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1. How to pronounce GIF

The one debate that’s been around since the Graphic Interchange Format was introduced by internet service provider CompuServe in 1987 is how to pronounce GIF. The accepted and most common way is with a hard G (as in “gift”), but some people – including the symposium’s co-organiser – insist on a soft G pronunciation. He actually has the support of the GIF’s inventor Steve Wilhite, who says to sound like popular US peanut butter brand Jif.

2. GIFs are better than words

For , associate curator of digital media at the   in New York, a large part of the GIF’s success comes down to its ability to express both nonverbal and non-textual communication. “For most of the history of humanity we have been an oral culture, before making the shift to text,” he says. With communication on the internet so heavily based around the written word he sees the GIF as allowing the quick, immediate, emotional human communication that can be so hard to express in text. “GIFs are the gestures of the internet” he says, pointing to the huge phenomenon of the “reaction GIF” – short, looped animations of (usually) people or animals non-verbally responding to questions or events. Funny, cutting and instantaneous, reaction GIFs attempt to convey the emotions and social clues that are such an important part of face-to-face communication, but are lost when talking through the keyboard.

3. The revolution will be GIFed

According to Columbian digital artist , the GIF has become an important tool for online protest and activism. As well as having an immediate visual impact, they’re quick and easy not just to create, but to share and spread across networks. She also points to how hard they can be for repressive regimes to detect and track – to date they can’t be read by bots or algorithms looking for keywords, and so they provide an effective way of slipping information past online censors.

4. GIFs keep the network running

Although we associate GIFs chiefly with social media and online art, the symposium’s co-organiser of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts pointed out how for a long time they were an important part of internet infrastructure. One of their earliest uses was to create eye-catching “banner ads”, one of the first forms of the online advertising.

Small, 1px-by-1px images embedded in email newsletters can also tell the sender when the email has been opened. Every time a user looks at that email, the GIF needs to be downloaded from the server to be displayed, thus registering as a hit on the server’s analytical software. The technique provides important demographic data to businesses, and because these GIFs are usually the same colour as their email background, they remain invisible.

5. Restrictions have made GIFers more creative

For , co founder of – which prints physical moving prints of GIFs – technical restrictions have been one of the most interesting factors to shape them as an art form. For many years Tumblr, arguably the platform that propelled GIFs to where they are now, had a 1-megabyte upload limit, forcing GIF creators to find new ways to use colour and animation. These restrictions forced artists to explore both their technical tools and their creativity.

Tumblr later increased its limit to 3 megabytes, and to combat spam GIFs that were being used to fool ad-revenue networks, they also brought in minimum dimension restrictions. This had a devastating effect on a small but popular community of artists who made very small animations. Sites such as  were forced to shut down temporarily until a work-around could be found.

6. GIFs are big business

In February, the search engine Giphy , shining a new light on the business of making animated GIFs. While Giphy’s $300 million valuation points to the seemingly unstoppable popularity of the format, for Hwang and Canadian GIF artist it’s a worrying development. Not only is Giphy seen as sanitising and commodifying the GIF and taking it away from its anarchic roots, but integration into Facebook and Twitter threatens to undermine the GIF’s specialness as a format.

GIFs uploaded to either platform are actually converted into video files, and in effect remain GIFS by name alone. The reason for this, says Hwang, is that the big social media platforms don’t want you to share content outside their walled gardens. For Mills, too, the beauty of GIFs is that they could be easily saved to your own computer and shared anywhere. “The worst thing that can happen to GIFs” she says, “is that they stop being shareable.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About GIFs was held at the NYU Centre for the Humanities on 19 February

“The fundamental problem with environmental justice in the world today is that the people and the places that are most responsible for getting us into this mess seem to be the ones most capable of dealing with the problem.”

So said sociologist earlier this February. A prolific writer and editor, and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, Klinenberg had been invited to speak at an event entitled “Disaster and Environmental Justice”, of evenings looking at climate change through the lenses of disciplines outside the natural sciences.

