Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne

The book attempts for the very first time to systematically determine and measure the ever more increasing acceleration of societal relations, as for example in the latest political and digital acceleration wave known under the term ‘globalisation’, and to analyse the figures in respect to their cultural and structural causes as well as their impact on the individual and collective way of leading one’s life. Rosa establishes the thesis that the initially positive, liberating, and empowering effects of modern social acceleration, which go hand in hand with the technical acceleration in transportation, communication, and production, are, in the late modern age, threatening to overturn these positive effects into their complete opposites. Individually and collectively the perception of time and history is changing: Instead of a one-way forward-motion, the perception of it nowadays, is of a virtually static and locked-in, inactive spiral of development.