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Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated auhtor of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world. Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness." a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of the nanosecond," a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we're still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
80 people are currently reading
2105 people want to read
About the author
James Gleick
34 books2,021 followersJames Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.
He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.
His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.
Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.
Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )
Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.
He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.
His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.
Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.
Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews
October 10, 2023
Twenty-first century life in the fast lane!
James Gleick, author of the bestseller CHAOS has created another compelling and often disturbing tale of the nature of our society. FASTER characterizes our modern day thinking as overwhelmingly occupied with notions of time - time management, saving time, using time, keeping time, multi-tasking, channel surfing, high speed internet, moving sidewalks, high speed elevators, telephone speed dial functions, and, of course, the plethora of self-help books touting improvements in personal efficiency and productivity.
A few pithy trenchant quotations from the book will illustrate Gleick's brilliant observation of the twenty-first century's morbid pre-occupation with time, speed and the generally unhealthy acceleration of life:
"A medication is marketed `for women who don't have time for a yeast infection' - as though slackers might have time for that."
"There are ... places and objects that signify impatience. Doctors' anterooms. The DOOR CLOSE button in elevators, so often a placebo, with no function but to distract for a moment those riders to whom ten seconds seem an eternity."
"Marketers and technologists anticipate your desires with fast ovens, quick playback, quick freezing and fast credit. We bank the extra minutes that flow from these innovations, yet we feel impoverished and we cut back - on breakfast, on lunch, on sleep, on daydreams."
"It might seem that to save time means to preserve it, spare it, free it from some activity that might otherwise have consumed it in the hot flames of busy-ness. Yet time-saving books are constantly admonishing people to do things."
And yet, paradoxically, this notion of filling every millisecond of every day with productive activity is juxtaposed with the rather strange realization that:
"Our idea of boredom - ennui, tedium, monotony, lassitude, mental doldrums - has been a modern invention. The word `boredom' barely existed even a century ago."
Boredom - as silence, as emptiness, as time unfilled - was a mental state all but inconceivable a hundred years ago. But perversely, with all of the activities available at our fingertips and the ability to access those activities in seconds, we find ourselves thirsting for more and more.
I wonder what Gleick would think of the fact that there were times when I found his book so interesting that I was skimming ... just so I could absorb it more quickly. (Note to self: the next time I listen to a piece of classical music, I'm going to do nothing else. I'm going to listen to the music for its own sake). Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
James Gleick, author of the bestseller CHAOS has created another compelling and often disturbing tale of the nature of our society. FASTER characterizes our modern day thinking as overwhelmingly occupied with notions of time - time management, saving time, using time, keeping time, multi-tasking, channel surfing, high speed internet, moving sidewalks, high speed elevators, telephone speed dial functions, and, of course, the plethora of self-help books touting improvements in personal efficiency and productivity.
A few pithy trenchant quotations from the book will illustrate Gleick's brilliant observation of the twenty-first century's morbid pre-occupation with time, speed and the generally unhealthy acceleration of life:
"A medication is marketed `for women who don't have time for a yeast infection' - as though slackers might have time for that."
"There are ... places and objects that signify impatience. Doctors' anterooms. The DOOR CLOSE button in elevators, so often a placebo, with no function but to distract for a moment those riders to whom ten seconds seem an eternity."
"Marketers and technologists anticipate your desires with fast ovens, quick playback, quick freezing and fast credit. We bank the extra minutes that flow from these innovations, yet we feel impoverished and we cut back - on breakfast, on lunch, on sleep, on daydreams."
"It might seem that to save time means to preserve it, spare it, free it from some activity that might otherwise have consumed it in the hot flames of busy-ness. Yet time-saving books are constantly admonishing people to do things."
And yet, paradoxically, this notion of filling every millisecond of every day with productive activity is juxtaposed with the rather strange realization that:
"Our idea of boredom - ennui, tedium, monotony, lassitude, mental doldrums - has been a modern invention. The word `boredom' barely existed even a century ago."
Boredom - as silence, as emptiness, as time unfilled - was a mental state all but inconceivable a hundred years ago. But perversely, with all of the activities available at our fingertips and the ability to access those activities in seconds, we find ourselves thirsting for more and more.
I wonder what Gleick would think of the fact that there were times when I found his book so interesting that I was skimming ... just so I could absorb it more quickly. (Note to self: the next time I listen to a piece of classical music, I'm going to do nothing else. I'm going to listen to the music for its own sake). Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
December 17, 2018
Given that this was published in 1999, the book is still relevant today (more than ever) with its message about the speed with which we run our lives. The days of sitting on a back porch waiting for the evening newspaper are long gone, as the pace of technology makes us more and more impatient.
We may need to set aside formal time for deliberation, where once we used accidental time.
The 19th Century really started the spurt with the Industrial Revolution, which changed people's lives so rapidly, previously contented rural inhabitants became impoverished urban denizens. The 20th Century brought so much advancement (telephones in every home, radio followed by TV, computers instead of typewriters, the Internet) that people started being eased out of jobs in favor of those workers who could master new machines and their new rules.
We mistrust our machines all the more because we fall behind in learning how to use them.
If the author thought life was accelerating as the 21st Century reared its head, then we must now be moving at the speed of light. James Gleick mentions 500 kbps as "blazing speed"...now we just laugh at that. Faxes are a bewilderment to Generation Z and five-year plans are rarely discussed now (try 5-week plans). What this book gets so very right is our expectation of time. That is, we expect our phones to pull up data immediately. If that doesn't happen, temper tantrums ensue. Yet not that long ago, the expectation was that someone at a major corporation would actually answer your call and you could call a local library to ask a question in the hopes they had the answer. That's all gone. Now we no longer control time, it seems to control us.
"Time is a gentle deity", said Sophocles. Perhaps it was, for him. These days it cracks the whip.
This book is a very good reminder of how our obsession with the shininess of new technology may be doing more to hurt than help us.
Book Season = Year Round (10 seconds = eternity)
We may need to set aside formal time for deliberation, where once we used accidental time.
The 19th Century really started the spurt with the Industrial Revolution, which changed people's lives so rapidly, previously contented rural inhabitants became impoverished urban denizens. The 20th Century brought so much advancement (telephones in every home, radio followed by TV, computers instead of typewriters, the Internet) that people started being eased out of jobs in favor of those workers who could master new machines and their new rules.
We mistrust our machines all the more because we fall behind in learning how to use them.
If the author thought life was accelerating as the 21st Century reared its head, then we must now be moving at the speed of light. James Gleick mentions 500 kbps as "blazing speed"...now we just laugh at that. Faxes are a bewilderment to Generation Z and five-year plans are rarely discussed now (try 5-week plans). What this book gets so very right is our expectation of time. That is, we expect our phones to pull up data immediately. If that doesn't happen, temper tantrums ensue. Yet not that long ago, the expectation was that someone at a major corporation would actually answer your call and you could call a local library to ask a question in the hopes they had the answer. That's all gone. Now we no longer control time, it seems to control us.
"Time is a gentle deity", said Sophocles. Perhaps it was, for him. These days it cracks the whip.
This book is a very good reminder of how our obsession with the shininess of new technology may be doing more to hurt than help us.
Book Season = Year Round (10 seconds = eternity)
August 27, 2011
After reading Gleick’s Chaos in 1989 and The Information this year, I was anticipating Faster. What a letdown. Chaos and The Information rocked. Faster just plodded along.