“Those who have done so little to drive global warming,” Klinenberg continued, “are about to experience an acute crisis, if they haven’t already.” The idea – that poorer nations will face the worst impacts of changes caused to the climate by the richest nations – is hardly new. But, according to both speakers that evening, it is one of which many in the US still seem unaware.

Environmental injustice

Pulitzer prize-winning author and journalist was Klinenberg’s foil that evening, in a discussion about catastrophes and the role they play in galvanising people to deal with environmental injustice and global inequality.

Kolbert, a Pulitzer prize-winning environmental writer, revealed her chief anxiety: surprisingly, the US’s sheer ability to deal with the direct effects of global warming. A public and political assumption that because America is coping, climate change can’t really be that bad, would allow ignorance of global realities to continue, Kolbert feared. “Is that the messaging that we want? That the US is going to sail through this without any problems?”

Though broadly sympathetic, Klinenberg argued that 2012’s Hurricane Sandy marked a sea change in American attitudes: “For citizens here, Sandy made this concept of climate change transform from something that was abstract into something that felt concrete and somewhat terrifying,” he said. His own research centres on New York’s attempts to rebuild after the damage the hurricane wreaked on the city – a multibillion dollar effort that will, he fears, widen the gap between the global rich and poor: “One of the dangers of the moment is that we’re starting to invest our resources into coping with climate change, and there’s a real risk that this will exacerbate inequalities. It’s expensive to build seawalls, and drainage systems, and new infrastructure. There are many places that will do this better than others.”

Low priority for voters

“On the flip side,” Kolbert argued, “you could look at lower Manhattan and see there’s a phenomenal amount of value there. Whereas, if you have to move a low-lying slum in a developing country, you’re not moving all that much by way of infrastructure. So there are ways in which that equity issue can be flipped on its head.” It’s an interesting idea: that poor populations may have the flexibility to relocate more easily than their megacity neighbours – though it opens up even more questions about inequality, migration and the fate of refugees, and none of these have easy answers, especially for a nation that has for so long struggled with the reality of climate change.

“We didn’t expect that this conversation would take place the day after Donald Trump won an election, the , and ,” Klinenberg observed. , “It’s actually not the case that the majority of Americans doubt that climate change is real. We’ve reached a point where most people do believe that the climate is changing, and they believe for the most part that it’s related to human behaviour. The bigger problem seems to be that when you rate climate change against other considerations, it ranks pretty low. Unemployment, access to healthcare, crime, abortion, immigration: all these things are going to take precedence when people go to vote.”

Seeing how relatively little the environment features in the campaign rhetoric of the major presidential candidates this year, it’s hard not to subscribe to Klinenberg’s pessimistic outlook. The American public might finally be waking up to the truth about climate change, but for many, it’s still something that happens in the distant future – or, if it’s here and now, happens only in faraway places, and to other people.

���۱�’s Environmental Humanities series runs in New York until 23 September: visit for details

While high profile, the Apple Watch is hardly a new concept. Activity-tracking devices such as the Fitbit have been popular for a while, and many people’s smartphones so rarely leave their pockets that they might as well be part of their clothing.

As the consumer technology industry is using fashion to sell us more technology, Making Patterns, a new exhibition from Brooklyn-based arts and tech collective Eyebeam, wants us to question our relationship with technology, interfaces, networks and the people around us by bringing together technology-infused items of clothing designed to open up discussion.

At the more playful end is Kaho Abe’s Hotaru, Prototype #1: with two gauntlets embedded with Android smartphones and a projection dome, the piece is as much a video game as a fashion statement. In a world ruined by pollution, two players must cooperate to defeat darkness. One player shoots and the other collects power, and they must hold hands to transfer light between them.

