Phenomenologies of ‘social acceleration’: some consequences and opportunities for education studies in an unknown future

ABSTRACT

Social acceleration, the rapidly increasing speeding up of the pace of life, has been described and theorised by contemporary social theorists including Paul Virilio, Ben Agger, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, and Hartmut Rosa. While these theorists use illustrations from education, and others such as Foucault and Adam have considered the relationship between education and time, there has been little theorisation of dromology (a term Virilio coined to describe the ‘science’ of speed) in education studies itself. Given its growing importance as a ‘grand theory’ in social science, this paper calls for educationalists to recognise the value of theories of social acceleration to gain a better understanding of contemporary educational practices and how the COVID-19 pandemic is illustrative of this.

KEYWORDS:

• Speed
• social acceleration
• higher education
• pace of life
• COVID-19
• phenomenology in education

Introduction: the increasing speed of life

[C]olleges and universities ought to foster a genuine and ongoing debate about the velocity of knowledge and its effects on our larger prospects. We bought into the idea that fast is better without taking the time to think it through. (Orr, 1996, pp. 701–702)

‘Social acceleration’ describes the processes by which life is getting faster and faster. As theorised by cultural theorist Paul Virilio, an increasing of the speed by which processes take place through physical space is one such manifestation, e.g. from shipping to air travel, from letters to telegraph to telephone, email, instant messaging, and the World Wide Web (Virilio, 1977/1986, 1998/2005). Internet technology enables us to send a message instantly or make a video call to someone on the other side of the world. Smartphones mean we no longer even need to get to a computer to communicate with each other, keep up with the news, or share our thoughts via social media. Technology is becoming ever more portable. In the 1980s a ‘portable’ computer weighed 11.8 kg and could be transported like a suitcase (Lombardi, 1986). Nowadays, we can use our 1.5 kg laptop computer or 200 g mobile telephone while travelling – this time being an increased opportunity to work and study as well as for our leisure.

This speeding up and portability of technologies offers opportunities and challenges for education delivery for both tutors and students. Online virtual study, learning technologies and software mean students do not need to be physically present in the classroom and do not need to visit the library to do their homework. Education has become a global scalable market with the emergence of international players such as Pearson Education and Kaplan. While there has been research into the implications of this faster world (Eriksen, 2001), there has been limited consideration of social acceleration in education studies.

This paper argues that social acceleration needs to be a central concern for research and scholarship in education. Most examples here come from UK higher education, but these arguments could be considered in relation to other sectors and global contexts. Our UK focus comes with the caveat that the benefits and consequences of this social acceleration are not evenly spread within Western capitalist countries as there are many complex equality issues to consider (Kuhn et al., 2023), namely around digital exclusion, economic poverty and power dynamics in learning and teaching. The examples used may have different resonances in other parts of the world – including parts of the Global South where there is little or no infrastructure to access the internet (Zhang et al., 2022). We also examine how educational responses to the COVID-19 pandemic can be viewed through the lens of social acceleration.

The social consequences of social acceleration

Rosa (2005/2013, p. 15) identifies three core tenets of this ‘self-propelling circle of acceleration’ namely (i) technical acceleration, (ii) the acceleration of social change, and (iii) acceleration in the pace of life. Eriksen (2016a) uses the term ‘overheating’ to describe these runaway processes with their contradictions, paradoxes, and clashes of scale.

The consequences of social acceleration are uneven and contradictory leading to what Rosa (2005/2013, p. 15) calls a state of ‘frenetic standstill’ (rasender stillstand). Acceleration(s) in technology and pace of life can have an opposite decelerating (though not necessarily equal) reaction – the invention of cars enables us to travel further faster, but with the consequence of traffic jams (Eriksen, 2016a; Rosa, 2005/2013, p. 84).

Mobile technologies make us available by phone, text message, email, video conferencing, social media, etc., blurring traditional distinctions between home, social and work lives (Agger, 2004). We may wish to relax and make time for ourselves, but we do not want those we depend upon doing the same thing and we do not want to be personally disadvantaged (Rosa, 2005/2013, p. 86). At best any gains are temporary, and advantages gained from new technology quickly become the new expectation. Companies produce goods and services faster to gain an advantage, but only until other companies catch up (Rosa, 2005/2013, p. 162).

Social acceleration and the interpersonal dimension in education

In the traditional physical workplace, it is easier to choose what we want to reveal and to conceal other aspects of ourselves. With technological advances, however, once a teacher shuts their laptop, a student may try to message them on Instagram to get a quicker answer to their query. It becomes harder and harder to be absent – eternal presence is tacitly invoked by social acceleration.