In his profile, David Giltinan cites 10 common sources of disappointment in a book. The first is “Failed to match brilliance of author's previous work.” That was certainly the case here. Another distraction is this edition is an audio book, read by Gleick. His reading wasn’t engaging.
The other GR reviews cover the content, how everything is speeding up. That seems like old news. One item of interest is how digital answering machines compress the message without raising the pitch. This technology also saves time for phone operators. Now that is a useful idea. I happened to be listening to Faster on an iPhone, which has a 2X speed button. In practice, it’s closer to 1 ½ X speed. With Gleick’s reading faster was better.
I expect to thoroughly enjoy Gleick’s books on Feynman and Newton.
In his profile, David Giltinan cites 10 common sources of disappointment in a book. The first is “Failed to match brilliance of author's previous work.” That was certainly the case here. Another distraction is this edition is an audio book, read by Gleick. His reading wasn’t engaging.
The other GR reviews cover the content, how everything is speeding up. That seems like old news. One item of interest is how digital answering machines compress the message without raising the pitch. This technology also saves time for phone operators. Now that is a useful idea. I happened to be listening to Faster on an iPhone, which has a 2X speed button. In practice, it’s closer to 1 ½ X speed. With Gleick’s reading faster was better.
I expect to thoroughly enjoy Gleick’s books on Feynman and Newton.
April 1, 2009
This book is great. The acceleration of society/culture by way of technology is a subject that interests me greatly, maybe more than any other, so this book was right up my alley. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Faster is, despite its being almost a decade old, it's still entirely relevant. Aside from the lack of talk about iPods an iPhones, it doesn't seem dated at all. This is especially noteworthy considering the book's premise, which claims that a decade, these days, is an eternity.
If the book has one flaw, it's indicated by its subtitle. In only 280 pages, Gleick indeed covers just about everything that is currently being accelerated, so it almost reads like a collection of short essays. Which, ironically, is perfect for the society he claims we've all become, i.e. voracious consumers of small, easily-digestible bits of information who rarely pause to consider or process the information. Yes, the book is a rather easy read, and I would have preferred if he'd gone into some more detail, either technical or historical, or whatever, about certain topics, as someone like Paul Virilio does.
Still, the book is an excellent survey of time, speed, technology, and culture acceleration. It's well-written, well-reasoned, and, I thought, entertaining (i.e. never dry). Some of my favorite topics covered were the airline industry and how it has come to manage its myriad flights, telephone operators, the wearing of wristwatches, and the concept of efficiency. It's rarely gloomy or preachy, which is rare, I've found, in cultural studies. Gleick even provides a super comprehensive bibliography (it takes up like 25 pages), so anyone who wants more detail will know where to look. Recommended.
If the book has one flaw, it's indicated by its subtitle. In only 280 pages, Gleick indeed covers just about everything that is currently being accelerated, so it almost reads like a collection of short essays. Which, ironically, is perfect for the society he claims we've all become, i.e. voracious consumers of small, easily-digestible bits of information who rarely pause to consider or process the information. Yes, the book is a rather easy read, and I would have preferred if he'd gone into some more detail, either technical or historical, or whatever, about certain topics, as someone like Paul Virilio does.
Still, the book is an excellent survey of time, speed, technology, and culture acceleration. It's well-written, well-reasoned, and, I thought, entertaining (i.e. never dry). Some of my favorite topics covered were the airline industry and how it has come to manage its myriad flights, telephone operators, the wearing of wristwatches, and the concept of efficiency. It's rarely gloomy or preachy, which is rare, I've found, in cultural studies. Gleick even provides a super comprehensive bibliography (it takes up like 25 pages), so anyone who wants more detail will know where to look. Recommended.
January 25, 2020
This book is a bit of a transitional fossil - ironic, given that it's about how "everything's getting faster." But that sentiment is, in my estimation, itself an artifact of the late 1980s through the 1990s. The analogous $CURRENT_YEAR narrative is about *scale* and *volume*, if anything - we don't notice the increases in Internet bandwidth because we're already downloading 4K-HD cat videos. But now we're worried about how many data points it takes for a machine learning algorithm to predict your behavior with 95% confidence, and the speed is just "fast enough to be a problem." In contrast to Gleick's portrait of the late-20th-c. Western world as go-go-go, the world from 2020 seems, at least on the physical plane, rather sluggish. Why go out when you can binge-watch Netflix and order out on Grubhub?
As for the actual style, it's caught between the justifiably amazing CHAOS: MAKINGA NEW SCIENCE (1980s) and the more modern pop-sociology of a Malcom Gladwell C-suite read (2010s). Gleick has a rich vocabulary, but more than once I felt like he was gilding the lily, or getting a bit too jazzy with his narrative. The chapters kind of, sort of stitch together but don't quite form a coherent picture. I never could shake the doubt that these phenomena were all that important - more than a few examples, like multitasking while the dial-up modem connects to the Internet, have simply gone away. Contrast with CHAOS, where I felt like I had learned something insightful and surprising after every chapter.
Overall, 2.5 stars rounded down. It's a quirky read for people who might enjoy a retrofuturism of their own lifetimes (speaking as a Nineties Kid) but it doesn't otherwise leave an impression.
As for the actual style, it's caught between the justifiably amazing CHAOS: MAKINGA NEW SCIENCE (1980s) and the more modern pop-sociology of a Malcom Gladwell C-suite read (2010s). Gleick has a rich vocabulary, but more than once I felt like he was gilding the lily, or getting a bit too jazzy with his narrative. The chapters kind of, sort of stitch together but don't quite form a coherent picture. I never could shake the doubt that these phenomena were all that important - more than a few examples, like multitasking while the dial-up modem connects to the Internet, have simply gone away. Contrast with CHAOS, where I felt like I had learned something insightful and surprising after every chapter.
Overall, 2.5 stars rounded down. It's a quirky read for people who might enjoy a retrofuturism of their own lifetimes (speaking as a Nineties Kid) but it doesn't otherwise leave an impression.
January 22, 2008
An OK book. It's written for a somewhat pop audience and contains few revelations. However there is an interesting section towards the end where he discusses the limits of speed and uses the example of the disabled "close door" buttons on newer skyscraper elevators which exist only so that people can press them and believe that they are causing the doors to close faster when they stay open for the same time regardless.
December 31, 2018
"I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time."
(From a Steven Wright's stand-up routine)
It is quite depressing to read a nineteen-year-old book that focuses on one of the things that are obviously wrong with our civilization and realize that the problem has gotten much worse since the publication. James Gleick's Faster was published in 1999 and its subtitle - The Acceleration of Just About Everything - aptly describes the topic. Mr. Gleick is the author of the wonderful Chaos: Making of a New Science, where the mathematical chaos theory is explained in a way accessible to general audience. I am also planning to re-read and review his Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. While Faster is not on the same stellar level as the two other books, it is well written, absorbing, and readable. And of course the main thesis of the book - that we want to do things too fast for no reason whatsoever - is even more relevant today, in the age of Twitter.
The book starts slowly: in the first 80 or so pages the author focuses on various topics related to time, like time standardization, time travel, watch technology and watch fashion (here he predicts the arrival of smart watches), slow-motion film and stroboscopic photography, but the only item that stands out for me is the critique of multi-tasking. These days people take pride in multi-tasking even more than in 1999, but at least today studies are available which unequivocally show that multi-tasking either does not save us any time or that the tasks that have been executed simultaneously with others are not executed as well as they would have been if we focused on one task at a time.
