies have altered our perception of time, which in turn has altered the individual?s concept of self. We are in a rush. We are making haste. A compression of time characterizes the post-contemporary society. Stress, an adrenaline rash, and mania, are symptom of the speed sickness, a result of the rapid march of technological progress. We hurry up and wait, in doctors' offices, traffic jams, airport gates, on hold with the tech line. An inflexible networked system needs only one glitch, a delayed flight, to starts an inexorable ripple effect that can turn into a catastrophic tidal wa...
