Hurried lives

Introduction

During his Commencement Address at Hampton University on 11 May 2010, President Obama remarked that the class before him were graduating at a time of great difficulty for America and for the wider world. Beyond the more obvious remarks about economic and environmental crises, and the continuing challenges of American foreign policy, Obama also chose to reflect upon the role of new technology in reshaping the socio-cultural landscape of the new century. He said to the Graduating Class of 2010: ¹

… you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations … information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

Obama was surely right to note the growing prevalence of new technology within our consumer societies. On 28 May 2010 – the day on which Apple launched the first version of its (then brand new) iPad device in the UK, amidst reported ‘carnivalesque’ scenes outside of its stores – the company’s net worth overtook its main competitor, with Apple Inc. estimated at $222 billion against Microsoft’s $219 billion. Largely thanks to its role in pioneering new mobile ‘tablet’ devices, such as the iPad, by March 2013 – less than three years later – Apple Inc. was estimated to have a net worth circa $550 billion. The mobile phone industry sold 1.2 billion units in 2008 and is expected to sell 1.9 billion units by the end of 2013, leading to an estimated industry value of $200 billion. In 2012, Facebook claimed more than 693 million active members, with the Google Plus social network at 343 million and YouTube at 280 million (Kosner 2013). In comparison, from amongst its 500 million members, Twitter currently enjoys some 200 million active users worldwide (O’Carroll 2012).

The connection between time use and the increasing consumption of such technologies is well-established. The Communications Market Report UK by Ofcom (August 2010) stated that the average person spends about 15 hours and 45 minutes every day awake. Of this time, the report found, the average person spends seven hours and five minutes ‘engaging in media and communications activities’, ² interacting with a digital screen of one form or another. Although perhaps startling enough that half of our waking lives is spent engaged with new technology, the report also found that most people are able to cram in even more by ‘multi-tasking’, effectively using two or more technological devices at once. For example, although people aged between 16 and 24 appeared to consume the least, spending just 6 hours and 35 minutes per day on their phone, laptop, or television, by multi-tasking the survey found that young adults were able to squeeze the equivalent of 9 hours 30 minutes worth of data consumption into that same time period by using multiple devices at once.

As consumers of new communications technology we now live a curiously ‘hurried life’ in which the perception of time has become so acutely accelerated that we live in a series of fleeting, episodic moments, or pointillist time (Maffesoli 2003), a lived experience characterized by a series of seemingly disconnected intensities. In desperately trying to cope, let alone to ‘get ahead’, the preferred strategy of contemporary men and women has been to embrace new communications technologies seemingly because of their basic marketing promise: namely, to allow us to do things more swiftly, and to allow us to circumnavigate the allegedly tedious, awkward and time-consuming business of having to encounter other human beings in their physical proximity (Bauman 2010a: 149). In so doing, however, we are each increasingly devoid of meaningful human face-to-face contact in our daily lives, instead spending much of our time staring at the multifarious digital screens that now seem to dominate our every waking moment, including televisions, mobile phones, internet forums, emails, blog posts, and all those vast screens that have ever so quietly taken up residence in our shared public spaces in order to offer us a cocktail of news headlines, advertisements, and state-of-emergency warnings. As any readers familiar with Bauman’s (1993, 1995) wider work will know only too well, meaningful human face-to-face contact is fundamental to an ethical life lived in the company of others, and its growing absence from our everyday lives presents a moral challenge intensified by the dominant role of new technology in our liquid modern times.

In what follows, I want to reflect critically upon this currently widespread strategy of looking to new communications technologies as the solution to our increasingly ‘hurried lives’ and to suggest that it is in fact self-defeating. There are many chances offered by such technology in the liquid modern age, most notably a level of instant global connectivity never before experienced by humanity. The capacity for human creativity across all spheres of life has been greatly enhanced by the internet and forms of social media, from the Occupy movement and Arab Spring, through ‘democratic finance’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ banking, to the no less significant ability to contact loved ones near and far at the push of a button. And yet, as Obama’s Commencement Address chose to highlight, amidst all the chances and opportunities afforded by new technology, there are also very real social, political and economic dangers. My contribution here identifies a curious form of ‘hurried life’, in which we spend much of our waking lives interacting with digital screens rather than engaging in human face-to-face contact, and in which for all our frantic productivity we are perhaps becoming more and more ‘interpassive’, running the risk of losing basic social skills in the process. In other words, there would appear to be a potentially dangerous and contradictory (dialectical) logic to liquid life whereby things turn rapidly into their opposites.

