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Recently in Salon Technology

Can Robert Johnson bring more blacks online?
Black Entertainment Television's founder is launching a $35 million African-American portal site. Will it help mend the digital divide?
By Raymond Rawlinson
[10/06/99]

Technology: View from the top
Linux at the bat
Red Hat's Marc Ewing steps up to the plate against Microsoft in the billion-dollar free-software ballgame.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/04/99]

Why Microsoft doesn't rule the Net
Redmond's observers keep counting on the software giant to become a Net company. What's wrong with that?
By Mark Gimein
[10/01/99]

A worm in the Apple?
QuickTime 4.0 is like nothing you've ever seen on a Mac. Has Apple broken its intuitive user interface?
By Daniel Drew Turner
[09/30/99]

Forbidden romance?
Why are electronically published romance novels not receiving the blessings of the traditional steamy-fiction industry?
By Janelle Brown
[09/29/99]

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Although the book whirls across a dizzying variety of topics, the main focus is on "the thoughtlessness that creeps into our lives when we speed it up." In Shenk's world, every new technology has a dark side. Personalization services constrict readers to narrow worldviews; interactive toys offer false intelligence to children; Photoshop is used to fictionalize "real" photography; Java gimmicks on Web pages train us to demand style over substance. Information technologies, in general, are at the root of "the coarsening of our culture" (a quote Shenk nabs from William Bennett) -- creating shock jocks like Howard Stern and false punditry all across the dial. Shenk even laments the way that speedy e-mail responses beget tiny misspellings that are overlooked in our haste.

Shenk's fear is personified by an image at the close of his book -- a Japanese businessman, hustling through a tranquil rock garden on a cell phone, too busy nattering away to notice the beauty around him. "What more perfect image of the clear and present danger," writes Shenk, "... that people will become so addicted to the pulse of electronic communication, trafficking in the latest data updates, that they will become oblivious to serenity -- oblivious, even, to history."

Fatalistic? Perhaps. Shenk's vision of a world of info-addicted automatons verges on the extreme -- omnipresent cell phones may be a symptom of connection-obsession, but it's a leap to expect that everyone who enjoys information devices will forget to stop and smell the roses. But Shenk is not alone in his pessimism; the views he presents are quite similar to those of James Gleick, whose masterful "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" provides a more nuanced view of this topic of "hurry sickness."

The main premise of "Faster" is captured in this succinct thought: "If we do not understand time, we become its victims." Gleick portrays a world in which everything has been accelerated, with few real benefits. "In the world before FedEx, when 'it' could not absolutely, positively be there overnight, it rarely had to be," he writes. Instead of a sped-up world allowing us more time for the important things, we are resorting to depressingly shallow time-savers like the best-selling book "One Minute Bedroom Stories."

But increased speed is of little benefit. Although Gleick doesn't outright condemn our culture's insatiable demand for speed, he, like Shenk, seems to have little positive to say about it. "Connectedness has brought glut," Gleick writes. And: "In the evolutionary competition for business fitness, the fast has driven out the slow. Sometimes the consumer benefits. Sometimes everyone just scurries around in real time." In fact, he writes, making the world faster causes us to lose time: We have to constantly train ourselves just to keep up with our own jobs -- accelerating technologies make our skill sets obsolete within years, if not months -- and we walk around half-awake for lack of sleep. We miss out on a symphony because radio stations only play the first movement; we dedicate only 30 minutes a week to sex -- about as much time as we spend on paperwork, he points out.

What we are getting more of, however, is advertising. This is where Douglas Rushkoff chimes in -- pointing out that not only do our new information technologies provide yet more space for commercial messages (rather than thoughtful commentary), but we have less and less energy to think about what they are telling us. "Commercial media seems to have taken on a life of its own, dedicated to selling more goods to more people in less and less time," he writes in "Coercion: Why We Listen to What 'They' Say."

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