The founding editor of Time & Society, a journal central in the development of critical time studies as a distinct field of enquiry, Adam’s work provides a comprehensive and far-reaching social-theoretical framework for understanding the myriad ways in which our experience of time is mediated through technologies, structures, practices, and ideas, and the simultaneous centrality and mutability of time in relation to human existence. She also reflects helpfully upon risk, environmental catastrophe, and ethical responsibility for our future. Necessary reading.

Agger, a social theorist, first coined the term ‘fast capitalism’ in the late ‘90s, in his book of the same name (Fast Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Significance, 1989). In this somewhat more recent text, he argues that the problem is not technologies themselves, but the ends to which they are put by an economic system that values and rewards instantaneity. In both of these books, what interests Agger above all else is what he describes as the dispersion of discourse, whereby the decline in reading as a slow, measured activity has been accompanied by a gradual dematerialisation and diffusion of banal cultural messages into the everyday environment – a process that he believes has been vastly accelerated by the internet.

Bastian has published widely on the topic of time in relation to community, belonging, and environmental crisis. This article is of particular interest, however, insofar as it attempts to push back against the remarkably widespread denigration of the clock within continental philosophy (e.g. in the work of Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, all of whom saw ‘clock time’ as a flattened, ersatz simulacrum of the authentic time of experience). Contrasting the clock’s reputation against that of the map, Bastian argues that we need a ‘critical horology’ that might examine more thoroughly the social (rather than merely technical) conditions under which clocks are produced, and seek to understand the potentialities that clocks still harbour.

A classic text of social theory, Berman investigates the concepts of modernism and modernisation, arguing that the quintessentially ‘modern’ experience involves trying to find secure ground within a maelstrom of perpetual destruction and renewal. Particularly interesting is the first section, which looks at depictions of such experience in the works of Goethe, Marx, and Baudelaire. Still a useful resource for understanding the historical tendencies that have led to the seeming chaos and relentless change of late capitalism.

Featuring in a special issue (co-edited with Susanna Paasonen) of the Media Theory journal, as part of her larger ‘Mediating Presents’ project. In this article, Coleman concentrates on the seemingly mundane activity of ‘refreshing’ various forms of digital media (websites, email accounts, videos, etc.), exploring the peculiar temporality of the ‘now’ involved in such a practice, and arguing that this temporality is partly constitutive of a contemporary ‘structure of feeling’ (using Raymond Williams’ phrase) – an experience of the middle – distinct from that engendered by broadcast television.

First and foremost an art critic, much of Crary’s scholarly output has focused upon visual culture and questions of perception. This book, however, is instead devoted to the topic of sleep, and the impossible temporality of ’24/7’, remarking upon the various ways in which the relentless pace of modern life is affecting our sleep patterns – and concomitantly, our bodies and minds more generally. Sleep, Crary concludes, might be one of the few modalities of human life inherently resistive to the restless productivity and accumulation of late capitalism.

Taking Aldous Huxley’s claim that speed ‘provides the one genuinely modern pleasure’ seriously, Duffy examines the political stakes of speed from the turn of the twentieth century onward, contending that the introduction of various consumer technologies – in particular, the motorcar –helped individualise the pleasurable experience of speed. At a time when the modernist apparatus of speed was becoming increasingly onerous, regimenting and disciplining minds and bodies, such technologies, Duffy suggests, were able to repackage speed not as a mode of social control, but as a new kind of pleasure for the masses.

A social anthropologist, Eriksen provides a clear and compelling investigation into the ways in which the supposedly ‘time-saving’ advances foisted in the guise of the ‘information society’ are in fact producing a more hurried, time-poor world, wherein much of its population seem to have less time to spare than ever before. A very useful introduction to the topic of socio-technical acceleration, and the ambivalent effects of the ICT revolution more generally.

Gleick has long been established as an exemplary writer on science and technology for non-specialist audiences, with his books on chaos theory (Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987; 2008) and information (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, 2011) standing out especially. In this particular text, he turns his attention toward socio-technical acceleration, providing a plethora of compelling illustrations of the ways that we have succumbed to a demand for speed and a desire for instantaneity. A lucid work of narrative non-fiction, quite distinct in tone and style to the other texts cited here.

Perhaps the most noteworthy (certainly the most prominent) of Han’s many books, most of which are available in English translation. Han – a philosopher and cultural critic – asserts that we have moved beyond the disciplinary society described by Foucault into a performance-oriented society [Leistungsgesellschaft], one which prizes individual competition and achievement, interpellating its citizens as entrepreneurs of themselves, continually striving toward their own exploitation. This is a society that interdicts negativity, demanding positivity, perseverance, and perpetual self-optimisation. Consideration of the good life has been lost; survival is privileged above all else.