Elsewhere, artists examine the future possibilities of 3D printing in creating clothes, and the unique bespoke forms and material options that presents. Billy Dang, Andrea van Hintum, and Hilary Sampliner’s Poseidon is a wearable 3D printed garment that moves with the body.

Inspired by denticles – the teeth of a shark – it is a chainmail-like, protective exoskeleton that guards the wearer from the elements. The garment is composed of hundreds of intricate, hinge-like, movable scales but, incredibly, it was printed in one piece.

A Gesture of Sadness (Image: Eyebeam Art + Technology Center)

Cici Wu and Bo Kyung Byun’s A Gesture of Sadness shifts the focus from design and utility to emotional expression. The dress is designed to be worn while lying down, and it was the only item at the exhibition’s opening night to be worn by a live model.

Created by turning the sound wave pattern of one of Wu’s favourite songs (for the record: Lochness Spawn of God by Discombobulation) into a 3D design, it’s not only a physical embodiment of a deeply personal emotion – only possible because of new technology – but it offers a unique take on how we relate to the digital storage and distribution of music.

Then there are a series of clothes created by OCAD University’s Social Body Lab and Intel’s Jamie Sherman that explore a future where digital technologies may allow us, literally, to wear our emotions on our sleeves.

Nautilus, for example, is a mechanical hood designed to cover the wearer’s head like a protective shell. Sensors measure tension in the wearer’s shoulders, automatically activating the hood when they are under threat.

A second piece, Monarch, works in a similar way, with its shoulder-mounted, butterfly-like wings spreading when the wearer feels more assertive. Both aim to explore a future where digital technologies allow us to, quite literally perhaps, wear our emotions on our sleeves.

(Image: Eyebeam Art + Technology Center))

Cardinal, a GPS-equipped felt cowl (see above) that investigates how technology-infused clothing might enhance our sense of directional awareness and social connection. The patterns on the front, back and sides of the garment change colour depending on which way you are facing in relation to people and places connected via a distant GPS beacon, perhaps placed in your home or carried by a family member.

Heat pads facing the direction of the beacon heat up, changing the colour of the thermochromic ink so that you’re reminded of your origins, your home, or wherever is important to you while navigating your daily life, and allowing you to turn and face them at anytime.

As outlandish as the designs look at first glance, in many ways they are the most effective works on display at Making Patterns because the designs’ functionality feel like an extension or exaggeration of existing consumer technologies.

Just as the Apple Watch allows you to transmit your heartbeat to a loved one, or our use of social media lets us broadcast our emotional states, the tech-fashion at this show fits neatly into a world where we are increasingly inseparable from our technology.

Tastes like a match strike to some (Image: Center for Genomic Gastronomy)

After battling through congested Manhattan streets on a muggy Saturday afternoon, smog-flavored meringues did not seem like the most intuitive of refreshments, but the crowds around Nicola Twilley’s cart were a reminder never to second-guess New Yorkers.

“We’ve had all sorts of different reactions, from ‘Disgusting, no thanks’ to ‘That’s really nice’,” said Twilley, author of the blog and co-host of the podcast. “Some people take a bite and throw it away. Some people ask for seconds. People have said it makes their mouth taste foamy, people have said it’s spicy, people have said it’s bitter, or that they can taste different ingredients. Some people have said it tastes like a match strike.”

Her goal isn’t just to create novelty cakes, but to make people stop and think about urban environments, and specifically about the air they breathe every day. “Usually, breathing smog – unless you’re in a place like New Delhi or Beijing, where it’s un-ignorable – is an unconscious act. When you choose to eat a meringue, it’s a very different thought process, a different interaction, a different visceral response. People are wondering whether they like it or not.”

Simulated air

Twilley had come to New York City’s IDEAS CITY festival with the , an artist-led think tank that asks how biotechnologies are affecting the systems we use to feed ourselves. Together they handed visitors smog meringues, each containing simulated air from one of three cities, giving New Yorkers a unique tasting that spanned time as well as space. Like wine, smog meringues have vintages.