Things get really interesting when the author begins discussing the Internet. It is nice that in a book that is almost 20 years old the observations about the Web revolution - these were its early days - do not sound dated at all. But it is a pity that the author could not talk about one of the most idiotic things that our civilization has ever produced - Twitter - as it was created in 2006. Twitter, the perfect embodiment of our "religion of speed," allows short (140 characters) messages, which transform any actual, potentially worthwhile content into superficial and worthless "sound bites." The author offers quite an interesting perspective on the psychological and sociological ramifications of sound bites, which supports the contrarian point of view - one to which I wholeheartedly subscribe - that if anything can be said in a short sentence, it is not worth saying at all.
Further chapters in the book focus on the issues related to "saving time." Mr. Gleick points out the illusory nature of time savings obtained by reading faster, cooking faster, and eating faster. He ridicules the time-saving-driven attempts to measure how much time we spend for all kinds of activities and perversely asks "How much time can a person devote to time-saving?" The passages that satirize the self-help genre of books like 365 Ways To Save Time are hilarious.
One of the more interesting chapters is devoted to "hand-held antiboredom devices" like the remote. Mr. Gleick quotes Saul Bellow who saw a modern human's mental state "an unbearable state of distraction:"
Three and a quarter stars.
(From a Steven Wright's stand-up routine)
It is quite depressing to read a nineteen-year-old book that focuses on one of the things that are obviously wrong with our civilization and realize that the problem has gotten much worse since the publication. James Gleick's Faster was published in 1999 and its subtitle - The Acceleration of Just About Everything - aptly describes the topic. Mr. Gleick is the author of the wonderful Chaos: Making of a New Science, where the mathematical chaos theory is explained in a way accessible to general audience. I am also planning to re-read and review his Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. While Faster is not on the same stellar level as the two other books, it is well written, absorbing, and readable. And of course the main thesis of the book - that we want to do things too fast for no reason whatsoever - is even more relevant today, in the age of Twitter.
The book starts slowly: in the first 80 or so pages the author focuses on various topics related to time, like time standardization, time travel, watch technology and watch fashion (here he predicts the arrival of smart watches), slow-motion film and stroboscopic photography, but the only item that stands out for me is the critique of multi-tasking. These days people take pride in multi-tasking even more than in 1999, but at least today studies are available which unequivocally show that multi-tasking either does not save us any time or that the tasks that have been executed simultaneously with others are not executed as well as they would have been if we focused on one task at a time.
Things get really interesting when the author begins discussing the Internet. It is nice that in a book that is almost 20 years old the observations about the Web revolution - these were its early days - do not sound dated at all. But it is a pity that the author could not talk about one of the most idiotic things that our civilization has ever produced - Twitter - as it was created in 2006. Twitter, the perfect embodiment of our "religion of speed," allows short (140 characters) messages, which transform any actual, potentially worthwhile content into superficial and worthless "sound bites." The author offers quite an interesting perspective on the psychological and sociological ramifications of sound bites, which supports the contrarian point of view - one to which I wholeheartedly subscribe - that if anything can be said in a short sentence, it is not worth saying at all.
Further chapters in the book focus on the issues related to "saving time." Mr. Gleick points out the illusory nature of time savings obtained by reading faster, cooking faster, and eating faster. He ridicules the time-saving-driven attempts to measure how much time we spend for all kinds of activities and perversely asks "How much time can a person devote to time-saving?" The passages that satirize the self-help genre of books like 365 Ways To Save Time are hilarious.
One of the more interesting chapters is devoted to "hand-held antiboredom devices" like the remote. Mr. Gleick quotes Saul Bellow who saw a modern human's mental state "an unbearable state of distraction:"
"Remote control switches permit us to jump back and forth, mix up beginnings, middles and ends. Nothing happens in any sort of order... Distraction catches us all in the end and makes mental mincemeat of us."While Faster is not a great book in that it contains too much peripheral stuff and lacks cohesion, it is a really worthy read that may cause one to pause and think "Wait, do I really need to hurry?"
Three and a quarter stars.
April 26, 2020
It's pretty common to hear people say 2020 is such a fast year and compare it to turn of the century when Y2k and hanging chads in Florida seemed the world's biggest problems. 'Faster: The Acceleration of just about Everything' by James Gleick, published in the year 2000, is thus a useful time capsule in showing that back then everyone thought that life was far too fast as well.
The theory that life is speeding up is widely held, even if the evidence for it is patchy and somewhat of a social construction thanks to everyone telling each other that yes, life is much faster these days. Gleick mounts the argument as well as can be, in part by showing how much a search for efficiency in time drives our choices - especially in relation to technology - and how rarely this actually translates into more time for the things we value. We're not victims of a faster world, we've deliberately built it and tell ourselves we need it, even as we resent parts of it, and overstate its importance.
The role of time and feeling of speed are increasingly important in western culture. Unfortunately while Gleick is a good writer, this isn't a book of much value 20 years on. It's not as detailed about history as say 'About Time' by Adam Frank, nor as grounded in sociological evidence and broader critique as work such as 'Runaway World' by Anthony Giddens. Save your time, read something new. That's what a faster society would recommend anyway.
The theory that life is speeding up is widely held, even if the evidence for it is patchy and somewhat of a social construction thanks to everyone telling each other that yes, life is much faster these days. Gleick mounts the argument as well as can be, in part by showing how much a search for efficiency in time drives our choices - especially in relation to technology - and how rarely this actually translates into more time for the things we value. We're not victims of a faster world, we've deliberately built it and tell ourselves we need it, even as we resent parts of it, and overstate its importance.
The role of time and feeling of speed are increasingly important in western culture. Unfortunately while Gleick is a good writer, this isn't a book of much value 20 years on. It's not as detailed about history as say 'About Time' by Adam Frank, nor as grounded in sociological evidence and broader critique as work such as 'Runaway World' by Anthony Giddens. Save your time, read something new. That's what a faster society would recommend anyway.
February 12, 2019
Anyone familiar with other books by James Gleick (Chaos: Making and New Science and The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood) will quickly recognize the formula for Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Written at (approximately) the turn of the millennium, some of the material is dated, but as with most books by this author, the anecdotes, quotations, and insights are well worth considering it anew. For example, Gleick begins his discussion of time with interesting factoids about an urban source of impatience, elevators. “A good waiting time is in the neighborhood of fifteen seconds. Sometime around forty seconds, people start to get visibly upset.” (p. 27)
In a similar vein, did you ever notice the well-worn walk buttons for traffic signals? They are continually used, yet, “At best, the push-to-walk button will eventually, within a minute or two, insert a ‘walk phase’ into an otherwise walkless cycle.” (p. 30) At a time when watches have largely become jewelry or transitioned to the computer as with the Apple Watch, it is fascinating to read about an Encyclopedia Britannica article still in print up till 1936 that offered instructions for repairing a watch would have been magnetized, “’twirl it rapidly around while retreating from the dynamo [source of the magnetism] and continue the motion till at a considerable distance.’” (p. 38)
I was both amused and appalled at a Hitachi executive whose mantra was, “Speed is God, and time is the devil.” (p. 75) I could resonate with the metaphor on p. 90: “Try to distinguish between the little nattering demons that can fill every moment and the greater, quieter spirits which can enrich the passing hours.” And, I very much agree with and have experienced the reality in James Burke’s observation, “We will need to reskill ourselves constantly every decade just to keep a job.” (p. 81)
As for factoids (for which Gleick is famous), did you know that the average U.S. citizen’s time commitment to filling out U.S. government forms averages to 4.5 minutes per day (p. 127)? Did you know that the average shelf life of a book in 1999 (surely even shorter today) was 60 days (p. 141)? For me, personally, it was fascinating to learn that one of the professors from my graduate school, Dr. Wayne E. Oates, officially coined the phrase, “workaholic.” (p. 153) Did you know that even a public radio station given a choice between a performance of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik which plays in 21 minutes and 31 seconds compared to another which plays in 20 minutes and 18 seconds that the shorter performance will invariably be chosen (p. 193)? Did you know that, at the turn of the millennium, software company support lines alone kept customers on hold 3 billion minutes per year (p. 234)?
