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Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity

Hartmut Rosa (Translation)

4.35 · Rating details · 99 ratings · 8 reviews

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal ...more

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Hardcover, 470 pages

Published June 11th 2013 by Columbia University Press (first published November 28th 2005)

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Oct 11, 2013 Hadrian rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, nonfiction, society-culture-anthropology-etc

This is an exceedingly capable book on the phenomenon of 'social acceleration'. It's remarkable how Rosa compares past theorists, considering how few were able to agree on a definition of what 'time' is at all.

Rosa defines three categories of 'acceleration': technical acceleration, which refers to the speed of transportation and communications technologies; social acceleration, which refers to the changing of popular norms (for a positive example, compare the time it took for interracial marria This is an exceedingly capable book on the phenomenon of 'social acceleration'. It's remarkable how Rosa compares past theorists, considering how few were able to agree on a definition of what 'time' is at all.

Rosa defines three categories of 'acceleration': technical acceleration, which refers to the speed of transportation and communications technologies; social acceleration, which refers to the changing of popular norms (for a positive example, compare the time it took for interracial marriage to be accepted compared to same-sex marriage), and the acceleration of daily life, with increasing responsibilities and demands forced into the same span.

It's simple for Rosa to define this 'acceleration', provide empirical evidence, and discusses how these trends continue. His main task is understanding how these affect each other. For example, these three accelerations continue to reinforce each other in a feedback loop. For example - cellphones allow greater precision in arranging social gatherings, but they also mean that a person is always available and connected to their friends or perhaps their employer. Or seeing how other people move more 'quickly' in their lives compels the individual to use more technology. And so on. Rosa does not explicitly say one will incite all the others - any one factor will do.

In addition to this feedback loop, Rosa discerns multiple external causes of social acceleration. Part of this comes from technological advance and industrialization, and can be seen in orthodox Marxist theory. But Rosa is not satisfied with that alone. The other sources are society splitting itself into more discrete parts (i.e. Luhmann's differentiation), and by the promises of techno-futurists that technology can only solve all problems instead of introducing new demands.

Based upon these assertions, Rosa moves to even more provocative discussions - that this pressure to move faster is based upon the promise of being able to do more within the limited time of one's own life, that states and corporations are willing to use these to maintain control. However, the problem is that society is changing so quickly - that social changes which usually took generations to accomplish now happen within single generations, outpacing the ability of deliberative democracy to govern and legislate effectively. Take the anguished debates over stem cells or fully automated robots as an example - policy grappling with technological advances whose results may not yet be fully understood. This process of social acceleration also leads to further causes of division between and within social classes and generations, where a span of a few years leads to a wide gulf of different experiences, where it is even more difficult to have any idea of the future.

This is only a brief summary of the arguments within the book, but please let me assure you that it is even more provocative and interesting than what I have already brought up in this case. It is a book which unites empirical studies and the insights of critical theory to help understand the questions which many of us have, but few have capably expressed. ...more

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Jun 24, 2017 Alex Hochuli rated it it was amazing

Fuck. It's rare that a book utterly transforms your perspective on things; not just in your explicit positions but also in your tacit assumptions about society and history.

This is a staggering work of social theory, one that convincingly argues for the treatment of time as an essential (perhaps the essential) analytical dimension. I wish I could capture all the repercussions of this perspective in a short post, but I can't, so can only urge everyone to read the book (or at least key sections of Fuck. It's rare that a book utterly transforms your perspective on things; not just in your explicit positions but also in your tacit assumptions about society and history.

This is a staggering work of social theory, one that convincingly argues for the treatment of time as an essential (perhaps the essential) analytical dimension. I wish I could capture all the repercussions of this perspective in a short post, but I can't, so can only urge everyone to read the book (or at least key sections of it).

'Social Acceleration' argues that acceleration is the key distinguishing factor of modernity, but that in late modernity acceleration has sped on beyond certain bounds. This means nothing less than that the project of modernity (individual and political autonomy) has been superseded by the process of modernity (acceleration). Whereas going faster used to be a means of pushing forward modernisation, it now impedes it.

The impacts upon so many areas that concern us when thinking about contemporary society, it's impossible to sum them up. So just to give a brief enumeration: the subjective sense of not having enough time; the fragmentation of identity; the inability to commit to things; bureaucracy appearing as a hurdle to acceleration when previously it was a carrier of it; the growing impotence of the political steering mechanism; the sense that everything is changing fast while at the same time nothing changes - 'frenetic standstill'; the epidemic of depression; the loss of intergenerational trust and the lack of respect accorded to wisdom; the loss of meaning; the 'end of history'...

This has made me fully grasp the nihilism of speed; that the external compulsion to infinitely accelerate into the future is not a way of realising the promise of modernity. The autonomous, external compulsion to accelerate is deleterious to precisely the things for which we started to accelerate in the first place: the ability to seize control of History and construct a world fit for humans. ...more

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Jan 28, 2013 GONZA rated it really liked it

This is a fantastic and interesting book, but still I'm not sure I understood it all. Written by a sociologist it is based on the dromology, or the study of speed and covers the speed of new discoveries, the speed of the people moving across countries and what does that imply when we think about the political part of that all. These essays are really really deep and open the mind to a new way of thinking all the world around us.

Questo libro è stato veramente eccezionale ed interessante, ma ancor ...more

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Feb 11, 2016 Narges rated it really liked it

Hard book to read, a hard argument to follow. but this guy is a genius. it will show you how a brand new theory is being formed.

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Jan 28, 2016 Isadora Wagner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, postmodern, theory, technology, speed

AMAZING!!

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Aug 03, 2011 Guillaume Frasca rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Une plongée angoissante pour mieux comprendre la perte de sens et de direction de nos sociétés modernes, face à l'accélération des techniques et des changements sociaux.

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