Interview by Claudio Gallo, Asia Times Online, Nov. 3, 2012

Home page lede:

It's a commonplace that life is "getting faster", but blaming - or thanking - modern technology is to put the cart before horse, says "social acceleration" specialist Hartmut Rosa. Nor is the "race" any longer about reaching a goal or improving one's position; it is about not falling back, not regressing into chaos and crisis.

Excerpt:

HR: In my view, technology clearly is not the cause of social acceleration. Rather, it is the other way round: modern technology arose - it was invented - because of the time-famine of modernity. You can make this point historically as well as logically: most technologies help us to save time. More than this: it is the purpose of almost all modern technologies to save time. Thus, cars, hair-dryers, microwave-ovens or telephones are all machines built for the purpose of speeding-up "natural" processes.

Logically, this should create free time-resources for us. Take the email: to write and send an email only takes half the time of writing and sending a letter. Thus, if you have to write 10 messages and 10 letters take one hour, while 10 emails take half an hour, you gain 30 minutes. But where are they? Why is it that you have even less time now than before the email age?