What once counted as unsettlingly fast later reads as slow and calming

Evidence

The displacement of the limits to speed and the related changes in the perception of quickness and slowness are revealed in the fact that the railroad counts today as a slow and peaceful mode of transportation, one that is, compared to the highways and airplane travel, even a paradigmatic medium of “Slow Time” (Eriksen), while it appeared to the eighteenth century to be inconceivably fast and damaging to human health (and meanwhile has reached much higher velocities). Quite similarly, today certain forms of jazz music that, at the time of their emergence in the first half of the twentieth century, were experienced as breathless, hectic, exceedingly fast, maschine-like, and stupefyingly chaotic—and thus as fitting reflections of their era—are touted as “music for tranquil hours” or “jazz for a peaceful afternoon.” — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 272

Categorization

• CANDY: Fun fact: early jazz was “breathless, hectic, machine-like chaos” and is now sold as peaceful afternoon music.
• XREF: connects to: Prolonged attention transforms what initially seems boring; What was newly vivid to one generation reads as insipid to later readers — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 650

Broader Connections

• What was newly vivid to one generation reads as insipid to later readers #corroborates (0.92) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 650
• Prolonged attention transforms what initially seems boring #expands (0.80)