Have you ever wondered how in virtually every sphere of life in the modern age, from transportation to food production and from medicine to farming, slow persists alongside fast? Yet, when fast and slow time meet, fast time wins. For much of modern society, particularly from the mid-20th century onwards, speed and efficiency triumph over slowness and the aesthetic experience.
According to sociologist Ben Agger, speed’s continued conquest over slowness, and the intensification and speeding up in how we live our lives today can be attributed to the Internet and World Wide Web, which he proclaims have colonized the planet. Agger quite rightly observes that modern tech has lead “to profound changes in the ways we start our days (with e-email), communicate (e-mail, again, and chat), learn about and teach the world (Web pages), entertain and stimulate ourselves, shop and travel, and make intellectual contracts.”
To paraphrase Agger, just about everything we do in our day to day, Western lives, including communicating, corresponding, connecting, consuming, studying and working has accelerated exponentially because of the Internet. In less than a generation, the Internet has compressed time to the point where we accelerate between our everyday family, work, school and social lives seemingly without the existence of boundaries between them. Put simply, the Internet and the breathtaking acceleration it brings has eroded the social boundaries that shape our lives and has, in return, delivered us “instantaneity,”
The Slow Human finds this kind of tech all very disconcerting. On the one hand, the Internet is the conduit to the speed we now crave; yet, on the other hand, it comes at the expense of slowness and sacrifices slow living and all that it gives.
As Agger points out, today, more than ever, we desire and “expect things quickly, instantly, including our fast food, fast cars, fast bodies, fast work, fast reading, and fast writing.”
Yet, more than ever, we at The Slow Human believe our modern lives are in much need of something quite the opposite: reflection, mindfulness, patience, empathy, and inquisitiveness, the virtues that slowness and slow living propagate.