Focused particularly on the ways in which machine logic (and more specifically, a networked, digital logic) have infected more and more aspects of our lives, and the ramifications for our work, our media landscape, and institutions of liberal democracy, Hassan’s work vividly underscores both the phenomenological effects of socio-technical acceleration and its political economic roots, seeking to recover a ‘temporal sovereignty’ that has been lost.

Perhaps the most comprehensive and methodical work of critical time studies to date, Rosa attempts to furnish a systematic theoretical account of the concept of social acceleration, arguing that this phenomenon must be understood as the key principle undergirding modernity and its accompanying processes. Although its analytic detail can be quite intimidating, making it perhaps less suitable as an introductory text, it remains crucial reading for those interested in the conceptual nuances of this foundational idea.

Approaching the topic of social acceleration from the perspective of political science, political philosophy, and legal theory (as opposed to social theory, where most studies of this ilk have been located), Scheuerman argues that the operations and institutions constitutive of liberal democracy are being undermined by expectations of rapidity in the political and legal spheres. In order to rescue liberal democracy from these ‘institutional pathologies’, he suggests, he advocates not a radical devolution, but a temporal reformism that accepts social acceleration as an unavoidable aspect of contemporary existence.

A very accessible, ethnographically-grounded exploration of the ways in which individuals negotiate time, both their own time and that of others. Arguing that we need to pay more attention to the inextricable connection of time and space in public life, Sharma’s book is especially insightful in its highlighting of the striking dissymmetries between different forms of labour and their relationship to time, and the complex intersections between class, gender, and race that play out in the realm of temporal politics.

This is one of many articles Southerton has written on the topic of time-pressures and the temporal organisation of life. In this particular piece, Southerton examines the phenomenon of ‘time squeeze’ through study of the experiences of suburban households in Bristol, observing not only that all of these respondents feel themselves to be suffering from a time shortage, but that they characterise this shortage in terms of a failure of time ‘allocation’, inadvertently framing the time of their everyday lives in the terms of Taylorist management.

The notion of precarity and precarious labour has been central to much political-economic analysis in the past decade or so, and Standing’s book has contributed considerably to this. The topic of precarity is inseparable from that of time pressures, and in the fifth chapter of this book – ‘Labour, Work and the Time Squeeze’ – proffers a pointed explication of the acute time stress, combined with an intensification of labour, that helps produce the precarious conditions in which so many workers now live.

One of the more notable recent philosophers of technology, over three decades Stiegler produced a plethora of works dealing with the relationship between human beings and technics, with a particular interest in the constitution of human temporality via the exteriorisation of memory. His magnum opus, in this respect, is the three-volume Technics and Time series, wherein he articulates a complex theory of technicity building upon the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Gilbert Simondon, as well as that of the archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan. For a slightly less philosophically recondite starting point, however, we would recommend this volume – The Future of Work – which furnishes a quite clear exploration of the consequences for both work and consciousnesses brought about by automatisation.

Another accessible sociological account of acceleration. What makes this book particularly useful is Tomlinson’s rigorous analysis of the principle of ‘immediacy’ that guides contemporary society, arguing that the culture of immediacy to which we are subjected is qualitatively distinct from the preceding modern culture of speed, even if it largely emerges from the latter. Tomlinson places especial attention upon the contribution of media technologies to this state of affairs, arguing that we are faced with an unprecedented telemediation of cultural experience as television, computers, mobile phones, and so on have become mundane and routinised, increasingly constitutive of our everyday experience

Remarkably, this is just a small selection of Virilio’s voluminous output. Difficult to pin down – his work flitting seamlessly between philosophical, historical (and at times even theological) examinations of architecture and urban design, warfare, technoscience, art, cinema, mass media, and democratic governance, amongst many other topics – and employing a highly idiosyncratic, playful, and speculative writing style that sets him apart from most academic authors, Virilio remains a tremendously prescient and influential thinker. His nightmarish vision of a ‘dromological’ society in thrall to the logistical exigencies of speed, movement, and circulation, as fanciful as it may often seem, provides a provocative starting point for considering the ravages of temporal acceleration upon the human sensorium and body politic.

The university is in no way immune to the pressures of the high-speed society: although scholarship would seem a practice almost entirely incompatible with exigencies of fast and efficient thinking, requiring careful, time-intensive study and observation, academic life is inarguably speeding up, with profound consequences for the quality of both teaching and scholarship. Vostal lays out the consequences of this state of affairs in a refreshingly lucid manner, whilst also challenging simplistic entreaties to deceleration. Academia, he suggests, requires a temporal autonomy that would allow scholars to work at the variable speeds necessary for effective research.

In large part framed as a response to purportedly deterministic accounts of social acceleration, that would view this phenomenon as driven chiefly by technological developments, Wajcman instead takes a ‘social shaping’ approach, arguing that technologies must be situated in the context of social, economic, and political forces and practices – i.e. they must be understood not just in terms of their in-built affordances, but also of the ways in which they are utilised. She thus seeks to understand the intensification of time-pressures through this lens, emphasising the variegated and often dissymmetrical patterns that characterise modernity’s accelerative dynamism.

