Speed For What In The 90-Second Economy?

We can prepare a meal in about 5 minutes, we carry mobile devices with email and the phone...and ability to microblog via Twitter, interact with our peeps on social networks and send SMS messages. We watch short videos on YouTube in the middle of the day for a quick laugh or moment of stunned awe, but we watch them for 90-seconds. A new executive plane is coming out in 2011 that can cross the Atlantic at Mach 1.5 and we are building cars to go faster all the time.

It's the 90-second economy. We want to move faster, live faster, sleep less (the average Canadian and American sleep under the needed 8 hours) and we work faster...supposedly. Yet studies have shown that productivity drops by 10% in a day through constant checking of emails.

Why are we in a rush? The Web has been the backbone of enabling these speeding up. By such technologies as Twitter, IM and Chat. The Web, I believe has played a vital role in this evolution of speed. Even the material goods, such as cars and high-speed trains and planes, are born of knowledge activities that leverage the Web to bring disparate groups together to collaborate.

Uh oh, some think, are we speeding towards massive global knowledge burn-out? Frying our brains to keep up with it all. Absolutely not. If you buy into the hype of media (and most news is nothing but soundbytes and no true depth) then perhaps we are.

I think we're sorting out where we want to be fast so we can slow down on the things we really want to do. Like chillax on the beach, work less hours, just more intensely. The Web enables this. Time to reflect and deal with other issues. For the more we can outsource and delegate to technology, the more leisure we'll have. Ok, there's a little Asimovian future-think there, a little Huxley and the Brave New World (I feel like the Savage every time I take 3 days to hit the waters for a kayak trip) and perhaps so. But it is the Web that is the enabler. That's a good thing.

Time to go watch a bad sci-fi movie.