Perhaps the most alarming insight in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything was the illustration of how fast technological change was obsoleting much of our digital archive of human wisdom in the digital age (p. 250). As a cautionary tale, Gleick quotes the historian and science-fiction author H. G. Wells about the advent of now obsolete microfilm. Wells said, “There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind.” (p. 254) In 1937, Wells had no idea how fast microfilm would become obsolete (p. 255). Yet, as proud as we are of the petabytes of valuable archival materials, there is tremendous danger of losing that data, too.
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything is a fascinating book both in entertaining narratives from the past and present, as well as thought-provoking commentary. Though outdated, it still stands up as a valuable resource.
In a similar vein, did you ever notice the well-worn walk buttons for traffic signals? They are continually used, yet, “At best, the push-to-walk button will eventually, within a minute or two, insert a ‘walk phase’ into an otherwise walkless cycle.” (p. 30) At a time when watches have largely become jewelry or transitioned to the computer as with the Apple Watch, it is fascinating to read about an Encyclopedia Britannica article still in print up till 1936 that offered instructions for repairing a watch would have been magnetized, “’twirl it rapidly around while retreating from the dynamo [source of the magnetism] and continue the motion till at a considerable distance.’” (p. 38)
I was both amused and appalled at a Hitachi executive whose mantra was, “Speed is God, and time is the devil.” (p. 75) I could resonate with the metaphor on p. 90: “Try to distinguish between the little nattering demons that can fill every moment and the greater, quieter spirits which can enrich the passing hours.” And, I very much agree with and have experienced the reality in James Burke’s observation, “We will need to reskill ourselves constantly every decade just to keep a job.” (p. 81)
As for factoids (for which Gleick is famous), did you know that the average U.S. citizen’s time commitment to filling out U.S. government forms averages to 4.5 minutes per day (p. 127)? Did you know that the average shelf life of a book in 1999 (surely even shorter today) was 60 days (p. 141)? For me, personally, it was fascinating to learn that one of the professors from my graduate school, Dr. Wayne E. Oates, officially coined the phrase, “workaholic.” (p. 153) Did you know that even a public radio station given a choice between a performance of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik which plays in 21 minutes and 31 seconds compared to another which plays in 20 minutes and 18 seconds that the shorter performance will invariably be chosen (p. 193)? Did you know that, at the turn of the millennium, software company support lines alone kept customers on hold 3 billion minutes per year (p. 234)?
Perhaps the most alarming insight in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything was the illustration of how fast technological change was obsoleting much of our digital archive of human wisdom in the digital age (p. 250). As a cautionary tale, Gleick quotes the historian and science-fiction author H. G. Wells about the advent of now obsolete microfilm. Wells said, “There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind.” (p. 254) In 1937, Wells had no idea how fast microfilm would become obsolete (p. 255). Yet, as proud as we are of the petabytes of valuable archival materials, there is tremendous danger of losing that data, too.
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything is a fascinating book both in entertaining narratives from the past and present, as well as thought-provoking commentary. Though outdated, it still stands up as a valuable resource.
December 23, 2015
This was a great, quick read, and though written in 1999, the ideas and issues presented are as pertinent as ever. An easy essay read on various facets of how technology is shaping society with mutitasking, emails, information overload and a sheer feeling of lack of time as our everyday pace quickens. Ten years later, the world has accelerated far more than even this book portends with flash trading, texting, twitter, digital downloads, and the enormous capacity of the web. But in essence, it is an examination of our sense of time and how technology shapes our vision of it and our feeling of productivity. It certainly was inspiring to read and make my own goals of taking myself out of that heightened acceleration as much as possible. The writing was a bit kitschy, with its emphasis on television, cable and more, but that's the world we live in (and a world I forego in terms of immersing myself in such media) and the actual writing itself could have been more in depth, it essentially read like a giant magazine article for the New Yorker or something. Definitely a "pop" book vs science. Worth a read regardless, as it doesnt take long to get through.
June 30, 2025
Disappointing. I enjoyed 'The Information' by the same author, which I found well-rounded and offering depth and variety. This earlier offering by the American author failed to hold my interest and failed to really deliver on the theme set up quite adequately in the opening fifty or so pages. Gleick speaks at length about the increasing pace of modern life, but doesn't really make a coherent or particularly interesting point about it - it just comes over as a list of examples and facts about how things were slower and now are faster. On top of this, the book also felt a little US-centric and (as it was published in 1999, before the smart-phone revolution) curiously dated whilst trying to address a [then] modern phenomenon. I found it a little cynical in the focus on what has been lost with a pacier existence, as opposed to counterweighing what has been gained, and there wasn't a lot about it which hadn't already occurred to me or which I had previously read about. Yes, at the turn of the millennium it would've made for a more powerful and insightful commentary, but to me reading it in 2018 it wasn't that rewarding.
September 3, 2013
I started out not quite impressed with this book. It looked like it was going to be vacant navel-gazing - reminiscing about a time in the past when things were "slower" and therefore better. But I'm glad I stuck with it, because it turned into a very thought-provoking story of what time means to us now. Lots has been written on the increasing speed of technological innovation and how this changes society, but much less has been written about what the effect is of moving fast. The author doesn't quite argue that we need to go slower, and he's not a luddite arguing we get rid of modern technology. All the same, a lot of topics worth thinking about are brought up. Though this was published 13 years ago, it has only become more relevant with time.
July 1, 2018
A series of think-pieces that don’t add up
The author is trying to capture different versions of the same theme: how our modern lives are shaped by busyness and commotion. He has lots of short chapters that expound in this idea. Each feels like its meant to be a think-piece published in The New Yorker. Overall, it seems the author keeps trying to convince the reader how smart he is, how much of an observer of social trends he is, how he can wrap up our lives into a broad theme. In the end, he tries to say too much in each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence. He jumps from topic to topic. In the limit of trying to capture everything into a single theme, this book ends up being about nothing at all. Rather than remembering the theme, I’ve basically forgot everything written.
The author is trying to capture different versions of the same theme: how our modern lives are shaped by busyness and commotion. He has lots of short chapters that expound in this idea. Each feels like its meant to be a think-piece published in The New Yorker. Overall, it seems the author keeps trying to convince the reader how smart he is, how much of an observer of social trends he is, how he can wrap up our lives into a broad theme. In the end, he tries to say too much in each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence. He jumps from topic to topic. In the limit of trying to capture everything into a single theme, this book ends up being about nothing at all. Rather than remembering the theme, I’ve basically forgot everything written.
