Saturday Morning Quote

I've just begun reading the book Faster by James Gleick. Whether you're working today or it's an off-day, here's some food, or time, for thought:

We are in a rush. We are making haste. A compression of time characterizes the life of a century now closing. Airport gates are minor intensifiers of the lose-not-a-minute anguish of our age. There are other intensifiers - places and objects that signify impatience. Certain notorious intersections and tollboths. Doctors' anterooms ("waiting rooms"). 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 seems an eternity. Speed-dial buttons on telephones: do you invest minutes in programming them and reap your reward in the tenths of a second? Remote controls: their very existence, in the hands of a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding citizenry, has caused an accelration in the pace of films and television commercials.

Instantaneity rules in the network and in our emotional lives: instant coffee, instant intimacy, instant replay, and instant gratification. Pollers use electronic devices during political speeches to measure opinions on the wing, before they have been fully formed. Like missiles spawning MIRVs, fast-food restaurants add express lanes. If we do not understand time, we become its victims.