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How refreshing to read Thomas Docherty¡¯s plea for a new relationship with time, efficiency and (implicitly) technology in the academy (¡°Rushing to bad judgement: need for speed kills learning¡±, 18?July).

It was Karl Marx who insightfully wrote of capitalism¡¯s inherent tendency to ¡°annihilate space by time¡±, and our sometimes fraught individual and collective relationship with technology is one that all students should have time and space to explore.

Here¡¯s a radical proposal: does any university have the courage to introduce a compulsory first semester for all its degrees that looks at our relationship with time and the breathless momentum of modern technology? Such a?module would have the likes of James Gleick¡¯s Faster, Martin Heidegger¡¯s History of the Concept of Time and The Question Concerning Technology, Paul Virilio¡¯s Speed and Politics, William Meissner¡¯s Time, Self, and Psychoanalysis and Carl Honor¨¦¡¯s In Praise of Slow on its core reading list. Then, perhaps, a deep, thoughtful engagement with the postmodern paradoxes that ¡°less is more¡± and ¡°slower is faster¡± might generate a new generation of citizens able to bring a critically reflexive perspective to our vexed relationship with time and our hyper-modern ¡°communication¡± technologies. For as Mahatma Gandhi famously had it, ¡°There is more to life than increasing its speed.¡±

Richard House
Department of education studies and liberal arts
University of Winchester