October 11, 2009
I read this book during a week holiday in the Okavango Swamps (Botswana) at the turn of the Millennium ... after a decade of burning the candle at both ends and living Internet years.
Gleick is one of the small handful of popular science writers able to spin a delightful series of yarns to make his point.
His final big bit of advice: our species needs to learn how to squander copious amounts of time, again. A profound bit of advice, if one can find the time to think about it, let alone implement it.
Gleick is one of the small handful of popular science writers able to spin a delightful series of yarns to make his point.
His final big bit of advice: our species needs to learn how to squander copious amounts of time, again. A profound bit of advice, if one can find the time to think about it, let alone implement it.
October 9, 2016
At the end I'm not really sure that it said much... But it was a reasonably interesting and engaging read. Inevitable dated parts. Could really have just stuck to the Brainpickings summary but it was a pleasant enough read.
February 2, 2020
Faster
By: James Gleick
The keeping of time was a right reserved to Emperor in ancient China. They set the calendar and marked the passing of time with complex water clocks, while the population carried on in blithe ignorance of the mechanical passing of time, well after clocks spread throughout the rest of the world. Gleick compares this state of being with our segmented, minute-by-minute life today and remarks: “if our watches are slave-chains, we don them eagerly”
Faster is a book that explores the concept of speed as it can be applied to objects, the evolution of technology and, importantly, the pace of life. Having come to Faster through another of Gleick's book, The Information, you start to see a pattern to his writing: take a concept, deconstruct it and explore its many meanings, evaluate the moral significance we associate with this concept, and color it in with eclectic examples that loosely orbit the concept's center. In this sense, Gleick's mode of operation compares with the likes of Malcolm Gladwell. Yet if Gladwell frames vivid and deeply personal stories in order to suss out a factoid, Gleick takes a less sentimental approach, focusing instead on the concept at hand, filling it with esoteric facts, in brick-a-brac fashion.
Gleick puts forward the idea that there is a sort of check-stop to speed in that it only progresses and rarely reverts. The mechanism around this process isn't made explicit but is hinted at in business: affairs were conducted over weeks, with correspondence taking days to be written and sent off. Lawyers were stereotypical associated with being lazy and slow. That is no longer an option with the advent of email, video chat, the telephone and billable hours. The pace of production has set a new “normal” and reverting to some prelapsarian era is only possible in post-Apocalyptic daydreams. Information is assumed to be more and more instantaneously accessible and acting on that information is a necessity, not an option. It's hard to even image, for example, that “two thousand people died in the 1815 battle of new Orleans a fortnight after the relevant peace treaty had been signed in London”.
But what in what sense is it good to be fast? Are we supposed to be “hurried and hasty” or “living at high speed with athleticism and vigor”? What about being leisurely and present? What, exactly, is the right speed of life? Gleick offers interesting examples of how time is more and more a precious commodity and that it's use is more than even coming under rigorous scrutiny. Products are offered to save a minute here, a few seconds there. In one aside, he notes that an advertisement “'for women who don't have time for a yeast infection' – as though slackers might have time for that”. What are we putting our precious time into and where do these regained seconds go into?
How we experience time as a society shifts with the advent of technologies that speed up life. This process isn't neatral in respect to the values that earlier societies had or even the activities that they engaged in. Books, once read in solitude, are now heard while engaging in another task; and the advent of companies offering audio summaries of books (Blinkist, for example) show that even multitasking can be sped up. Even the thought of sitting down to enjoy to an entire album, free of other distractions or activities, makes people restless.
What it means to experience time is important. Our common intuitions tell us that we can use our time better, now that we have access to so many time saving technologies, now that we have so much choice on how to spend our time. But that doesn't actually bear out. In early user testing Sun Micro-systems did on early internet users, they found that people don't actually read articles on the internet as they do books. The conclusion reached was there there are simply too many options of what to engage with and lurking in everyone's mind as they are on a website is the idea that there is some other, better website that they might want to switch their attention to. In a coincidental finding that goes against economic theory, as it is understood today, adding choice decreased the happiness and fulfillment people experience.
In conclusion, Gleick doesn't offer some milquetoast panacea: slow down and smell the roses! In many ways, how we spend our time is out of our control and the norms we feel around time are clearly set socially. At best, we are faced with the reality of the quick passing of time and our biological limits of squeezing more meaning out experienced time, as much as we may want to. We are forced to re-evaluate our intuitions, that faster is always better, that more choice means more happiness and fulfillment. The book succeeds in making the seemingly benign concept of speed exotic and interesting, diffused yet understandable. Gleick hints at a limit to going faster but what that limit is remains unclear.
By: James Gleick
The keeping of time was a right reserved to Emperor in ancient China. They set the calendar and marked the passing of time with complex water clocks, while the population carried on in blithe ignorance of the mechanical passing of time, well after clocks spread throughout the rest of the world. Gleick compares this state of being with our segmented, minute-by-minute life today and remarks: “if our watches are slave-chains, we don them eagerly”
Faster is a book that explores the concept of speed as it can be applied to objects, the evolution of technology and, importantly, the pace of life. Having come to Faster through another of Gleick's book, The Information, you start to see a pattern to his writing: take a concept, deconstruct it and explore its many meanings, evaluate the moral significance we associate with this concept, and color it in with eclectic examples that loosely orbit the concept's center. In this sense, Gleick's mode of operation compares with the likes of Malcolm Gladwell. Yet if Gladwell frames vivid and deeply personal stories in order to suss out a factoid, Gleick takes a less sentimental approach, focusing instead on the concept at hand, filling it with esoteric facts, in brick-a-brac fashion.
Gleick puts forward the idea that there is a sort of check-stop to speed in that it only progresses and rarely reverts. The mechanism around this process isn't made explicit but is hinted at in business: affairs were conducted over weeks, with correspondence taking days to be written and sent off. Lawyers were stereotypical associated with being lazy and slow. That is no longer an option with the advent of email, video chat, the telephone and billable hours. The pace of production has set a new “normal” and reverting to some prelapsarian era is only possible in post-Apocalyptic daydreams. Information is assumed to be more and more instantaneously accessible and acting on that information is a necessity, not an option. It's hard to even image, for example, that “two thousand people died in the 1815 battle of new Orleans a fortnight after the relevant peace treaty had been signed in London”.
But what in what sense is it good to be fast? Are we supposed to be “hurried and hasty” or “living at high speed with athleticism and vigor”? What about being leisurely and present? What, exactly, is the right speed of life? Gleick offers interesting examples of how time is more and more a precious commodity and that it's use is more than even coming under rigorous scrutiny. Products are offered to save a minute here, a few seconds there. In one aside, he notes that an advertisement “'for women who don't have time for a yeast infection' – as though slackers might have time for that”. What are we putting our precious time into and where do these regained seconds go into?
How we experience time as a society shifts with the advent of technologies that speed up life. This process isn't neatral in respect to the values that earlier societies had or even the activities that they engaged in. Books, once read in solitude, are now heard while engaging in another task; and the advent of companies offering audio summaries of books (Blinkist, for example) show that even multitasking can be sped up. Even the thought of sitting down to enjoy to an entire album, free of other distractions or activities, makes people restless.
