Faster The Acceleration Of Just About Everything

Posted In: Faster

Amos Blomker says...

"Faster" is a book about the modern culture of speeding up to save milliseconds.James Gleick finds so many interesting aspects of this "age of acceleration" that we are now living in...further, he wastes no time in describing the many facets of this new lifestyle and the possible ramifications of what he calls "hurry sickness".

Why are we in such a rush?? Are we really saving time? And just what do we DO with those few seconds we seem to save by multitasking even the smallest of our daily activities?

"Faster" answers many of those questions and it also looks into other scientific aspects of time and how we perceive it.I highly recommend this book for those who feel rushed in their lives but don't know why.I also recommend it for anyone interested in the science of time and time travel.James Gleick is a genius.He has an incredible way of provoking the reader to look closer into something and see what is really happening there.

Hurry up and read this book, you'll be amazed at what you'll learn.

Posted on December 5, 2010

Felix Nuncio says...

I had a similar experience with Gleicks' previous book 'Chaos': I had trouble putting it down and ended up reading the entire book in 2 days...in 'Faster' he has clearly mastered the style of writing loosely refered to as 'pop-science'...while this 'anecdote mixed with fact' style has been imitated in many other books of this sort Gleick manages to grab the reader by both lapels and doesn't let go until they turn the last page...while the content of 'Faster'is less engaging than 'Chaos' his style keeps you turning pages...it is the perfect book for a transatlantic flight!

Posted on December 5, 2010

Tajuana Bari says...

I've rated "Faster" only 3 stars not for want of James Gleick's writing ability, but for how quickly I predict the book will date in This Faster World.Having enjoyed "Chaos" and "Genius", I knew that Gleick researches well, interviews wisely and has the penmanship to make brave new science (and wacky quantum thinkers) accessible to the layest, laziest reader (using myself as the yardstick of course).

This time around, Gleick charts lucidly and with his usual wry humour the parabolic curve taken by the lives of those of us in the "developed" world.In short order, the author introduces us to the man who keeps time for the world (and asks The Director what watch he wears); guides us on a tour through the unbelievable engine of Directory Assistance (where efficiency and productivity is measured in micro-seconds); and teaches us that the height limit of a skyscraper is determined more by the number of elevators needed to service such an Olympus than any other engineering constraints (this, dear cultured reader, is a science journalist who calls up Kafka and Escher when imagining a tower made up of only elevators).

But wouldn't so accurate a snapshot of the turn of this millennium look positively sepia-toned in the future which is barrelling down on us like a bullet-train?Of course, Gleick would probably feel vindicated that even a book as snappy and modern as this one will become historical research fodder quicker than any science book ever before.

Is "Faster" for you?Well, take this short quiz: Do you stab the door close button repeatedly (it's an impotent placebo in many lifts)?Are you the person who's checked in one good hour before flight-time, or the one who throws himself through the plane door seconds before it closes for take-off (and which is the one who suffers from "speed-sickness")?Does your remote-control jockeying skills and mercury concentration allow you to watch 3 hour-long shows and 15 music videos in one hour (thereby missing some of the smartest fast-cut ads ever created)?

But I expect I've lost my target audience ... this review took longer than 12 seconds to read, didn't it?

Posted on December 6, 2010

Verona Dutton says...

Gleick's slim little book about the quickening pace of...well, everything...turned out to be surprisingly tedious. The book's main drawback is that it's nothing more than a collection of loosely related anecdotes: how airline scheduleing software optimizes plane routes, how call switching programs handle zillions of calls, how movies are compressed into MTV-like bursts, how modern audiences can't sit still for a full symphony, etc. (If lists like this actually interest you, you might like "Faster".) While there are plenty of discreet observations of quick "stuff", there's almost no analysis to speak of, no discussion of the implications of this increasing quickness or speculation on where it might ultimitely lead.

The writing style is largely glib and ironic, offering the reader little substance to chew on. A prime example of the irony of this book is the fact that many of the chapters are only three pages long.

Posted on December 6, 2010

Aurore Mateus says...