“We’ve chosen three different types of smog,” Twilley explained. “This 1950s Los Angeles is a classic photochemical smog, while our contemporary Atlanta is a biogenic smog, meaning that along with the usual pollutants there’s a lot of organic material, mostly from all the pine trees there. This 19th-century London on the other hand is an industrial smog… a real pea-souper.”

In 2011, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy began using meringue batter to harvest air pollution. Smog is formed by a mixture of pollutants reacting together – a reaction usually catalysed by sunlight. Atmospheric scientists can replicate this in the lab by mixing precursor chemicals in a special smog chamber and exposing them to ultraviolet radiation. For Twilley the similarities between this and baking were too obvious to ignore, and it was a logical step to hijack the smog chamber as an oven for making meringues.

The lengths you have to go to just to get that distinctive smoggy flavour (Image: Center for Genomic Gastronomy)

The process is straightforward: fill the chamber with the relevant chemicals, then whip up egg whites inside. “When the egg whites and sugar get into that perfect consistency, a meringue is 90 per cent air. The ones we make in the smog chamber are 90 per cent smog,” Twilley said. “Different places require different baking times. The LA one takes longer.”

Twilley calls the subtle place-specific taste “aeroir”, and the cart was the first in a planned series of Center for Genomic Gastronomy projects aimed at exploring the idea further. “Taste of place is really valuable when it comes to wine, mineral water even. Why not the air? All of these cities taste different. We’re provoking thought about that.”

The possibilities are endless, from smog pairings and food wheels to allow chefs to prepare menus that fit particular atmospheric conditions, through to wearable devices that provide a form of “smog seasoning”. “Aeroir may well be the missing ingredient,” , “that makes tacos taste the same in the restaurant back home as they did on the streets of Mexico City.”

New York City’s ran from 28 to 30 May 2015

There’s always a camera you don’t know about (Image: Niall McDiarmid/Millennium Images, UK)

Conference: Theorizing the Web 17/18 April, International Center of Photography, New York City

THIS century’s next great legal challenge will be to make those responsible for complex systems accountable for their actions, says Kate Crawford, who works for Microsoft Research. If a bunch of unrelated algorithms, interacting in unforeseen ways, puts you under heightened surveillance, blocks your credit or stunts your kids’ life choices, who do you call? Who will make redress for such unforeseen, unintended automated wrongs?

There are no clear answers to these questions, which is why Crawford wants to resurrect the deodand, an obscure legal term from the 11th century.

Only at a hip New York conference like Theorizing the Web could medieval law be proposed as the answer to the great legal battle of our age. Now in its fifth year, the event is widely regarded as the coolest kid on an already crowded block. Its participants are dressed more for a music festival than an academic conference. They are sociologists who code, coders who do social theory, hackers who make art, and artists who hack. Who else would listen to an exegesis on deodands in the bare, unfinished venue for New York City’s International Center for Photography, with dusty floors and terrible acoustics that are better suited to a rave?

In medieval England, personal property became a deodand if it was judged responsible for the death of a human being, and, as such, was forfeit to the monarch. Its owner was ordered to pay a fine equal to the object’s value to the court. Everything from haystacks to pigs and horses were defined as deodands. The practice was revived in the 1830s to hold railway companies to account for train deaths, but paying a fine equal to the value of an expensive train every time someone died in a crash proved unworkable.

Crawford argues that the deodand was killed off by corporate capitalism’s ability to shape its own legal accountability. She says we must be wary of allowing technology companies to use unseeable complexity as a reason to wash their hands when things go awry.

Her talk left me wishing that I had a more solid understanding of the way we interact with technology to hold the right people to account.

The hipness of Theorizing the Web comes not just from the youthfulness of its participants but also from the newness of their work. Many of the delegates were presenting work in progress, or the results of as-yet-unfinished doctorate theses.

