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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
WHAT IS SOCIAL ACCELERATION?
Hartmut Rosa
University of Vienna and New School
March 28, 2006
Tuesday, 12:30pm-2:00pm
Sumwalt College, Room 102
In his new book Social Acceleration: The Change in Temporal Structures in
Modernity, Hartmut Rosa has put forward a social theoretical analysis of
time from the perspective of critical theory. Crucial to this account is
the analysis that he uses to account for modern changes in the tempo of
social life. Three "ideal-typical" categories of temporal change are
introduced: technological acceleration (especially evident in transport,
communication, and production), social accelerationÐno longer within
society but of society itself, it involves the "shrinking of the present"
in terms of a time-span in which past experience coincides with future
expectations and is present in both the cultural and the structural aspects
of social and cultural institutions and practices; and finally acceleration
in the pace of life, a phenomenon which occurs in spite of the expectation
that technological changes should provide an increase of free time when in
fact the speed of life appears instead to increase for the individual. The
explanation for this apparently paradoxical result of disappearing time
resources lies in the close interrelationships among all three of the
different categories: the quantitative increase of speed characteristic of
technical acceleration affects not only objective relationships by
compressing space and time, but also accelerates social relationships as
well, increases in social change, indicated in the "slippery slopes" of
contemporary experience, act to increase the tempo of life for the
individual, which itself works back to require increases in technological
change. This reinforcing feedback loop puts the emphasis upon social
acceleration as, according to Rosa, a, if not the, fundamental tendency of
modernity.
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