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but this book makes you so aware of how time is used to sell everything. America is obsessed with time, after reading this book I began to see its influence everywhere. I loved the concept that there is a negative correlation between free time and success. I makes you realize the folly of it all. After reading this book, when you see people who are running around, on their cell phones, trying of organize and multi-task their lives (you may be one of them) you'll smile a bit. They're places where doing things faster is better (computers for example), but for many things there comes a point where faster is not better, or cheaper, or anything other than faster. It makes you think, actually if you stop what your doing, clear your head, and think about how time has influenced your life, then this book has achieved its purpose (I think, but then again I don't have a cell phone, and I rarely multi-task so what do I know). No pun intended, but the book is a fast read. The style is engaging and the material is just great. I really liked Choas (a previous book by James Gleick), but this is the his best book. I would recommend this to everybody. It won't change your life, but it will shift your perception a little.

Posted on December 6, 2010

Leena Gurwell says...

After hearing so many people rave above Gleick's two previous books, "Chaos" and "Genius", I was very much taken aback by this unstructured collage of factoids and tidbits. Written in a whiny and grating first-person address to the reader, the book regurgitates endless anecdotal and semi-documented examples of how modern life has accelerated the pace of everyday life. It's somewhat bizarre (or perhaps nudge-nudge, wink-wink, ironic) that the book is divided into wee snippets of psuedo-chapters, reflecting/acknowledging?, the national decline in attention span. While some of these individual items are certainly interesting in their own merit-I liked the discussion of the original research into "Type A" personalities, the bit on telephone voice acceleration technology, and the brief economics of time part near the end-the overall effect is like reading a scrapbook of magazine sidebars and mini-features with no framework other than the self-evident notion that in the industrialized West, we live at a "faster" pace than any previous generation. Nowhere is there any discussion of how we might, as a society, turn away from this trend, or even if we should. (Gleick implicitly characterizes this trend as a negative one throughout). A breathlessly superficial survey which offers no analysis or insight.

Posted on December 7, 2010

Tona Bretana says...

James Gleick's "Faster" is a wry, many-faceted meditation that takes as its starting point the notion that our lives, both at work and at leisure, have inexorably sped up. That's not a new idea, of course. Get any group of people 35 or older reminiscing, and the topic will eventually be chewed over till everyone sounds like Dana Carvey's Cranky Old Man on Saturday Night Live....

'Why, we remember the days when you had to actually go into a bank and see a teller to get cash, when nobody had a fax machine, when we had to keep from playing our favorite tunes too often because, as every audiophile knew, the grooves on the LP needed time to rest; and, dammit, we liked it that way!'

Employing a knowing, tongue-in-cheek style and, yes, a suitably fast pace, Gleick examines every time-related dimension of life in what he calls this "epoch of the nanosecond." He observes that "a compression of time characterizes the life of the century now closing," and he proceeds to peg our obsession with correct time, our frustration with things that go too fast or too slow, the evolution of the concept of speed, the pervasive influence of the computer and the effect of the culture of acceleration on the arts.

His most resonant chapter heading is "The Paradox of Efficiency." Gleick uses the phrase to describe the complicated systems that businesses use in order to become vastly more efficient (and less likely to bend to your whim). Missed your connecting flight? Thanks to modern flight planning programs that keep far fewer "extra" planes on hand, you stand a good chance of waiting longer than ever for another one.

But the paradox of efficiency doesn't apply to customer service alone. The nemesis of the "just in time" inventory systems that have made auto production much more efficient is that little spare parts factory in Ohio that, each time it suffers a strike, shutters every GM plant in the Midwest.

Closer to home, this paradox is the creepy certainty that the more you have the resources to work with every day -- the more words you can process, the more e-mails and faxes you can send and instantly answer -- the more expectations of your output expand. You can now do more, so you can't do enough.

One day the Internet is a marvelous new tool; the next afternoon you're drumming your fingers during transfer time, despairing that it takes 15 seconds to have an entire library catalog a continent away at your fingertips. With the rise of time consciousness has come, Gleick notes, the rising status of the overbooked. Think of all the exaggerators you know who with straight faces claim 80-hour work weeks. Why revel so in the notion of overwork? For many people today, having time on your hands feels downright dirty. What kind of a slacker are you? "The transformation of time into a negative status good has odd social consequences," Gleick writes, and he quotes Michael Lewis on the "wonderful new prestige [of] any new time-saving device. After all, who needs such a device? People who have no time. And who has the least time? The best people!"

