Faster and faster and faster … really?

I keep everything on my google calendar which I sync from my Smartphone.  I can only imagine what I would do without it.  The quotations below belie the fact that during my first year of my campus ministry I didn’t even have a calendar I carried with me.  That’s hard to imagine as I look back on those halcyon days.  With my At-a-Glance Monthly desk Pad, I thought I was the fastest, most efficient guy on the block … 

“Sleeker. Faster. More Intuitive” (The New York Times) …

“Welcome to a world where speed is everything” (Verizon FiOS); 

“Speed is God, and time is the devil” (chief of Hitachi’s portable-computer division) …

” In ‘real’ time, life speeds up until time itself seems to disappear—fast is never fast enough, everything has to be done now, instantly. To pause, delay, stop, slow down is to miss an opportunity and to give an edge to a competitor. Speed has become the measure of success—faster chips, faster computers, faster networks, faster connectivity, faster news, faster communications, faster transactions, faster deals, faster delivery, faster product cycles, faster brains, faster kids. Why are we so obsessed with speed, and why can’t we break its spell? … Not all reality is virtual, and the quick might not inherit the earth. Complex systems are not infinitely adaptive, and when they collapse, it happens suddenly and usually unexpectedly. Time is quickly running out.”  (Mark C. Taylor is chair of the department of religion at Columbia University. His latest book, Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left, is just out from Yale University Press.)