Dialectics of loneliness and connectivity

In May 2010, the same month that Obama made his Address at Hampton, the Mental Health Foundation in the UK published a report entitled The Lonely Society. Their research highlighted how social relationships that are vital to health and well-being were coming under threat by the various ways and means of (liquid) modern life that serve to isolate people from one another and thus lead to a greater sense of loneliness. 48 per cent of the people included in the study believed that people are getting lonelier. There were many reasons given for this. One of the more thought-provoking reasons put forward was that, for some, investing time in social activities is seen as being far less important than work. With people feeling an ever-growing pressure to be productive and ‘busy’, one of the central consequences of this lust for greater success (i.e. reward) at work was neglecting vital social relationships with friends and family. In this context, the claim by Jonathan Gershuny (2005) that it is now ‘busyness’, rather than leisure, that has become a new badge of honour for many in contemporary society seems persuasive. The report continued by proclaiming that individuals, pursuing consumer aspirations in a market-driven world, may be doing so at their own physical and psychological expense, often neglecting the basic human need to spend time with others. Polling for the report revealed that 42 per cent have felt depressed specifically because they felt alone.

A striking finding of the report that is relevant to our concerns here was that 18 per cent of people said they spend far too much time communicating with family and friends online when they felt they should be seeing them in person. Furthermore, the report indicated that these feelings of isolation, loneliness and depression were most prevalent amongst the young, the age group that are most involved in the consumption and heavy use of new communications technologies marketed specifically because of their professed ability to ‘connect people’. ³ Nearly 60 per cent of those questioned who were aged between 18 to 34 spoke of feeling lonely ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’, compared to 35 per cent of those aged over 55. As Morrison and Gore (2010) found in their social-psychological study, people who spend a lot of time browsing the net are more likely to show depressive symptoms. In the very first large-scale study of young people in the West to consider the relationship between internet addiction and depression, they found striking evidence that some ‘heavy users’ had developed a compulsive internet habit, replacing ‘real-life’ social interaction with online chat rooms and social networking sites. Their initial findings suggest that this type of addictive surfing can have a serious impact on mental health.

With increasing consumption of the internet and mobile/smart phones, this absence of meaningful human contact can certainly be covered up and momentarily forgotten about, the pain of isolation temporarily assuaged. For those growing up in this liquid world of free-flowing virtual connectivity, perhaps the social skills of human face-to-face interaction are no longer deemed as necessary, or at the most are seen as a cumbersome and unwieldy form of ‘solid’ communication full of shortcomings as compared to their fast-moving online alternative. One can see these preferences in action on any given day in any given public space. Surrounded by the immediate physical proximity of others, individuals frequently make themselves ‘socially absent’ by losing themselves in the flow of electronic signals from their technological devices, opting for the virtual connections of online life and thus sending a very clear social signal to all around them that they wish to be ‘alone’. This has potentially significant consequences for our shared understanding of public space and civic life and, it seems to me, can be usefully understood through the frame of Erving Goffman’s (1972) sociological concept of ‘civil inattention’. In the consumer societies of today, sociality seems always to be occurring elsewhere via new communications technologies, with our attention firmly housed in a virtual world of connections to physically absent others, rather than concerned in any meaningful way with those who are physically around us in ‘offline’ communities. With new technologies in hand, we become socially absent on tube trains and crowded shopping streets. Indeed, this even occurs within the household, putting a curious spin on the famous finding of Levin (2004) and others that relationships were increasingly following the LAT model of ‘living apart together’. In a world of virtual connectivity rapidly replacing human face-to-face interaction, does not the prevalence of new technology and multiple digital screens within the domestic space now lead to liquid modern couples ‘living together apart’, sharing physical proximity but each spending their lives elsewhere in a stream of online networks?

To borrow again from Goffman (1984 [1959]), at least a part of the appeal of the virtual world seems to be the ways in which it limits the risk of an awkward social ‘encounter’, the subtle art of the presentation of self having moved online whereby it is now possible to nano-manage the self so that individuals increasingly come to resemble online commodities: thousands of carefully posed for or subsequently airbrushed Facebook photographs; delicate product placement within a never-ending web of consumer tastes and preferences that we ‘like’ and invite others to ‘like’ also; the visual display of personal consumer satisfaction surveys, communicated by pointing out how many people ‘like’ the self that we are now promoting in the hope that they too may join the growing ranks of our online ‘friends’.

