Modern transportation Photo: TUCHONG

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With new advances in science and technology, as well as a changing social context, we are now entering a phase known as the “Accelerating Society.” When exploring this phenomenon, we cannot avoid the discussion of how it is formed, in what way individuals perceive its nature and state, and how they respond to it.

Driven by competition

In the process of human societal development, competition has become the de facto “nature” of individuals, groups, and even societies as they compete with each other for living space. For those with competitive advantages, competition brings not only survival resources, but also a specific and subtle sense of fulfillment in life. On the other hand, individuals without competitive advantages tend to become “victims under the natural law of survival” in the social context. Competition culture, in turn, influences the competition mechanism. In the endless process of refinement, these two elements eventually evolve into a self-driven endogenous system within society.

While competition was limited to specific spatio-temporal scenarios in traditional society, since the 20th century, the cutting-edge scientific knowledge underpinning the development of human society has changed individual habits and lifestyles, laying the foundations for the rapid emergence of new structures and forms of politics, economies, organizations, and culture.

German sociologist Hartmut Rosa distinguishes three typical manifestations of acceleration. First, accelerating science and technology has completely changed the way individuals perceive real living spaces, time, and life itself. Second, accelerating social changes have caused unforeseeable and irreversible changes in culture, values, beliefs, and institutions that enable the establishment of social order. Third, the accelerating pace of life has subjected individuals to an overwhelming multitude of events within a given timeframe. Rosa believes that the accelerating society has led to cognitive dissonance regarding individuals’ perception of time, space, objects, actions, and self-relation in real life, gradually altering societal norms. 

Not a distress

In physics, acceleration is the rate at which velocity changes with time. It is a vector quantity that has a magnitude and a direction. Scholars emphasizing the arrival of the accelerating society have only noticed that the final velocity of social development is much greater than the initial velocity within a given period, without paying attention to the “deceleration” manifested in social development itself. That is to say, in a given period of time, the final and the initial velocity of social development can be in opposite directions, while the rate of change of the velocity is still significant. Therefore, to some extent, the accelerating society has the potential for deceleration.

Moreover, preconceptions and cognitive biases are inevitable when “accelerating society” is used to describe and even criticize the rapid development of contemporary society, as the concept itself was proposed based on the tradition of critical realism. In reality, the arrival of the accelerating society is not solely accompanied by alienation, anxiety, crises, and other negative impacts. On the contrary, it can also be regarded as an approach to experiencing social life.

In other words, if we concentrate on the critical perspective, we may feel disheartened and concerned about the potential desynchronization between subjects and objects caused by the accelerating society, leading to a survival dilemma in which subjects and objects exist independently from one another. Conversely, if we shift our focus to the vast amount of diverse information offered to individuals by the acceleration of technology, society, and life, this “spectacle” can leave a profound impression and evoke excitement within us.

Action strategies

In response to the continuous acceleration in the process of social development, German philosopher Rahel Jaeggi suggests that individuals should start from the practice of daily life and internalize the external world into their own habits through learning activities, thereby regaining control over their everyday life.

In contrast, Rosa argues that individuals are far from being able to dominate the accelerating society, even if they can feel and experience it. Nonetheless, individuals can try building the kind of relationships that allow them to relate to their surroundings, thereby resolving specific dilemmas in daily life.

In fact, strategies for both learning relating underline the need to align individual daily life with the pace of social development. Only by maintaining their own pace of life can individuals avoid losing the opportunity for actual action in an accelerating world. After all, the arrival of the accelerating society represents a phase of societal change in terms of the pace, scope, depth, difficulty, and direction. The nature of the change remains “a pace of development,” although it is not yet understood or controlled by us.

Faced with acceleration, individuals need not excessively seek deceleration, or excessively stress either the learning strategy or the relating strategy. Instead, individuals should actively adjust their way of life according to the specific state of social development in order to adapt to or familiarize themselves with the pace of the external environment, thus keeping their minds and bodies in sync with changes in the outside world. This might be the most realistic and effective action strategy in the face of the coming accelerating society.

Jiang Libiao is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Edited by WANG YOURAN