Technical acceleration spans material processing plus transport and communication speed

Evidence

Technical acceleration designates not only the faster movement of humans, goods, messages, and (as Virilio emphatically points out) military projectiles across the earth but also the more rapid production of goods, the speedier conversion of matter and energy, and, though in lesser measure, the acceleration of services. As James Beniger thus correctly remarks, “by far the greatest effect of industrialization … was to speed up a society’s entire material processing system.” The story of acceleration to be told here describes the path from the steam engine to the utilization of hydraulic power and the combustion engine, on down to electricity and the technologies of industrial mass production and the assembly line, arriving finally at the microtechnologies of the computer age. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines technical acceleration as conceptually broader than mere transport speed, encompassing matter and energy conversion.
• XREF: connects to: Technical innovations and their industrial implementation drive waves of acceleration — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 169