The Culture of Speed and The Counter Culture of Slow movement

 Hello everyone

I am Student of the English department at MKBU. In this blog given by our prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir. This blog is based on Paul Virilio Dromology, the study of speed and Honore on Slow movement.

TEDTalk on 'In Praise of Slowness':- 

Journalist Carl Honore believes the Western world's emphasis on speed erodes health, productivity and quality of life. But there's a backlash brewing, as everyday people start putting the brakes on their all-too-modern lives.

Today's time we have to leave faster. We have to live a speedy life. Everyday we are busy with work and less time and it feels like a race. If we have to work when we have to speak speedily. Culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives, on our health, our diet ect.. 

Honore asked questions like, How did we get so fast? And second, is it possible, or even desirable to slow down? In here we live urbanization, workplace, technology surrounding. We have a lot of time to listen to 'Time is Money'. And looking around, there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better. 

If you slow down,your road is killed by others. people find that they do everything better, eat better ect.. let's have looked up the slow food movement. 

The Slow food movement started in Italy but nowadays many countries are part of them. This movement is about the Renaissance of the farmer's markets. People are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. 

Slow food movement is also known as the slow cities movement. We believe that in the 21st century slowness has a role to play. If we have to slow that give to label of dump or stupid so and so. Slow is a dirty word in our culture. It's a byword for lazy slackers for being somebody who gives up. The purpose of slow movement is to tackle that taboo, and to say that yes, something slow is not the answer that there is such a thing as bad slowness. 

Let's look at Paul Virilio Dromology, the study of speed.

Dromology Term:-

Dromology term coined by the French philosopher Paul Virilio to discuss the importance of speed in warfare and communication. Equivalent to dromo- +‎ -logy.

Speed and Politics (first published in France in 1977) is the matrix of Virilio's entire work. Building on the works of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radically political than that of any of his French contemporaries: speed as the engine of destruction. Speed and Politics presents a topological account of the entire history of humanity, honing in on the technological advances made possible through the militarization of society. 

Virilio's vision sees speed—not class or wealth—as the primary force shaping civilization. speed, with the consequence that time and light (the ultimate speed) become the key ideas of the epoch. Although we are to understand that this kind of activity and organisation has been present in the life of humanity since time immemorial, it is the modern and postmodern periods – that is, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and beyond – that become the particular focus of Virilio’s theorising. 

Virilio had limited his interest in speed to military technology and warfare; he might have been of interest only to military historians and strategic studies. 

Speed is central to transportation and communication, and communication at the speed of light is as integral to world warfare as it is to global capitalism. Speed is fabricated by the machinery of culture; the techniques for handling, recording, storing and transmitting information induces speed.

Virilio’s liberal humanism is anchored in Christianity and phenomenology but he is a “realist” when it comes to science and the human body. He also has described himself as ‘urbanist’, a ‘democrat’ and ‘citizen of the world’. Although he was not linked with new left activism and did not believe in Revolution, he deemed it urgent to analyze the military institution or risk “failing (voluntarily or not) to effect the most necessary de-institutionalization of all: that of the military. 

Speed of technicalture is very harmful to democracy also. When we enter the 3rd decade of the 21st Century, the century of technology, we have already started to experience this undermining of democratic value systems by democracy itself.