How are we to make sense of these developments? One interpretation, I think, is that in seeking to overcome existential feelings of loneliness by embracing greater levels of virtual connectivity with other human beings we are – to borrow a phrase employed in a different context by Slavoj Žižek (2010) – perhaps taking ‘a right step in the wrong direction’. We rightly seek a greater quantity of connections with people to reaffirm increasingly liquefying social bonds, but in seeking to achieve this through new communications technologies we step in the wrong direction, because online networks lack the quality of proximity to the human Other; they lack the face-to-face contact that is the basis of a form of human sociality that can overcome feelings of isolation and loneliness. In short, one may be in the virtual company of millions whilst online, but one is invariably ‘alone’ in front of a digital screen whilst doing so. Such a dominant part of the knowledge economy in our consumer societies, these new communications technologies are frequently cited by politicians and business leaders as a major global industry capable of providing much sought after growth that will drive our economies out of recession and beyond the age of austerity into a new age of abundance. This is a chance that they present to our economic lives. At the same time, however, the willing embrace of new communications technologies comes at a cost, namely that in increasing the quantity of our online social networks we are sacrificing the right to enjoy the quality of human togetherness, believing that our ‘hurried lives’ do not afford us nearly enough time to tend to our relationships with others.

Dialectics of interactivity and interpassivity

In developing their sociological concept of ‘inconspicuous consumption’, and thus updating Veblen’s work for the liquid modern world, Sullivan and Gershuny (2004) identify a ‘cash rich/time-poor’ complex. Crudely summarized, the idea here is that as rapacious consumers we continue to buy an ever greater quantity of things in spite of lacking the time to use them properly, instead simply storing products away in garages, attics, or paid-for storage facilities for an imagined future of increased leisure time. ⁴ They are thus far from conspicuous, with skis, fishing rods, mountain bikes, cooking equipment and even small boats piling up out of sight in household storage areas, reflecting a new and growing class of consumers who have fallen in love with individual choice and the promise of a leisured lifestyle, but who lack the time to lead it. Related research, conducted by Datamonitor in 2004, also found that the typical UK shopper spent an average of £1725 a year on luxury items, gadgets, accessories and memberships which were ‘under-utilized’, and food which was thrown away, suggesting that Britons wasted ‘a staggering £80bn’ on goods that were either never used or used so rarely as to have not been worth buying. ⁵

There are many ways one could interpret these developments. My own reading of this, in the light of the wider concerns of this paper, is that consumer goods – especially new communications technologies – have in some sense cheated us of the their basic marketing promise. That is to say: consumer goods have not, to employ broadly Marxian terminology, served to reduce ‘socially necessary labour time’ and thus created a world of leisure. The rise of our consumer societies in the age of liquid modernity has resulted in the majority of men and women in the Western world now working longer hours with notable implications for physical and psychological well-being. In the UK, for example, we work an average of 42 hours per week, more hours than any other nation in the European Union (Clement 2006). A clinical study in the same year found that people who work 41 hours or more a week are significantly more likely to have high blood pressure than those who work less (Yang 2006). A survey presented to the European Parliament in 2007 predicted that the stress of over-scheduled lives means that 60 per cent of middle-aged adults will suffer from high-blood pressure by 2027 (Kanavos et al. 2007). One of the principal drivers of this trend is the emergence of a culture of ‘over-working’ whereby status is increasingly attached to being busy as a sign of success, as mentioned earlier in relation to Jonathan Gershuny’s work in this area.

What is interesting in this context is that the consumer object of choice for the stressed and over-worked employee is – your guess is right – new communications technologies. This is because we appear to have been seduced by the sales pitch that they will allow us to accomplish far more in the amount of available time. In one way, of course, this is undoubtedly true. Many modern institutions would cease to function today without the constant flow of electronic signals between screens that have become the necessary circulatory system of global capitalism. But, as ever in liquid modern life, there are both (economic) chances and (social) dangers. For example, the capacity to ‘do more, more quickly’ has not created a world in which ‘socially necessary labour time’ has been reduced. Indeed, social media appears to have blurred the boundaries still further between work and leisure. Not only is the nature of physical space altered, with professional offices and domestic rooms in the home slowly starting to resemble each other, but the means of communicating with loved ones becomes indistinguishable from communication with one’s employer, both conducted with varying degrees of (in)formality simply by pushing buttons. ‘Doing more, more quickly’ has fostered a culture of over-working directly connected to the proliferation of new communications technologies in our everyday lives.

