Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism Hardcover – 6 Jan 2015

Review

"Across her books, Wajcman has chosen issues and problematics that needed to be addressed, examined, and re-interpreted. All her books share an intense engagement with major conditions that affect many of us. In this book she gives us her kind of analysis of time--its presences and absences, its visible and invisible vectors."
--Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions

"For all those who experience the time pressure paradox--ever more technological devices promising time-saving efficiency while feeling ever more harried--this brilliantly written book offers a fresh look at the temporal landscape in the digital age. It rejects the technological promise of speed as the ultimate telos of innovation and the perspective that we are all temporal victims of digitalization. Multiple temporalities coevolve with emergent technologies, shaped by gender relations and the value accorded to work-life and leisure balance. The dynamics of technological digitalization closes off some options while opening up others, thus encouraging us to think of an alternative politics of time."--Helga Nowotny, author of Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience

"Wajcman integrates the voluminous literatures on time use and technology elegantly and concisely, a great service in itself. But, more important, she wisely leads the reader to new questions, more interesting and fruitful than the ones to which we are accustomed, helping us to think in terms not of quantities (of time or stress, of work or leisure) but of the flows and rhythms that we produce as we interact with technology and with one another. This is an essential addition to any bookshelf or syllabus on the social implications of information technology."--Paul DiMaggio "Princeton University "

"Wajcman delivers one sharp tap after anotherat the calcified interpretations that surround [technological] changes. It leaves the reader with a clear sense that the paradox of becoming trapped by devices that promise to free us follows, not from the technology itself, but from habits and attitudes that go unchallenged. . . . "Pressed for Time" helps elucidate how things shaped up as they have. It seems less paradoxical than pathological, but Wajcman suggests, rather quietly, that it doesn't have to be this way."--Scott McLemee "Inside Higher Ed "

"More, better, faster. So many of us take these as unproblematic goods. Judith Wajcman's "Pressed for Time"--written in elegant, clear, accessible language--will make you take a new look at this kind of thinking. Armed with her analysis of the co-construction of technology, social practice, and our sense of what matters, 'more, better, faster, ' and our modern culture of time is made problematic, insecure, and interesting. A must-read not only for a range of social scientists and humanists, but for everyone who wants to understand how we have remade time and remade ourselves in digital culture."--Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

For all those who experience the time pressure paradox ever more technological devices promising time-saving efficiency while feeling ever more harried this brilliantly written book offers a fresh look at the temporal landscape in the digital age. It rejects the technological promise of speed as the ultimate telos of innovation and the perspective that we are all temporal victims of digitalization. Multiple temporalities coevolve with emergent technologies, shaped by gender relations and the value accorded to work-life and leisure balance. The dynamics of technological digitalization closes off some options while opening up others, thus encouraging us to think of an alternative politics of time. --Helga Nowotny, author of Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience"

Wajcman integrates the voluminous literatures on time use and technology elegantly and concisely, a great service in itself. But, more important, she wisely leads the reader to new questions, more interesting and fruitful than the ones to which we are accustomed, helping us to think in terms not of quantities (of time or stress, of work or leisure) but of the flows and rhythms that we produce as we interact with technology and with one another. This is an essential addition to any bookshelf or syllabus on the social implications of information technology. --Paul DiMaggio "Princeton University ""

More, better, faster. So many of us take these as unproblematic goods. Judith Wajcman s Pressed for Time written in elegant, clear, accessible language will make you take a new look at this kind of thinking. Armed with her analysis of the co-construction of technology, social practice, and our sense of what matters, more, better, faster, and our modern culture of time is made problematic, insecure, and interesting. A must-read not only for a range of social scientists and humanists, but for everyone who wants to understand how we have remade time and remade ourselves in digital culture. --Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other"

"Wajcman delivers one sharp tap after another at the calcified interpretations that surround [technological] changes. It leaves the reader with a clear sense that the paradox of becoming trapped by devices that promise to free us follows, not from the technology itself, but from habits and attitudes that go unchallenged.. . . Pressed for Time helps elucidate how things shaped up as they have. It seems less paradoxical than pathological, but Wajcman suggests, rather quietly, that it doesn't have to be this way."--Scott McLemee "Inside Higher Ed ""

Across her books, Wajcman has chosen issues and problematics that needed to be addressed, examined, and re-interpreted. All her books share an intense engagement with major conditions that affect many of us. In this book she gives us her kind of analysis of time its presences and absences, its visible and invisible vectors.
--Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions"

About the Author

Judy Wajcman is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Social Shaping of Technology, TechnoFeminism, and The Politics of Working Life.