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High-speed Society

Author: Hartmut Rosa

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0271047704

Everywhere, life seems to be speeding up: we talk of &“fast food&” and &“speed dating.&” But what does the phenomenon of social acceleration really entail, and how new is it? While much has been written about our high-speed society in the popular media, serious academic analysis has lagged behind, and what literature there is comes more from Europe than from America. This collection of essays is a first step toward exposing readers on this side of the Atlantic to the importance of this phenomenon and toward developing some preliminary conceptual categories for better understanding it. Among the major questions the volume addresses are these: Is acceleration occurring across all sectors of society and all dimensions of life, or is it affecting some more than others? Where is life not speeding up, and what results from this disparity? What are the fundamental causes of acceleration, as well as its consequences for everyday experience? How does it affect our political and legal institutions? How much speed can we tolerate? The volume tackles these questions in three sections. Part 1 offers a selection of astute early analyses of acceleration as experienced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 samples recent attempts at analyzing social acceleration, including translations of the work of leading European thinkers. Part 3 explores acceleration&’s political implications.

Social Acceleration

Author: Hartmut Rosa

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-05-14

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 0231148348

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Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies in particular three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match future results and events. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

Pressed for Time

Author: Judy Wajcman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-07-11

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 022638084X

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In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them."--Jacket.

About Time

Author: Tim Aldrich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13:

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Sustainable development is about safeguarding the planet, and the people it supports, unconstrained by time. Looking at issues affecting society and the environment through the prism of time, this collection conveys the urgency of the challenge, leading us to new solutions.

The Fast and The Furious: Drivers, Speed Cameras and Control in a Risk Society

Author: Helen Wells

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2022-03-26

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1317031954

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The Fast and The Furious: Drivers, Speed Cameras and Control in a Risk Society presents a sociological and criminological perspective critical to understanding the driver's role at the centre of road safety interventions. Such an approach is, it is argued, as crucial to an understanding of attempts to reduce road crashes, deaths and injuries as approaching such questions from an engineering or educational perspective. The book offers an explanation for the continued debate about one road safety intervention - the speed camera - by situating that debate within contemporary literature about the 'risk society' (Beck, 1992) and more broadly understood experiences of risk faced on a daily basis by drivers. Rather than a focus on risk as something that can be objectively assessed, measured and managed separately from the social context in which it is encountered, it suggests that 'risk' is something that permeates this particular debate from every angle. The book achieves its aims by utilising sociological and criminological perspectives to investigate issues such as: - the social context in which it is possible for drivers to reject official scientific expertise about crash causation and camera effectiveness - the self-defined 'respectability' of the population being problematised and its juxtaposition with a 'proper' police focus on 'real criminals' - the reconceptualisation of law-breaking as risk-taking rather than inherently 'wrong' behaviour and its consequences for the enforcement of laws based on risk assessment - the experience of being controlled by technology and of receiving what is essentially 'automated justice'. These and other issues are explored and suggested as illuminating of both the real concerns underpinning this debate and potentially instructive for future attempts to control risky behaviour both within and beyond a road safety context.

Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time

Author: William E. Scheuerman

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-06-09

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1421440490

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"A fine contribution to the literature on the problems of modern liberal democracy."—Choice The pace of American society has quickened exponentially since the Founding Fathers first mapped the constitution. Information travels at the speed of light; so does money. We can hop from one side of the country to the other in a matter of hours, contact our elected officials instantaneously, and share our views with thousands of people at the touch of a button. Both academia and the popular media have grappled with the consequences of this acceleration on every aspect of contemporary life. Most pressing, however, may be its impact on political life. In Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time, William Scheuerman offers a sophisticated assessment of the implications of social and technological celerity in the operation of liberal democracies. Specifically, he asks what is acceleration's main impact on the traditional liberal democratic model of the separation of powers? According to Scheuerman, high speed has created an imbalance. The executive branch was intended to react with dispatch; by contrast, legislatures and the courts were designed to be more deliberate and thoughtful. While this system of checks and balances was effective in the age of horse and buggy, Scheuerman argues that the very features that were these institutions' strengths may now be a liability. Throughout this book, Scheuerman offers a constructive critique which articulates ways in which "liberal democracy might be recalibrated in accordance with the tempo of modern society.