Our continuing post-Snowden obsession with privacy and surveillance loomed large at the conference. For instance, Joshua Scannell at the City University of New York analysed Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System, a smart city crime monitoring and prediction system developed in association with the NYPD. By collating public and police information with data collected by sensors across the city – including radiation sensors sensitive enough to pick up recent chemotherapy treatment – the Awareness system creates “heat maps” of risk.

“The absence of sensor data is not the absence of information,” Scannell told the conference. A lack of credit card transaction activity in a neighbourhood, for example, allows the system’s users to make judgements about that area’s residents, their levels of wealth or poverty, and to then associate them with the potential for crime.

This system is a tech-savvy, yet sociologically simplistic form of social labelling. Reducing human activities to metrics is being marketed as a way to combat racial and social bias. But such pigeonholing feeds reactionary policies as efficiently as it informs other kinds. Efficiency is always draconian, and good intentions never survive algorithms.

“Efficiency is always draconian, and good intentions never survive algorithms”

Nestled between ageing stores selling white goods and the restaurants of Chinatown, the centre is a few doors from the Bowery Mission homeless shelter. Like most of New York, this neighbourhood faces a wave of gentrification – a process often typified by hip young people standing around in bare, dusty art spaces. How long before rising rents put the kitchen stores out of business and make them as bare and dusty as this venue, I wondered. Presumably, the Chinese restaurants will then buy their fridges and ovens online.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Can we sue the web?”

From 2008 to 2010, set out to create a comprehensive database of all non-microbial life on a single Polynesian island.

Five years on, a team of humanities students at the University of Pennsylvania have assembled their own, rather ironic . Its premise is that the most surveilled, studied and categorised creatures on earth are not, in fact, microbes, but humans – ordinary people. And just how do we feel about that?

In categorising the world, we invent systems called taxonomies. They are never complete or free of error, and are always controversial. Taxonomies meant for humans to slot into are even more problematic because they tend to be invented on the fly by people whose attention is focused elsewhere.

The overlooked ramp

This point was nicely explored in a talk by Sara Hendren, an artist and design researcher based at Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts. looks at ramps. Ramps are, she reckons, an overlooked technology, and this puzzles her. Why, in a world full of skateboards and wheelchairs, are ramps not ubiquitous, cheap, mobile and stackable? Why are wheelchair users and skateboarders addressed separately in design discussions? Who made that decision? And did they realise that they were needlessly fragmenting and obscuring the public’s demand for ramps?

Hendren’s own access ramps (portable, stackable and skateable) are half a practical “design solution”, half a work of conceptual art, uniting two seemingly unconnected groups around a shared challenge.

Once people have been put into categories, those categories tend to acquire the force of moral law. , made this point powerfully, while backing up her big claim that “people in West Africa are likely the most surveilled on earth”. Focusing on areas of Nigeria controlled by the Islamist militant movement Boko Haram, she detailed how people are subject to three levels of surveillance. Through satellites and drones, they are spied upon from above by Western military intelligence. Their radio and cellphone communications are intensively monitored, too.

But the most intensive surveillance they are subjected to is conducted by the Islamists themselves, whose militia constantly watch and police the communities under their control, violently punishing anyone that deviates from their extremist doctrine.

Analogue brutality

In our era of post-Snowden paranoia, it is good – if disturbing – to be reminded that surveillance can be just as brutal an analogue activity as a digital one (a talk by had much the same effect, highlighting how much of the modern art of surveillance was developed as part of the slave trade).

We watch people closely, using whatever technology is to hand. We categorise them for our convenience – and then leave them stuck, trapped behind the fences we have thrown up. This is the kind of pessimistic world view science fiction was invented to explore, and , talking about the ideas behind his 2008 indie science fiction movie Sleep Dealer, drew the threads of the Biocode conference neatly together.