By way of illustration, let us greatly simplify matters and propose that new communications technologies allow us all to do things only twice as quickly (even though in reality it is of course many more times that). In this hypothetical example, in a standard eight-hour working day, new technology allowing us to do things twice as quickly does not mean – as we might assume – that we work only half of the time by accomplishing our daily working tasks in four hours. Rather, it seems, being able to do things twice as quickly simply means that we accomplish twice as many tasks in those standard eight hours, in effect producing 16 hours’ worth of labour time in the same standard working day. ⁶ One explanation for this is that, because of an awareness of the role of new communications technologies in the modern workplace (and their increasing prevalence in our wider ‘non-working’ lives), other people’s expectations of what is possible have also dramatically shifted. ‘Why haven’t they responded to my email, I sent it almost 60 seconds ago!’ has fast become the frustrated cry of contemporary men and women plugged into the circulation of digital media to such an extent that time is frequently experienced in intervals of the digital second. And not having received an emailed response within this dramatically truncated time-frame affects our emotional state and our well-being. We may become cross, frustrated, enraged even, because our increasingly heavy use of new communications technology is not in fact making our lives simpler, happier, or anything else that we were promised that it would by slick sales promotions. And to find some evidence for this, we can look to the work of Philip Zimbardo.

Zimbardo’s (2010) research The Secret Powers of Time ⁷ claims that we are fundamentally under-estimating the emotional costs to our well-being wrought by the increased prevalence of new technologies in our daily lives, in particular how new technologies have profound effects on what he and Robert Levine call ‘the pace of life’. Zimbardo argues there is an urgent need to take more seriously the power of new technology in physically re-wiring people’s brains, specifically the shift from analogue to digital time perspectives whereby social life becomes measured by the second. For example, when studying people’s ‘time duration responses’ to the boot-up times for their personal computers, Zimbardo found that the average limit was around 60 seconds before people would start to exhibit advanced emotional states of anger. His conclusion was that new technologies have led to a world in which any form of waiting, even for pleasurable experiences, is now understood purely and simply as ‘a waste of time’, ‘a waste of valuable seconds’ that could (perhaps should) otherwise have been used to provide a more intensely experienced form of pleasure.

For Zimbardo, there is a fundamental change occurring within our globalized consumer culture whereby new technologies are shifting our time perspectives with disastrous consequences for our emotional health and well-being. He reports that a study with USA Today about how busy contemporary Americans believe themselves to be revealed that over 50 per cent thought they were busier now than they were one year ago, and that as a consequence they frequently sacrifice friends, family and even sleep for their success in the workplace. So, as part of their research, Zimbardo and his team proposed the hypothetical possibility of an ‘8th day’ in the week and asked respondents what they would do with it. All respondents said that this would be a great initiative, because with an 8th day they could work harder, get more done at work and so ‘get further ahead’ of their colleagues and peers. In other words, in spite of their own statements earlier in the research process, they would not spend any such magical 8th day catching up with friends, family or sleep.

My own reading of this is that it points to the paradoxes within liquid modern life, whereby a fundamental cause of the problem is being seen as its principal solution. That is to say: there seems to be a dialectical logic at play whereby things result in their opposites, in this case new technologies are seen as the cure for an accelerated social reality that their very introduction, consumption and increased usage has helped to create and to intensify. In further exploring this contradiction, it is instructive to recall Slavoj Žižek’s (2006) remarks in How to Read Lacan, where he states that the advent of the VCR as a consumer good ensured (somewhat counter-intuitively) that one actually watches fewer films. The logic of Žižek’s analysis is that, in recording more and more films and TV programmes with the VCR, it is as if we are no longer required actually to watch the films themselves. In other words, it is as if the VCR is watching them for us. It is possible that his process has been intensified amongst heavy users of digital recording boxes that can now store several weeks’ worth of television and movie content. As we are likely never to find the leisure time to watch all of this content, it seems as though programmes are stored on mass hard drives in order for the machine to watch, with us doing little more than simply deleting it all at a future date. All of this taken together seems to raise an interesting question about our (dialectical) relationship with new technology: namely, is what we so often refer to and champion as ‘interactivity’ in the world of Web 2.0 in fact leading to an acute form of ‘interpassivity’?

