Tags: economics | globilisation | modernism

That our world is rapidly speeding up around us is something that nearly anyone will agree with...

The proliferation of cell phones, email, fax machines; the exponential increase in the availability of cheap flights to the furthest-flung regions of the world; the calling card of economic globalization making everyone sway under the heady influence of money; all these things have led nearly every one of us to ponder just how fast our lives are moving and how we got here.

The achievement of Faster, by James Gleick, is not only that he tackled this almost obvious topic, generally side-stepping the cliches and moral traps that would be easy to fall into, and made it into a thorough academic account of our speed-obsessed modern times but that he (in an almost satirical sort of way) made it a fast read.

With short chapters, tight prose and the calculated pace of a smart writer toying with his readers while sharing a joke with them, Gleick is keenly aware of his readers lack of both attention-span and time, time, time.

Gleick takes us through the notion of time and speed from the perspective of history and sociology. Gleick points out that only in modern times has the word "speed" taken on its understood meaning, that in ancient times it was closer to an adjective that more accurately described success and prosperity. The irony that in our time speed has often come to mean success or the facilitation thereof is not lost on Gleick and he devotes numerous pages pointing out how we demonstrate this behavior and contrasting it with the past.

Gleick is smart enough to not idealize the "slowness" of the past and generally does a good journalistic job of maintaining his objectivity and points out that no matter what the reality of the past was we all tend to see it in a slower more idyll way.

The only time Gleick seems to lose this objectivity is when he comments on the explosion of web sites offering news and commentary. Here his vocabulary betrays his writing and we can see that perhaps he is one of the pundits who feel attacked on all fronts by the din of voices that rise from cyberspace on all manners of humanity.

One reads this portion and can feel Gleick wishing all these voices away so that he can continue to tell us just what's going on. And one might be tempted to take him up on the offer after reading the rest of the book. Faster provides an abundance of funny anecdotes, wry observations and esoteric facts that ceaselessly dazzle and sometimes shock. In a book packed with ironies the fact that most of us don't have time to dig up these sort facts ourselves is one of the biggest.