What it means to experience time is important. Our common intuitions tell us that we can use our time better, now that we have access to so many time saving technologies, now that we have so much choice on how to spend our time. But that doesn't actually bear out. In early user testing Sun Micro-systems did on early internet users, they found that people don't actually read articles on the internet as they do books. The conclusion reached was there there are simply too many options of what to engage with and lurking in everyone's mind as they are on a website is the idea that there is some other, better website that they might want to switch their attention to. In a coincidental finding that goes against economic theory, as it is understood today, adding choice decreased the happiness and fulfillment people experience.
In conclusion, Gleick doesn't offer some milquetoast panacea: slow down and smell the roses! In many ways, how we spend our time is out of our control and the norms we feel around time are clearly set socially. At best, we are faced with the reality of the quick passing of time and our biological limits of squeezing more meaning out experienced time, as much as we may want to. We are forced to re-evaluate our intuitions, that faster is always better, that more choice means more happiness and fulfillment. The book succeeds in making the seemingly benign concept of speed exotic and interesting, diffused yet understandable. Gleick hints at a limit to going faster but what that limit is remains unclear.
September 16, 2023
Nearly everyone talks about how things in life are moving faster and in this book, Gleick gives many examples that it is not an illusion. One of the best examples is when an air traffic controller instructs a pilot to perform a maneuver in a minute. When it is not done quickly, he raises his voice and says, “I meant a New York minute, not a hillbilly minute!”
One of the main things that have been sped up is the amount of information that is packed into videos. The film industry is constantly pushing the envelope to determine the high-speed limits of our perception. Although I am a lifelong fan of comic books, I find it very difficult to watch the latest superhero movies as I become overwhelmed with the imagery content.
I generally watch the network news in the evening, and I have noticed how the remote correspondents talk much faster than they used to. When the anchor cuts to them, they immediately begin their report and when done, they quickly snap it back to the anchor. One can easily visualize the clock in front of the correspondent counting down their allotted seconds.
My favorite chapter has the title, “A Millisecond Here, a Millisecond There.” It opens with what I consider the signature line of the book, “Between thoughts, there are gaps – very, very short gaps. Can this time be used?” Decades ago, efficiency experts worked diligently in order to shave seconds off of operations or ways in which seconds of dead time could be utilized. In the world described by Gleick, that time is now measured in thousandths of a second.
Published in 1999, this book is of course dated in the sense that many things have changed, from the development of the smartphone to various forms of social media. Yet, in it Gleick had proven to be prescient, things do indeed move faster now than even twenty years ago. The continued increase in the speed of things must of course become asymptotic to the theoretical maximum.
One of the main things that have been sped up is the amount of information that is packed into videos. The film industry is constantly pushing the envelope to determine the high-speed limits of our perception. Although I am a lifelong fan of comic books, I find it very difficult to watch the latest superhero movies as I become overwhelmed with the imagery content.
I generally watch the network news in the evening, and I have noticed how the remote correspondents talk much faster than they used to. When the anchor cuts to them, they immediately begin their report and when done, they quickly snap it back to the anchor. One can easily visualize the clock in front of the correspondent counting down their allotted seconds.
My favorite chapter has the title, “A Millisecond Here, a Millisecond There.” It opens with what I consider the signature line of the book, “Between thoughts, there are gaps – very, very short gaps. Can this time be used?” Decades ago, efficiency experts worked diligently in order to shave seconds off of operations or ways in which seconds of dead time could be utilized. In the world described by Gleick, that time is now measured in thousandths of a second.
Published in 1999, this book is of course dated in the sense that many things have changed, from the development of the smartphone to various forms of social media. Yet, in it Gleick had proven to be prescient, things do indeed move faster now than even twenty years ago. The continued increase in the speed of things must of course become asymptotic to the theoretical maximum.
January 22, 2023
Our modern (western) lives seem to run in a frantic pace. We seem to be obsessed by "saving" time, but just what is "saving" time? Doing tasks more quickly and leaving more free, idle, time, or rather filling up all your idle time with tasks? Does saving time mean fitting more tasks into your schedule, or having to complete less tasks?
Gleick's "Faster" is all about Time in modern society. About how we spend it (did you know that the average American spends on avarage as much time on government beaurocracy as he or she does on having sex?), about how we try to save it (did you know that a dishwasher only saves you one minute daily on average?), and how our perception of time has changed over the years; one striking example of that last point is how two centuries ago 2000 men were killed in battle, 2 weeks after a peace treaty had been signed, because the information didn't cross the Atlantic quickly enough. It's hard to imagine this today, with CNN and Al-Jazeera broadcasting wars live, and most of us living on a single, coordinated, clock. 200 years ago, if Einstein had invented his Special Theory of Relativity, he would have found it easier than now to explain to people about how two events can influence one another only if information can reach fast enough from one event to the other...
In the many short chapters of this book, Glieck gives numerous examples (some interesting and amusing, but a minority are not very interesting) on what we do to "save time" and increase pace in airline schedules, TV commercials, elevators, household chores, and shows how some of these bring greater efficiency, while others simply cause an arms race of increasing pace of life, from which nobody really benefits.
Gleick's "Faster" is all about Time in modern society. About how we spend it (did you know that the average American spends on avarage as much time on government beaurocracy as he or she does on having sex?), about how we try to save it (did you know that a dishwasher only saves you one minute daily on average?), and how our perception of time has changed over the years; one striking example of that last point is how two centuries ago 2000 men were killed in battle, 2 weeks after a peace treaty had been signed, because the information didn't cross the Atlantic quickly enough. It's hard to imagine this today, with CNN and Al-Jazeera broadcasting wars live, and most of us living on a single, coordinated, clock. 200 years ago, if Einstein had invented his Special Theory of Relativity, he would have found it easier than now to explain to people about how two events can influence one another only if information can reach fast enough from one event to the other...
In the many short chapters of this book, Glieck gives numerous examples (some interesting and amusing, but a minority are not very interesting) on what we do to "save time" and increase pace in airline schedules, TV commercials, elevators, household chores, and shows how some of these bring greater efficiency, while others simply cause an arms race of increasing pace of life, from which nobody really benefits.
March 17, 2025
James Gleick bemoans our collective obsession with time in his 1999 book Faster. According to Gleick, the modern world is moving in nanosecond increments. So many businesses and ideas vie for our limited attention.
It wasn't always this way. Time was something that happened, and some people kept track of it. With the advent of the Railroad, people needed more accurate timekeeping. We invented a universal time. Gleick calls this an accelerator.
The book is prophetic in scope. How did it predict things like TikTok and Smartwatches? The technology for smartwatches was available, but the infrastructure required was not. Furthermore, smartphones weren't available yet, so there was no market. As far as TikTok is concerned, media at the time was shortening at a faster and faster pace.
Gleick leaves no stone unturned in his explanations. He discusses the proliferation of methamphetamines and other such drugs intended to speed up a person.
I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
It wasn't always this way. Time was something that happened, and some people kept track of it. With the advent of the Railroad, people needed more accurate timekeeping. We invented a universal time. Gleick calls this an accelerator.
The book is prophetic in scope. How did it predict things like TikTok and Smartwatches? The technology for smartwatches was available, but the infrastructure required was not. Furthermore, smartphones weren't available yet, so there was no market. As far as TikTok is concerned, media at the time was shortening at a faster and faster pace.