There is a benefit to reading about acceleration beyond the fact that this book is consistently witty and fine: "Faster" makes you consider your own role in accepting the acceleration of modern life. Time, Gleick reminds you, "is not a thing you ever had. It is what you live in. You can drift or you can swim, and it will carry you along either way."

Posted on December 10, 2010

Shira Kohara says...

Aha! We knew it all along! Life, work, off-time - `things' -just seem a hell of a lot faster these days. Those of us with typical 21st century urban, technology led lifestyles are all too familiar with the constant background noise of accelerated living. In Faster, Gleick amasses a mixed bag of armchair philosophy, anecdotal antics and random research to document our strangely mercurial existence.

And a mixed bag it is indeed. The book shines best when Gleick exposes in detail those `hidden' time-saving procedures that underpin our everyday lives. The passage on telephone directory enquiries, where we discover the drive to shave mere milliseconds from customer's inbound requests, is a real eye-opener. As is the revelation that time-saving procedures have even encroached on the age old traditions of the leisurely 9-inning baseball game. And who would have thought that a restaurant in Tokyo now offers an all-you-can-eat service charging customers by the minute? Dining by time-clock? Well, thanks, but no thanks.

Still, I would have liked to have seen these sketches gather momentum and lead to a more cogent line of thought. Instead, they simply drift away and what remains is an assortment of charming but ultimately unsubstantial tales. Nothing more, nothing less. Readers looking for a more protracted cultural analysis, a deeper probe into psychological aetiology, or a broader review of our collective existential malaise will likely be disappointed.

So, It's hardly a radical premise. And there's no real conclusion to speak of; no pulling together of the various threads that weave through this work. But as a collection of interesting hors d'oeuvres and after-dinner anecdotes, this is an entertaining enough read which - thankfully - requires a not considerable investment of time nor energy. Bloody good job too, as I had to cook supper and pay my gas bill online at the same time.

Posted on December 13, 2010

Garnet Paglia says...

I've read this book several times over the last year or two. I enjoy it every time. There are many interesting anecdotes about how life has accelerated almost beyond control. Curiously enough, the book itself goes at a slow pace. There is a refreshing difference between the relaxed pace of the book and the frantic pace of the subject matter. Reading it straight through might not be the best way to approach this book. I enjoy reading one chapter at a time at night as a way to relax from my own fast-paced life.

Posted on December 15, 2010

Ryann Litteer says...

James Gleick's new book, "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything," discusses many of the shortcomings and consequences of living in society pre-occupied with speed and, accordingly, how everything in our own lives - from work to food to culture - is being raced-through at a mind-blowing clip.Not only are we increasingly incapable of enjoying our own lives but the line between a life "lived" and one "spent" is being blurred.

Although I enjoyed "Faster" and appreciated Gleick's prompting to consider the proper speed at which life should be lived, I could not help but also be critical of it.The average chapter-length in "Faster" is somewhere around five pages.Not surprisingly, one is escorted through the book at a spritely clip, due mostly to Gleick's zeal and his technicque to state and re-state his same harrangue in every (and, sometimes, even in the same) chapter.Wording his argument differently by only substituting one or two words.

While managing to comment on how just about every element of Western society during the later-20th century has 'sped-up' without ever reflecting on the evolution of our increasingly-technological culture, Gleick short-shrifts his readers -- making them believe that a pause and a deep breath once or twice in the day (which was allotted to your ancestors in their idyllic worlds, don't you know) is better than the alternative in which you live, where you rush through your life at break-neck speed where you accomplish nothing.Of course, Gleick fails to mention the unbearable, sixteen-hour work-days that persons living in this country endured prior to modern labor laws and, accordingly, their certain lack of 'free time.'Nor does he ever mention that, due to more crude technologies (by today's standards), certain events just took a long time even though individuals living during those times did think that they had sped-up their lives considerably.

Although his observations are credible, his debate is unfulfilling and, all to often, one-sided.I do not necessarily disagree with Gleick's take on our modern times, however, I do not think that he has provided a worthy argument against them.

Posted on December 18, 2010