And nowhere is the obsession more acute than in California's Silicon Valley, the dream factory of the products and thinking that to a large extent set the tempo for modern-day living. We've become a society of chrono-maniacs. Calif. With the preoccupation comes a rising perception that time is moving more rapidly, that less of it is discretionary, and that anything less than immediate is less than good. Time is a measurement, it's not time itself. Technology's mission, clearly, is to speed things up by packing more functions into smaller increments.
Engineers work in fragments of seconds.
The result, says Mr. McKenna, is a world in which technology is collapsing time and space, shrinking the gap between idea and action, and the distance between what you want and where you are. The acceleration of all these activities adds convenience and efficiency. But no one is kicking back. Experts in social behavior, both in and out of the workplace, see overwhelming evidence that people perceive their lives to have only gained speed and to have lost what used to be called free time. On the broad question of quality of life, surveys reveal an ambivalent relationship between people and technology.