Gleick leaves no stone unturned in his explanations. He discusses the proliferation of methamphetamines and other such drugs intended to speed up a person.
I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
July 9, 2014
There is a certain irony to the short chapters sporting catchy headings in FSTR – as the book cover popularly (or smugly?) has the title. “Prest-o! change-o!” and “On Your Mark, Get Set, Think” are as punny as they come; I'd almost argue they are Buzzfeed titles avant la lettre. In the afterword Gleick assures us that this is a book and, as such, a “slow device”, but you can't help but feel that he has been influenced in its design and structure by the subject matter. I guess there's no helping that when you immerse yourself in statistics about how every second counts. Make your chapters two pages longer and people will not be able to finish them on their daily commute! (or some such thought?) I read a rather depressing (and annoyingly written, to boot) article recently counting down how many visitors would still be reading after each paragraph. That is the sort of preoccupation that must be behind this one.
Since we're on that subject: one of Faster's chapters is called “Jog More, Read Less,” and points out that we only spent sixteen minutes a day reading a book, on average (but almost thrice as much reading newspapers and magazines, and probably much more reading short messages online). The Jog More part of that title is elaborated on more broadly. To summarize: we spent a lot of time exercising, but how much of that time is actually spent exercising our muscles instead of just flexing them is not entirely clear. I smuggled in the culprit word there: “exercise.” While Gleick generally limits his disapproval of all the little facets of life in which we have sped up, it's not hard to guess what he really thinks, and sometimes he can't help himself. On the subject of treadmills: “as you head off for the eternal horizon on your treadmill, you must be aware that this march is almost by definition a waste of time”. Indeed. Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust, writing on the history of walking, pointed out the irony that we have first created machines to lighten our work load, and then created machines to even out the lightening of our work load. She quotes an Eduardo Galeano essay in which he engages Dominican fishermen to talk about a rowing machine. Needless to say, they are perplexed, and conclude that the “rowing is the only thing we don't like” about rowing. They like all the things that the modern gym doesn't allow: the sun beating on their bodies and the cool splashes of water.
It doesn't necessarily help the book that Gleick starts with his strongest example, either. Point in case: the door close button. He borrowed it from Douglas Coupland, but he gets it right. “Anger at elevators rises within seconds, experience shows.” Although elevators are usually programmed to take only two to four seconds to close of their own, “the door close button in elevators is usually the one with the paint worn off”. I enjoyed the little factoid that most door close buttons are deactivated when the elevator is installed, and the buttons work only to relieve psychological stress. Since the doors close quickly anyway, no harm is done and no harm is even noticed.
After the doors close, I felt – again, quite ironically – a little too much come at me, too quickly, in this book. Yes, Gleick seems to press the door close button too soon upon virtually every subject, whereas I sometimes prefered to dwell longer. Nevertheless, somewhere in the midle of the book, through an endless barrage of examples, Gleick hits upon a more overarching core. Or perhaps I do, perhaps I finally get what he's trying to say around the time the author hits “Internet time,” a subject I've been involving myself with for my thesis. “The Web and TV complement each other perfectly,” Gleick has some nobody from California say. “TV doesn't require much attention from the viewer. It fits perfectly into the spaces created by downloading Web pages.” This one's insightful because it's not true anymore for most people. The internet does not take time anymore downloading web pages. Even hi-res movies can be streamed without delay. If you take the time out of everything – if you make TV and newspapers and books into bite-size chunks – it makes sense that it will be impossible to concentrate on anything, since nothing continues to happen. Moreover, in the meantime, there are a myriad of other things that can start happening. In the past, we sometimes simply had to wait. “We humans used to feel like laggards, with nature marching briskly onward.” We had to adapt to the world, and this of course has been the fight technology has been fighting. “In our day of electric wires,” Mark Twain writes, as quoted by Gleick, “we turn it around. Man waits not for time nor tide.”
This brings Gleick to his second-best example: the fermata. This is a notational sign in music used to prolong a note or rest indefinitely. Gleick points out that there are musicians around who can play any piece of music brilliantly, but choke on this sign. They just get uncomfortable with the silence, let alone the “indefinite” length of it.
The last paragraph, appropriately called “The End,” is rather wonderful. It can be read independently of what came before, and would make for an excellent separate essay. Here, Gleick finally draws some conclusions himself, most importantly of which is the following realisation: “whenever we speed up the present, as a curious side effect we slow down the past. […] Peering back through history we see scenes in a kind of slow motion that did not exist then. We have invented it.” This is what it boils down to. There is another, comparable remark to make here, which Gleick omits. Whenever we think of the future, it doesn't slow down the present. Just because we fantasise about traveling at the speed of light, we do not suddenly get flustered about flying at the speed of sound. It is only when we experience the acceleration first-hand that we get restless with all that came before.
Since we're on that subject: one of Faster's chapters is called “Jog More, Read Less,” and points out that we only spent sixteen minutes a day reading a book, on average (but almost thrice as much reading newspapers and magazines, and probably much more reading short messages online). The Jog More part of that title is elaborated on more broadly. To summarize: we spent a lot of time exercising, but how much of that time is actually spent exercising our muscles instead of just flexing them is not entirely clear. I smuggled in the culprit word there: “exercise.” While Gleick generally limits his disapproval of all the little facets of life in which we have sped up, it's not hard to guess what he really thinks, and sometimes he can't help himself. On the subject of treadmills: “as you head off for the eternal horizon on your treadmill, you must be aware that this march is almost by definition a waste of time”. Indeed. Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust, writing on the history of walking, pointed out the irony that we have first created machines to lighten our work load, and then created machines to even out the lightening of our work load. She quotes an Eduardo Galeano essay in which he engages Dominican fishermen to talk about a rowing machine. Needless to say, they are perplexed, and conclude that the “rowing is the only thing we don't like” about rowing. They like all the things that the modern gym doesn't allow: the sun beating on their bodies and the cool splashes of water.
It doesn't necessarily help the book that Gleick starts with his strongest example, either. Point in case: the door close button. He borrowed it from Douglas Coupland, but he gets it right. “Anger at elevators rises within seconds, experience shows.” Although elevators are usually programmed to take only two to four seconds to close of their own, “the door close button in elevators is usually the one with the paint worn off”. I enjoyed the little factoid that most door close buttons are deactivated when the elevator is installed, and the buttons work only to relieve psychological stress. Since the doors close quickly anyway, no harm is done and no harm is even noticed.
After the doors close, I felt – again, quite ironically – a little too much come at me, too quickly, in this book. Yes, Gleick seems to press the door close button too soon upon virtually every subject, whereas I sometimes prefered to dwell longer. Nevertheless, somewhere in the midle of the book, through an endless barrage of examples, Gleick hits upon a more overarching core. Or perhaps I do, perhaps I finally get what he's trying to say around the time the author hits “Internet time,” a subject I've been involving myself with for my thesis. “The Web and TV complement each other perfectly,” Gleick has some nobody from California say. “TV doesn't require much attention from the viewer. It fits perfectly into the spaces created by downloading Web pages.” This one's insightful because it's not true anymore for most people. The internet does not take time anymore downloading web pages. Even hi-res movies can be streamed without delay. If you take the time out of everything – if you make TV and newspapers and books into bite-size chunks – it makes sense that it will be impossible to concentrate on anything, since nothing continues to happen. Moreover, in the meantime, there are a myriad of other things that can start happening. In the past, we sometimes simply had to wait. “We humans used to feel like laggards, with nature marching briskly onward.” We had to adapt to the world, and this of course has been the fight technology has been fighting. “In our day of electric wires,” Mark Twain writes, as quoted by Gleick, “we turn it around. Man waits not for time nor tide.”