This book concentrates on five concepts that Wendling, a political philosopher, believes have come to increasingly organise our thinking over the course of the modern period (viz. labour, time, property, value, and crisis). It is the second chapter that is obviously of the greatest interest to us here, examining with admirable precision, and from a decided political-economic standpoint, the abstract temporal quantification of experience typical of bourgeois modernity, and the ways in which this can be used as a tool of domination.

Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds) (2001) Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. London and New York: Routledge.

Robert Hassan and Ronald Purser (eds) (2007) 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hartmut Rosa and William E. Scheuerman (eds) (2008) High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

David Bissell and Gillian Fuller (eds) (2011) Stillness in a Mobile World. London and New York: Routledge.

Emily Keightley (ed.) (2012) Time, Media and Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Judy Wajcman and Nigel Dodd (eds) (2017) The Sociology of Speed: Digital, Organization, and Social Temporalities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thijs Lijster (ed.) (2018) The Future of the New: Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Maren Hartmann, Elizabeth Prommer, Karin Deckner, and Stephan O. Görland (eds) (2019) Mediated Time: Perspectives on Time in a Digital Age. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

E.P. Thompson (1967) ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present. 38: 56-97.

Jacques Le Goff (1980) Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago, IL: Thr University of Chicago Press.

Stephen Kern (1983) The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

David Landes (1983) Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Jeremy Rifkin (1987) Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. New York: Henry Holt.

Anson Rabinbach (1990) The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Basic Books.

Helga Nowotny (1994 [1989]) Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. Trans. N. Plaice. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Carol Greenhouse (1996) A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Maureen Perkins (2001) The Reform of Time: Magic and Modernity. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.

Peter Galison (2003) Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: WW Norton & Company.

A. Roger Ekirch (2005) At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime. New York: WW Norton & Company.

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift (2009) Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kevin K Birth (2012) Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch (2014 [1977]) The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Krista Lysack (2019) Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carolyn Marvin (1988) When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Timothy Lenoir (ed.) (1998) Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Darren Tofts (1998) Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture. North Ryde, NSW: Interface.

Friedrich Kittler (1999 [1986]) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (eds) (2003) New Media, 1740-1915. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds) (2003) Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds) (2004) Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Siegfried Zielinksi (2006 [2002]) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Trans. G. Custance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Cornelia Vismann (2008 [2000]) Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Esther Milne (2010) Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. London and New York: Routledge.

Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (eds) (2011) Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Jussi Parikka (2012) What is Media Archaeology?. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas (eds) (2013) Relive: Media Art Histories. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Sean Cubitt (2014) The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bernhard Siegert (2015) Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Trans. G. Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher (eds) (2016) New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. London and New York: Routledge.

Thomas Elsaesser (2016) Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

David Link (2016) Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.

Shannon Mattern (2017) Code+Clay… Data+Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983) More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books.

Kerry J. Daly (1996) Families & Time: Keeping Pace in a Hurried Culture. London: Sage.

Arlie Hochschild (1997) The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Henry Holt.

Rita Felski (2000) ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’ pp. 77-98 in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Miriam Glucksmann (2000) Cottons and Casuals: The Gendered Organisation of Labour in Time and Space. London and New York: Routledge.

Valerie Bryson (2007) Gender and the Politics of Time: Feminist Theory and Contemporary Debates. Bristol: The Policy Press.

Carlo Petrini (2001). Slow Food: The Case for Taste. Trans. W. McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press.

Carl Honoré (2004) In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed. London: Orion.

Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig (2006) Slow Living. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Isabelle Stengers (2018 [2013]) Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Trans. S. Muecke. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Simone Fullagar, Kevin Markwell, and Eric Wilson (eds) (2012) Slow Tourism: Experiences and Mobilities. Bristol: Channel View Publications.

Peter Laufer (2014) Slow News: A Manifesto for the Critical News Consumer. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press.

Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber (2016) Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds) (2016) Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Michael Clancy (ed.) Slow Tourism, Food, and Cities: Pace and the Search for the ‘Good Life’. London and New York: Routledge.

Jennifer Rauch (2018) Slow Media: Why ‘Slow’ is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Megan Le Masurier (ed.) (2019) Slow Journalism. London and New York: Routledge.

An interesting and nuanced variation on the aforementioned trend of ‘slow x’ books, Walker proposes that philosophy – in its proper sense, the love of wisdom – has an inherent connection to slowness, but that this connection has been jeopardised by institutional pressures and expectations of productivity and efficiency. She thus posits, with reference to a number of philosophers (e.g. Michèle le Dœuff, Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, Luce Irigaray, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous) an ethics of slow reading in opposition to these dominant trends.