The Great Society Subway

Author: Zachary M. Schrag

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014-08

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1421415771

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As Metro stretches to Tysons Corner and beyond, this paperback edition features a new preface from the author. Drivers in the nation's capital face a host of hazards: high-speed traffic circles, presidential motorcades, jaywalking tourists, and bewildering signs that send unsuspecting motorists from the Lincoln Memorial into suburban Virginia in less than two minutes. And parking? Don't bet on it unless you're in the fast lane of the Capital Beltway during rush hour. Little wonder, then, that so many residents and visitors rely on the Washington Metro, the 106-mile rapid transit system that serves the District of Columbia and its inner suburbs. In the first comprehensive history of the Metro, Zachary M. Schrag tells the story of the Great Society Subway from its earliest rumblings to the present day, from Arlington to College Park, Eisenhower to Marion Barry. Unlike the pre–World War II rail systems of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Metro was built at a time when most American families already owned cars, and when most American cities had dedicated themselves to freeways, not subways. Why did the nation's capital take a different path? What were the consequences of that decision? Using extensive archival research as well as oral history, Schrag argues that the Metro can be understood only in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Metro emerged from a period when Americans believed in public investments suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world's richest nation. The Metro was built not merely to move commuters, but in the words of Lyndon Johnson, to create "a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." Schrag scrutinizes the project from its earliest days, including general planning, routes, station architecture, funding decisions, land-use impacts, and the behavior of Metro riders. The story of the Great Society Subway sheds light on the development of metropolitan Washington, postwar urban policy, and the promises and limits of rail transit in American cities.

24/7

Author: Robert Hassan

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780804751971

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24/7 is the first collection of essays dealing with the nature and our experience of temporality in the network society.

The Speed Handbook

Author: Enda Duffy

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-07-20

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0822392372

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Speed, the sensation one gets when driving fast, was described by Aldous Huxley as the single new pleasure invented by modernity. The Speed Handbook is a virtuoso exploration of Huxley’s claim. Enda Duffy shows how the experience of speed has always been political and how it has affected nearly all aspects of modern culture. Primarily a result of the mass-produced automobile, the experience of speed became the quintessential way for individuals to experience modernity, to feel modernity in their bones. Duffy plunges full-throttle into speed’s “adrenaline aesthetics,” offering deft readings of works ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, through J. G. Ballard’s Crash, to the cautionary consumerism of Ralph Nader. He describes how speed changed understandings of space, distance, chance, and violence; how the experience of speed was commodified in the dawning era of mass consumption; and how society was incited to abhor slowness and desire speed. He examines how people were trained by new media such as the cinema to see, hear, and sense speed, and how speed, demanded of the efficient assembly-line worker, was given back to that worker as the chief thrill of leisure. Assessing speed’s political implications, Duffy considers how speed pleasure was offered to citizens based on criteria including their ability to pay and their gender, and how speed quickly became something to be patrolled by governments. Drawing on novels, news reports, photography, advertising, and much more, Duffy provides a breakneck tour through the cultural dynamics of speed.

High Speed Catamarans and Multihulls

Author: Liang Yun

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-29

Total Pages: 746

ISBN-13: 1493978918

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High speed catamaran and multihull high speed marine vessel have become very popular in the last two decades. The catamaran has become the vessel of choice for the majority of high speed ferry operators worldwide. There have been significant advances in structural materials, and structural design has been combined with higher power density and fuel efficient engines to deliver ferries of increasing size. The multihull has proven itself to be a suitable configuration for active power projection across oceans as well as for coastal patrol and protection, operating at high speedd for insertion or retrieval with a low energy capability. At present there is no easily accessible material covering the combination of hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, and design issues including structures, powering and propulsion for these vehicles. Coverage in High Speed Catamarans and Multihulls includes an introduction to the history, evolution, and development of catamarans, followed by a theoretical calculation of wave resistance in shallow and deep water, as well as the drag components of the multihull. A discussion of vessel concept design describing design characteristics, empirical regression for determination of principal dimensions in preliminary design, general arrangement, and methods is also included. The book concludes with a discussion of experimental future vehicles currently in development including the small waterplane twin hull vessels, wave piercing catamarans, planing catamarans, tunnel planing catamarans and other multihull vessels.