Making Sense of the High-Speed Society

The world seems to change so rapidly, it often feels hard to keep up. Concerns regarding the hurried pace and constant upheaval of everyday life are not at all new, but anxieties surrounding these issues seem to be growing increasingly acute, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic (witness, for instance, the focus on problems of ‘burnout’). Continual upheaval, one of the characteristic features of modernity from the Industrial Revolution onward, has intensified to the point where our societies are unable to adjust. This inability to keep up manifests most strikingly in the realm of technology: the platforms, devices, apps, and other media forms that leave a mark on our everyday lives emerge and thenobsolesce with dizzying rapidity.We have all likely devised and shared tactics for adapting to and managing the pressures that the high-speed society places upon us – ways of dealing with the fact that we cannot, and perhaps should not, keep up with the pace of change. That is, ‘media literacy’ – the question of how we learn to navigate the fluctuations of our hyper-mediated world and how we share that skill and knowledge with others – is not an issue that can or should be confined merely to the institutional setting of the university. It does not occur solely within the classroom. In a world saturated by media technologies, all of us must learn – have learned – to live with media’s accelerating pace of change. Or: to ‘make sense’ of media technology even as it threatens to leave us behind.