This brings Gleick to his second-best example: the fermata. This is a notational sign in music used to prolong a note or rest indefinitely. Gleick points out that there are musicians around who can play any piece of music brilliantly, but choke on this sign. They just get uncomfortable with the silence, let alone the “indefinite” length of it.
The last paragraph, appropriately called “The End,” is rather wonderful. It can be read independently of what came before, and would make for an excellent separate essay. Here, Gleick finally draws some conclusions himself, most importantly of which is the following realisation: “whenever we speed up the present, as a curious side effect we slow down the past. […] Peering back through history we see scenes in a kind of slow motion that did not exist then. We have invented it.” This is what it boils down to. There is another, comparable remark to make here, which Gleick omits. Whenever we think of the future, it doesn't slow down the present. Just because we fantasise about traveling at the speed of light, we do not suddenly get flustered about flying at the speed of sound. It is only when we experience the acceleration first-hand that we get restless with all that came before.
December 13, 2018
Horribly outdated by this point, Gleick's accounting of acceleration reads as a collection of new phrases/inventions/gadgets/foods/behaviors he's either annoyed with or bemused by. There were still some nuggets of interesting-ness that touched off different semi-enjoyable musings (how quickly humans adapt to new things - how doing something faster makes us inevitably imagine the old way of doing it felt horribly slow at the time - how human speech and then idea patterns are influenced by the world around them) but this could have been accomplished much better in article format.
But even if there was an updated version that's just a short story in Wired, I wouldn't want to read it.
Gleick's "The Information" was wonderful though so I'm going to continue picking up his books regardless.
But even if there was an updated version that's just a short story in Wired, I wouldn't want to read it.
Gleick's "The Information" was wonderful though so I'm going to continue picking up his books regardless.
April 1, 2018
Faster is a great compilation and discussion of the ways in which our world is changing, and our perception of our own personal time is changing along with it. Though I read this almost 20 years after it was written, the themes are very much still applicable and this would have been state of the art in 1999.
Sprinkled throughout the text you can see portions that are interrelated, though not necessarily redundant to some of his other works. Some passages are inspired by Chaos, and others I can see as part of the foundation for The Information.
Overall this was a great read. A bit nostalgic for me personally, and Gleick's narrative is informed, robust, and scientifically literate as usual.
Sprinkled throughout the text you can see portions that are interrelated, though not necessarily redundant to some of his other works. Some passages are inspired by Chaos, and others I can see as part of the foundation for The Information.
Overall this was a great read. A bit nostalgic for me personally, and Gleick's narrative is informed, robust, and scientifically literate as usual.
September 21, 2024
I’m the kind of person who hates wasting time. Whether I’m at the gym or commuting, I make the most of it by listening to audiobooks. I also wake up really early to maximize my mornings.
But in a world full of distractions, wasting time is almost inevitable. This book by James Gleick, written around the year 2000, tries to tackle just that: our struggles and strategies for managing time.
The issue is that, while it might have been relevant back then, Gleick couldn’t foresee the impact of social media, video games, or streaming on our attention. And honestly, there are much better books on the topic today.
I only finished it because I had already started, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are far better ways to make the most of your time.
But in a world full of distractions, wasting time is almost inevitable. This book by James Gleick, written around the year 2000, tries to tackle just that: our struggles and strategies for managing time.
The issue is that, while it might have been relevant back then, Gleick couldn’t foresee the impact of social media, video games, or streaming on our attention. And honestly, there are much better books on the topic today.
I only finished it because I had already started, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are far better ways to make the most of your time.
May 24, 2017
An interesting treatise on time, from how societies starting using time, telling time - then how time became standardized.
Then how societies worked and how everyone is TOO busy - that time is precious and no one gets more of it. How time "saving" and management really came about in 1980's as an overall societal self help phenomena.
All trends still consistent - research mid to late 1990's, published in 1999 - seems a little dated compared to how much "worse" it is with all the digital and electronics.
Seemed a bit disjointed on occasion - not sure if my lack of concentration or the writing.
Then how societies worked and how everyone is TOO busy - that time is precious and no one gets more of it. How time "saving" and management really came about in 1980's as an overall societal self help phenomena.
All trends still consistent - research mid to late 1990's, published in 1999 - seems a little dated compared to how much "worse" it is with all the digital and electronics.
Seemed a bit disjointed on occasion - not sure if my lack of concentration or the writing.
December 16, 2020
I had two problems with this book:
1) It's very badly dated. The entire thrust is technology, and it's 20 years old. I mention this with the caveat of I read the first edition and there have maybe been some major changes, but still.....
2) I don't understand why it was written. Gleick basically goes through time from about the Indistrial Revolution onwards and literally lists ways that technological advances sped up life. Ok? There'slittle to nothing in the way of commentary or insight and that made this a waste of time for me.
1) It's very badly dated. The entire thrust is technology, and it's 20 years old. I mention this with the caveat of I read the first edition and there have maybe been some major changes, but still.....
2) I don't understand why it was written. Gleick basically goes through time from about the Indistrial Revolution onwards and literally lists ways that technological advances sped up life. Ok? There'slittle to nothing in the way of commentary or insight and that made this a waste of time for me.
December 12, 2022
Move over John A. McPhee, coming through
The master of important trivia, John A. McPhee's “Oranges” ISBN: 0374226881, is about to be surpassed by James Gleick, “The Acceleration Guy.” The history of chronometry will never be the same. His insights on elevators are uplifting. He discusses the type-A personality and its misconceptions. I will not go through every subject as you do not have TIME to read this review, but I was surprised to find out what “God’s speed” meant.
The master of important trivia, John A. McPhee's “Oranges” ISBN: 0374226881, is about to be surpassed by James Gleick, “The Acceleration Guy.” The history of chronometry will never be the same. His insights on elevators are uplifting. He discusses the type-A personality and its misconceptions. I will not go through every subject as you do not have TIME to read this review, but I was surprised to find out what “God’s speed” meant.
October 28, 2019
Lo mejor del libro son sus análisis de fenomenos culturales, edicion de peliculas y videos y como se traduce eso en capital. tambien los asuntos sobre tiempo de descanso, actividades y trabajo Los detalles sobre la velocidad de elevadores, logistica de vuelos pueden ser interesantes pero entran en el territorio de datos científicos inútiles.
April 16, 2023
Eh. An odd book. Kind of a jazzy approach to nonfiction commentary. Felt a bit like an old man shaking a stick at the sky - and reading it 20+ years after it was published makes his concerns feel like people complaining about the telegraph. Certainly did a good job of describing the late 90s feel of faster… everything. Captivating writing, as always.
January 24, 2017
Pseudointellectual trash. Gleick can and has written much better. Huge disappointment, ranges from preachy to just plain factually wrong at a few points (even after considering the technological developments since it was first published). Would have expected much better from the author of Chaos.
November 29, 2017
Even though it was written before smartphones, tablets, facebook, twitter, snapchat and netflix, it is still a very actual description of how we all have gotten so busy. How everything is being time-economized.
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