Impatience Is A Virtue

Is technology feeding our obsession with speed?
In the beginning there was the internet, and it was slow. So slow, in fact, that today’s tech savvy teens would think the world had ended waiting for their page to load. Early domestic data download speeds as reported by internet veterans on this online forum were as slow as 14.4kbps, and in the early ‘90s the internet bore no resemblance to the system we know today. Fast forward a few years and the internet is unrecognisable from those early days. BT Infinity are offering a top speed of 76Mbs and some of us are still claiming that this is too slow.
So, is technology changing the way we view time?
Yes, according to Dr. Philip Zimbardo, author of The Time Paradox: The New Psychology Of Time That Will Change Your Life. “Technology makes us impatient for anything that takes more than seconds to achieve”, Zimbardo told The Huffington Post, “You press a button and you expect instant access”. Back in the early years of the internet, that 14.4kbs download speed was perfectly acceptable because there  was no comparison. The concept of the internet was wonderful enough in its own right that users were willing to wait. When you think back to dial-up it is more the sound of connecting that grated with us (it never truly leaves us) and not the speed at which our sites once loaded.
But users are still hungry for advancements in technology, chasing immediacy in everything. The need for everything to operate in real time has caused a shift in the way that the passing of time is acknowledged, and this is now being reflected in our business methods.
A perfect example is business emails, where a reply is expected within a day. Any longer than two days and an apology is expected for the delay. The reality is that the more used to the immediacy that technology provides, the more that waiting is not acceptable.
It’s the advancement of technology and the desire for real-time conversation on a global scale that killed off the telegram, and has all but made the faxing machine a rarity. And waiting for a letter to arrive? Beyond contractual documents and printed records, paper generally has no place in the modern office.
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas saw the Internet of Things and wearable technology take centre stage, meaning the future looks like a place where we’re permanently connected to our homes, and perhaps our offices too. The search for a seamless existence of instant gratification, such as where our fridges know just what sandwich we’re browsing for, or our jewellery can be used to close the curtains whilst we complete a more important task without losing valuable seconds from our day.
So what areas of technology are holding us up?
As with most things, the technology might be ready but it is the manufacturing that is lagging. The onset of 3D printing excited many but frustrated even more who have dubbed it a cumbersome techno-snail, because the slow process of manufacturing has slowed down its global domination. But all that could be about to change, thanks to our need for speed… Inspired by a scene from Terminator 2, scientists have created a 3D printer which extracts fully-formed objects from a pool of liquid at 100 times the rate of current 3D printers. Transforming the method of 3D printing from “layer-on-layer” approaches of other printers to create a method of continuous manufacturing allows this new method of printing to speed things up. This begs the question: how long will it be until 3D printing is fast enough to keep up with our lives?