Faster The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Audible Audio Edition) James Gleick Random House Audio Books
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From the best-selling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world.
Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness" - a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of the nanosecond", a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we're still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families.
Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon.
Faster The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Audible Audio Edition) James Gleick Random House Audio Books
Believe it or not, this book came to my house faster than any other one. I live in Chile and it took just five days to arrive: normally it takes more.I'm not kidding. I read it in a week and it's still with me, I mean, the ideas and associations that James Gleick does between time and whatever facts of life. Since I read "Faster" I'm always thinking on that curious idea of doing anything faster or in the shortest way possible. But then, what do I get. After all, I said to myself, you did something (whatever) in fifteen minutes less, so what. What those fifteen minutes mean. What do you do now in order to fill up that surplus. The time you win is here, waiting to be used, but the question remains: how.
So this book isn't just a matter of time. That's why it begins with a chapter named "Pacemaker" and finish, just before "The end," with another named "Bored." In between you have thirty five topics or approachings to this crazy idea of going faster not matter why. In this vein, the author takes his time to attack the subject of living faster from different directions: the epoch, the technology, the globalization, the nets, the links, the nodes. And the place where you live: "All humanity has not succumbed equally, of course. If you make haste, you probably make it in the technology-driven Western world, probably in the United States, probably in a large city... Sociologists in sevarel countries have found that increasing wealth and increasing education bring a sense of tension about time... What is true is that we are awash in things, in information, in news... and --strange perhaps-- stuff means speed."
Time -the author tells us-- is not what you have, is that what you live in. A flux that has been segmented in hours, minutes and seconds in our clocks. Do you wear a watch? If you do, then you have been defeated by the matrix of the alloted time. But if you don't, if you live in a forest, far from the madding crowd, what did you get? Time? More time?
Perhaps, the solution to this conundrum is the advice that Anne Morrow Lindbergh gave us in her Gift from the Sea: time is not an issue about quantity but of quality. At any rate, we find in Gleick's book several recipes for dealing with this "something" that is always filtering out from our present, fading away, leaking out. One of such recipes is the multitasking perspective. "No segment of time," says Gleick, "can really be a zero-sum game." You can "drive, eat, listen to a book, and talk on the phone, all at once, if you dare." Maybe is true. All of us have try that sometime. But the problem persists.
Faster doesn't mean better or more. As a quote by Lao Tse I found in a Don de Lillo's novel (White Noise): "There is no difference between the quick and the dead. Both are a unique channell of vitality." James Gleick's book is a comprehensive and very disturbing work about our way of living that doesn't offer a way out, just the insight of a highly clever awareness.
So it deserves your time to read it.
Highly recommended.
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Faster The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Audible Audio Edition) James Gleick Random House Audio Books Reviews
I think there is the nucleus of a really good book here, but the author didn't quite bring it off. There is lots of interesting trivia about the history of time, time-keeping and the use of time. What is missing is an explicit satisfaction of what I think is the author's intended thesis - That all this speeding up has not really gained any ground in our lives.
Our modern (western) lives seem to run in a frantic pace. We seem to be obsessed by "saving" time, but just what is "saving" time? Doing tasks more quickly and leaving more free, idle, time, or rather filling up all your idle time with tasks? Does saving time mean fitting more tasks into your schedule, or having to complete less tasks?
Gleick's "Faster" is all about Time in modern society. About how we spend it (did you know that the average American spends on avarage as much time on government beaurocracy as he or she does on having sex?), about how we try to save it (did you know that a dishwasher only saves you one minute daily on average?), and how our perception of time has changed over the years; one striking example of that last point is how two centuries ago 2000 men were killed in battle, 2 weeks after a peace treaty had been signed, because the information didn't cross the Atlantic quickly enough. It's hard to imagine this today, with CNN and Al-Jazeera broadcasting wars live, and most of us living on a single, coordinated, clock. 200 years ago, if Einstein had invented his Special Theory of Relativity, he would have found it easier than now to explain to people about how two events can influence one another only if information can reach fast enough from one event to the other...
In the many short chapters of this book, Glieck gives numerous examples (some interesting and amusing, but a minority are not very interesting) on what we do to "save time" and increase pace in airline schedules, TV commercials, elevators, household chores, and shows how some of these bring greater efficiency, while others simply cause an arms race of increasing pace of life, from which nobody really benefits.
Believe it or not, this book came to my house faster than any other one. I live in Chile and it took just five days to arrive normally it takes more.
I'm not kidding. I read it in a week and it's still with me, I mean, the ideas and associations that James Gleick does between time and whatever facts of life. Since I read "Faster" I'm always thinking on that curious idea of doing anything faster or in the shortest way possible. But then, what do I get. After all, I said to myself, you did something (whatever) in fifteen minutes less, so what. What those fifteen minutes mean. What do you do now in order to fill up that surplus. The time you win is here, waiting to be used, but the question remains how.
So this book isn't just a matter of time. That's why it begins with a chapter named "Pacemaker" and finish, just before "The end," with another named "Bored." In between you have thirty five topics or approachings to this crazy idea of going faster not matter why. In this vein, the author takes his time to attack the subject of living faster from different directions the epoch, the technology, the globalization, the nets, the links, the nodes. And the place where you live "All humanity has not succumbed equally, of course. If you make haste, you probably make it in the technology-driven Western world, probably in the United States, probably in a large city... Sociologists in sevarel countries have found that increasing wealth and increasing education bring a sense of tension about time... What is true is that we are awash in things, in information, in news... and --strange perhaps-- stuff means speed."
Time -the author tells us-- is not what you have, is that what you live in. A flux that has been segmented in hours, minutes and seconds in our clocks. Do you wear a watch? If you do, then you have been defeated by the matrix of the alloted time. But if you don't, if you live in a forest, far from the madding crowd, what did you get? Time? More time?
Perhaps, the solution to this conundrum is the advice that Anne Morrow Lindbergh gave us in her Gift from the Sea time is not an issue about quantity but of quality. At any rate, we find in Gleick's book several recipes for dealing with this "something" that is always filtering out from our present, fading away, leaking out. One of such recipes is the multitasking perspective. "No segment of time," says Gleick, "can really be a zero-sum game." You can "drive, eat, listen to a book, and talk on the phone, all at once, if you dare." Maybe is true. All of us have try that sometime. But the problem persists.
Faster doesn't mean better or more. As a quote by Lao Tse I found in a Don de Lillo's novel (White Noise) "There is no difference between the quick and the dead. Both are a unique channell of vitality." James Gleick's book is a comprehensive and very disturbing work about our way of living that doesn't offer a way out, just the insight of a highly clever awareness.
So it deserves your time to read it.
Highly recommended.
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