Week 5 Reading

Judy Wajcman, 2015, ‘Finding Time in a Digital Age’ in Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, ch.7.

Finding time in a digital age. I thought this week’s reading was very apt, considering it’s week 5 and us students are just trying to find time to finish all our assignments.

Judy Wajcman discusses about how we live in an acceleration society- where everything is fast paced, instead of  a more leisurely lifestyle like what economist John Maynard predicted 100 years ago. One interesting fact that Judy Wajcman brought up was that digital technology are no longer simply just tools for us to be more efficient, however they reconfigure everything we know and even unconsciously change the way we think, act and behave.

It’s interesting as well, that even though technological advancements were created to make things easier and quicker and more efficient for us, they’ve actually succeeded in consuming a lot of our time too.

The real issue here is : Are we the ones controlling technology or is technology the one controlling us?

One thing for sure, technology is here to stay. As with this reading and many other readings I’ve done in this course, they talk about pressing issues about the development of our society in regards to the advancement of technology. It is then up to us to decide if we will let technology get the better of ourselves.

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