Long fascinated by the politics and economics of immigration and the US-Mexican border, Rivera distilled complex concerns and ideas into a story about factory workers in Mexico using elaborate mechanical and biological interfaces to control robots that have replaced them as unskilled labour within the US. All the cheap labour that the US economy needs lives south of the fortified border wall that keeps migrants out.

Stories can focus anxieties to a point. Conferences cannot. With its eclectic mix of artists, performers and academics, Biocode sometimes felt a little intangible, as though its various elements were competing with each other to find a theme.

But perhaps that was the conference’s point: between ordinary lives, and how our taxonomies represent them, is a zone of constant uncertainty. It was a pleasure to see such a variety of artists and academics let loose among these emerging, unmapped territories.

The Biocode: Performing Transgression After New Media conference was held at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, from 9 to 11 April

A shark has been killed because tagging data revealed it was regularly near a popular swimming area (Image: Stuart Westmorland/Getty)

Even in the digital realm, observation and conservation make uncomfortable bedfellows

“We hear a lot of talk about the ‘internet of things’,” says , “and, increasingly, some of them are living things.”

Benson, from the University of Pennsylvania’s department of History and Sociology of Science, was speaking at , a one-day conference aimed at examining what digital perspectives and technologies means for the future of animal protection.

Benson was describing the tracking system that uses data from sharks tagged by researchers to provide interactive maps, alerts and warnings – via its website and automated tweets – about shark activity near Western Australia’s beaches.

worldwide recently when the decision was made to destroy a shark based purely on tagging data that showed it was frequenting a popular swimming and surfing area, despite there being no visual sightings. The move sparked outrage from some sections of the media and the scientific community – the latter feeling betrayed at how its data had been used to kill the very sharks it was studying.

To Benson, the incident reveals a worrying shift in the philosophy behind the tagging of animals. Tags can be a nuisance for the animals fitted with them, and tagging has always been viewed as a sacrifice made by that particular animal for the greater good of its species. Now, argues Benson, in the case of West Australian sharks at least, the tags have become a technology of control and punishment.

Go fly zones

Also tracking animals, although for different reasons, is Thomas Snitch, whose company, , flies fixed-wing drones across central and southern Africa to protect rhinos and elephants from poachers.

Snitch, a mathematician, previously worked as an analyst for the US military, studying maps of Iraq and Afghanistan to work out where insurgents were likely to have placed explosive devices. The drones are less important than the algorithms that decide where they should be flown, he says.

A continuous stream of geographical data, LIDAR scans and the movements of animals and poachers are fed into a supercomputer by Air Shepherd’s team back at the University of Maryland. Predictive models are then used to direct a relatively small fleet of drones to the right places at the right times.

Snitch’s brash, military language seemed somewhat inappropriate at an animal rights conference, even while he was demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the social and economic issues behind the ivory trade. And it is hard to argue with his results. On average, 1200 rhinos are slaughtered by poachers every year in Africa. Since October 2014, not one has been killed in areas patrolled by Air Shepherd.

Pet hate

Digital technologies change how we watch animals. Anna Frostic of threw social media’s obsession with cute animal videos into a serious, and often depressing, light when she explained the role they play in creating demand for exotic and endangered pets. Couple this demand with websites and networks that actually allow ill-equipped members of the public to easily purchase animals they would traditionally have had difficulty finding, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

There are now more tigers in domestic captivity in the US than there are anywhere in the wild. Similarly, she pointed to research showing that people didn’t realise species such as chimpanzees were endangered because they are so used to seeing them online, which in turn has had a devastating impact on their willingness to donate to charities and conservation efforts.

There is little doubt that networks can help raise awareness of animal protection issues. Digital Animals went further, though, by asking how digital media formats have transformed the way we view, consider and treat animals – and by considering the inadvertent damage this technology has already done.