One of the dangers emerging from our increasing consumption of new technologies is that we have ceded more and more of our skills and capabilities to various forms of machines. The prevalence of new technologies in everyday life means that we expect more and more of our daily activities to be done for us, often becoming frustrated when we suddenly realize that we may have to do things for ourselves. As Žižek’s analysis of the VCR implies, perhaps because we seem to lack time in our ‘hurried’ and ‘over-worked’ lives, we appear to want new technologies to labour for us. And so we watch increasing numbers of television programmes about the art of cooking fine food, whilst simultaneously avoiding the artful joy of cooking for ourselves by regularly eating out or consuming ready-meals; we watch seemingly endless television programmes about improving our homes and gardens, whilst seldom feeling like we have the time, energy or resources actually to do these things ourselves; we buy personal gym equipment for our homes, but seldom use it, perhaps preferring to use these vast contraptions for the rather more quotidian task of drying laundry.

A further danger of this ‘interpassive’ behaviour is that we are now very easily distracted, struggling to retain ever-dwindling attention spans. In his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr (2010) echoes the findings of Zimbardo’s research by suggesting that new technology is fundamentally changing the way in which our brains operate. Encouraged by the frenetic, hyper-linked web, Carr argues that we are losing the capability to process information at ‘less-than-internet’ speeds. We are easily distracted, he argues, and increasingly incapable of paying attention to books or articles of any sustained length. We are no longer knowledge seekers but information data processors, simply roaming from one fact to another. The internet assumes that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines and thus our capability for ‘deep thinking’ is limited because (pertinent in this context) we frequently lack the time that is essential for digesting information, developing knowledge and then drawing our own reasoned conclusions. Knowledge has seemingly moved from the Platonic realm of ‘justified true belief’, that once sound epistemological claim that knowledge is based on reason, experience, and perception, and has instead become a commodity to be consumed just like any other.

By way of example, Mark Fisher’s (2009) book Capitalist Realism reflects upon the absence of ‘deep thinking’ amongst heavy users of new communications technology. Based upon his experiences as a teacher in a Further Education college, Fisher states:

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’.

Conclusion

As President Obama suggested in his Commencement Address at Hampton, perhaps information has indeed become ‘a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation’. To rephrase his concerns for the present discussion, perhaps for all the chances offered by the interactivity of new communications technology, Obama is fearful of the danger that a growing ‘interpassivity’ now resides in our liquid modern societies. Having bequeathed many of our most vital social relationships and social capabilities to machines, it is perhaps more vital than ever before that the dangers inherent in these processes are recognized and addressed. This article has chosen to follow Obama in highlighting the dangers of new technology with specific reference to its impact upon perceptions of time in the age of liquid modernity.

But there are, of course, chances as well as dangers. In the UK, the New Economics Foundation (2010) continues to argue for a gradual shift to a 21-hour working week, ⁹ as part of their wider ‘great transitions’ agenda. As they explain:

There is nothing natural or inevitable about what’s considered ‘normal’ today. Time, like work, has become commodified – a recent legacy of industrial capitalism. Yet the logic of industrial time is out of step with today’s conditions, where instant communications and mobile technologies bring new risks and pressures, as well as opportunities. The challenge is to break the power of the old industrial clock without adding new pressures, and to free up time to live sustainable lives. (2010: 2)

From the critical reflections sketched above, which as stated at the outset marks the start rather than the end of a research agenda at the Bauman Institute, I hope to have shown that there are two key resources that are inequitably distributed around the world and which are in urgent need of being rebalanced in a post-crisis context: time and money. Living life at such incessant speed in the pursuit of greater financial resources with which to fund our excessive consumer lifestyles, we are seldom aware of the seriousness with which we need urgently to address the fact that we are now living on borrowed money, for sure, but also on borrowed time. Snatching what we can of both, social life appears to have adopted as its guiding principle the Red Queen’s advice to Alice in Wonderland, in that we know it takes all the running we can do just to keep in the same place, and that if we want to get to somewhere else, we must run at least twice as fast as that. The debate on time and technology in liquid modern life is our chance to decide if we wish to keep running at such a speed.