Notes on, "Faster : The acceleration of just about everything" by James Gleick

This may be of use for our essays. Read this book last night while trying to stay awake as long as possible for the intervention tonight.

I just took a quick note on things I found interesting/relevant, with page numbers so people can use them in essays if necessary.


- We sleep 20% less than a century ago

- p10) "We have a word for free time: leisure. Leisure is time off the books, off the job, off the clock. If we save time, we commonly believe we are saving it for our leisure. We know that leisure is really a state of mind, but no dictionary can define it without reference to passing time. It is unrestricted time, unemployed time, unoccupied time. Or is it? Unoccupied time is vanishing. The leisure industries (an oxymoron maybe, but no contradiction) fill time, as groundwater fills a sinkhole. The very variety of experience attacks our leisure as it attempts to satiate us. We work for our amusement."

- p23) "Otis elevator company – estimates its elevators raise and lowers the equivalent of the whole population in 9 days, people don’t like waiting."
p24/25) Elevators sign of efficiency in the work-place, large amounts of theory to increase technological prowess of them and to increase their efficiency, such as, different elevators going only 15 floors, two elevators each stopping at odd/even, automatic sensors which don't stop when its full.
p25) Japanese elevators can travel 30 feet per second.
p27)"good waiting time is 15 second, “When they’re waiting for an elevator, as well as when they’re in an elevator, they don’t really feel they can do much productive.” John Kendall, director of tech at Otis."

p29) Ney York city subway system has a rule of closing door within 45 seconds.

P35) Karl Marx wrote to Frederick Engels in 1863, “The clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes; the whole theory of production of regulator motion was developed through it.”

P50) "even drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco have become speed-based pursuits. Liquor and cigarettes entered human life as time-savers, delivering their chemical effects far faster than wine and pipes had done."

P60) Photography thus began not just as a means of preserving a visual record or expressing an artistic vision. It froze a world in fast motion.

P66) “The computer is define by speed; it depends on speed, more than any of the fast machines that came before.”

P81) Science journalist James Burke, “the rate of change will be so high that for humans to be qualified in a single discipline – defining what they are and what they do throughout their life – will be as outdated as quill and parchment. Knowledge will be changing too fast for that. We will need to reskill ourselves constantly every decade just to keep a job.”

P86) 1984, only 8000 fax machines sold nationwide, 5 years on, 1989, 2 million fax machines. market for efficiency is massive.

P92/3) We like email, we like the connectedness, the economist Herbert Stein thought,

“it is the way of keeping contact with someone, anyone, who will reassure you that you are not alone. You may think you are checking on your portfolio, but deep down you are checking on your existence. I rarely see people using cell phones on the sidewalk when they are in the company of other people. It is being alone that they cannot stand. And for many people, being alone really means without-Mommy. We are raising a generation that had radio transmitters in its nurseries, keeping Mommy constantly informed of every movement of the baby in his crib. We will soon be walking around with transmitters in our lapels or pocketbooks, constantly connected via satellite with Mommy.”

P114) Robert J. Sternberger, “the essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly.” Stop a moment and ponder.

P122) “the mere presence of an alarm clock implies sleep deprivation.”

P122) sleep disorder clinics have more than tripled in the United States over the past decade

P204)Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, “In England, in the early 19^th century, 15 hours was the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometime did as much, and very commonly did 12 hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief.” He looked forward to a future where a full day’s work would be far less.

P278) Prison, where the fever of time does not exist. “Inside the prison walls history comes to a halt; time’s mechanism goes awry.” Maurice Lever

“The prisoner is suddenly plunged into ‘uchronia’ into a world where time does not exist.

Malcolm X, “Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned” “In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”