Rock concert (Image: Su-Mei Tse, ����ֳ����, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. © Su-Mei Tse)

An exhibition and two books show how technology is changing our interactions with time

Come to Washington DC, and the first work you’ll see at the Hirshhorn Museum’s Days of Endless Time exhibit is Su-Mei Tse’s 2003 video ����ֳ����, in which we see the artist sitting on a clifftop overlooking the Swiss Alps, playing the cello. She plays a short passage and then pauses, listening as the music echoes back from the mountains.

It’s a piece obviously designed to trigger a sense of contemplation and atemporality, and as such seems the perfect opener to a show that – as part of the Smithsonian’s 40th-anniversary celebrations – features artists bringing “slower, more meditative forms of perception” to “a world conditioned by the frantic, 24/7 flow of information and the the ephemerality of digital media”.

But something doesn’t sit quite right: her dress seems somehow a little too red, the grass on which she sits impossibly green. The video – like all 14 of the moving-image installations that make up Days of Endless Time – has been digitally manipulated, with its colours tweaked and frame rate adjusted. The result is a sense of hyper-reality. There is a slowness and contemplation that feels just as ephemeral as the digital mediascape the exhibition aims to critique.

Something similar can be said of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Horizontal (2011), in which footage of a huge wind-buffeted spruce tree has been caught by cameras at different heights and then projected on to a wall at a 90-degree angle. The result is a near life-size rendering of the tree in a way that’s hugely unfamiliar to the human eye, presumably with the aim of making the viewer take the time to watch a familiar symbol of nature in a more contemplative and abstract way. The by-product – whether intended or not – is that the tree seems incredibly artificial.

Thinking time

The whole exhibition’s aim is to make you slow down and encourage you to spend more time watching the works. But the longer you spend with them, the more one’s attention drifts from their subject to the technology and techniques used in their creation.

More effective – perhaps because it’s one of the few works that addresses the medium it was created in – is Siebren Versteeg’s (2005), a self-portrait in which the artist checks his cellphone while his image disintegrates into pixels that shift back and forth between two LCD screens. Instead of slowing down nature to make us contemplate, Versteeg slows down the digital image itself, forcing us to take a long look at the flows of data that surround us.

It is interesting to watch how other visitors to the Hirshhorn react to an exhibition about how modern life gives us little time to stop. People march past the installations, barely giving them a glance.

I wait patiently behind someone to read a description of a piece, only to discover she’s merely standing in front of it while texting from her smartphone. The idea that networked technology has taken away our thinking time and forced us into a constant state of anxious reaction is explored in a number of recent books.

Judy Wajcman, professor of sociology at London School of Economics and author of Pressed for Time, says it wasn’t always meant to be this way. “Not so long ago, commentaries about post-industrial society predicted a ‘leisure revolution’ driven by automation in industry and the home,” she says.

Instead, she argues, our lives have accelerated along with the speed of our machines “as if the exponential growth in computing power predicted by Moore’s law applies to every aspect of modern society”.

The slow must go on

Wajcman argues that this acceleration is less the fault of technology and more to do with the strains placed on us by consumer capitalism. Our sense of always being rushed is a result of the goals, priorities and demands we place on ourselves: “Being busy is now a necessary condition of a fulfilling lifestyle.”

Mark Taylor’s Speed Limits takes a more historical approach, aiming to be an account of how developments in technology, finance, industry, fashion and philosophy have led us to a point where “the acceleration of life is rapidly approaching the tipping point, where there inevitably will be social, political, economic… and ecological meltdowns”.

It’s hard not to wonder if there’s a generational aspect to both his and Wajcman’s analyses. Both are “baby boomers”: now in their sixties, they have lived through one of the most rapidly transforming eras of human history. Do today’s teenagers, some born since the turn of the century, feel the same loss of time as Wajcman and Taylor? Or has technology, far from robbing them, simply given them new things to do with their spare hours – things that seem unfamiliar to older generations?

Perhaps this isn’t about a lack of time at all, but about how we use it, how we value it, and how we choose to gleefully, enjoyably, waste it.