In Being and Nothingness (1943/1995), Sartre described different ways that we as human beings exist in the world both in our consciousness and in and for the consciousnesses of others. The nature of existing in the world as conscious subjects – as ‘I’s – is such that we are aware that other ‘I’s, also have consciousnesses which differ from our own and may even conflict with them. Adopting a persona, an act of self-deception perhaps to reduce any anxiety induced by revealing ourselves to the other ‘I’ in an existentially authentic way during an interaction is an attempt by us to capture the consciousness of this other and so determine for the other how they perceive and view us. This specialised act of bad faith (la mauvaise foi), implies intentionality towards creating that persona in the gaze of the other, is what Sartre terms being-for-others (être-pour-autrui). It involves a subject taking a third-person perspective on themselves, an act of consciousness known to be implicated in poor mental wellbeing (Gallagher & Cole, 2011) and dissociative experiencing of memories (Sutin & Robins, 2010).

This problem of being with others is also a key concern for Heidegger (1927/2010) in Being and Time. We share the world with others, and so in authenticity our experience of being in the world (Dasein) is a priori that of a shared world (Mitwelt) in which we experience a notion of the need to care (Sorge). If we fall into inauthenticity, as described by Sartre (1943/1995), then we may only experience others through the form of societal ‘idle talk’. Here the true nature of other Daseins is never experienced fully.

Social acceleration and the ethics of alterity

The shift from the in-person to the virtual in education settings has reduced or even perhaps sometimes removed the physicality of the face of the other itself from relationships between educators and students. In Totality and Infinity (1961/1969), Levinas outlines the importance of the face-to-face encounter in terms of the ethics of the interpersonal realm. Although he was not writing about education, and the internet was not invented, Levinas writes that it is because the other has a face just as I have a face that I know the other to be a person, to possess a soul, and most importantly of all, to not be a thing.

The face of the other creates the opportunity for emotional expressivity according to Levinas. The other has a face and their face’s eyes enable ‘the look’ to take place between us. This look reveals the emotions of the other to me as a person perceiving their face within my own consciousness. The face of the other is an invitation for me to consider the needs and wishes and feelings of someone else and not merely my own.

Perceiving a face of the other and recognising them as (1) not a thing, (2) capable of expressivity, (3) the other is unique non-spatial ‘infinity’, and cannot be purely seen as just one of a genus or species. Paradoxically, the other is revealed to us as beyond physical by nature of the physicality of the face-to-face. As such, if the face-to-face encounter is reduced or removed, the ethics of the entire interaction change. We are more likely to perceive the other as less human, or perhaps treat them like a thing in error.

If we as educators only ever interact with our students virtually, we are more likely to treat them like things, and not as beings. So too, students may treat educators as things, mere accessories to their goal of a transcript of studies or certificate evidencing their learning. Removal of the face-to-face in education because of social acceleration makes people a means to an end and not ends in themselves, as Kant might put it (Johnson & Cureton, 2022). A sense of personal responsibility towards one another that should arise naturally from The Look (Lévinas, 1961/1969) is replaced by a sense of obligation which is defined more by workload and a task to be performed.

Social acceleration and the non-personal

According to Heidegger (1927/2010), we are always situated in contexts, and social acceleration changes the nature of those contexts. Heidegger criticised other earlier philosophers such as Aristotle, whom he argued prioritised the sense of sight in terms of our physical interaction with the world (Moran, 2000).

Heidegger (1927/2010) argues that the way that objects reveal their uses through their readiness-to-hand (Zuhandensein) is more important than the sight of objects. In a contemporary education context, Microsoft Teams becomes both the thing and the world which practically constitutes the classroom, the coffee shop, the pigeonhole tray, and even the lecture theatre. Whereas previously the student appeared to the teacher in an embodied way, now they might appear only as a neck-up two-dimensional moving picture. The student might be on the train, in another country, or in the next room. These are issues of reversibility and irreversibility. With social acceleration it is rarely clear if one can apply the brake or return to a previous way of doing things. With increasing usage of Microsoft Teams/Zoom, etc., as a virtual learning environment made necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no time to pause and wonder whether a full return to in-person campus-based learning was ever truly possible ever again.

Social acceleration may even affect human biology. Research on how these increasing speeds affect human brains is in its infancy, but not using spatial memory strategies due to dependency on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) devices may increase risk of dementia (Konishi & Bohbot, 2013). Mobile technology may also increase stress, anxiety and depression (Lee, 2016).

Phenomenology of time

In physics speed and acceleration are precisely defined, but like Rosa, Virilio, Eriksen and others we use these terms in their ‘everyday’ sense. Contemporary theorists of fast capitalism cite Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920–1921/1976) as well as Heidegger’s ideas about time (1927/2010). Weber argued that Calvinism (in contrast to Catholicism or even Lutheranism) viewed time as a resource that could be ‘wasted’ and that it was sinful to waste time. Work therefore is not only a survival necessity but also an end in itself – even a means of spiritual fulfilment. The contemporary legacy is a not sin of time-wasting in any religious sense, but rather a pursuit of wealth and a morality of working hard for its own sake (Weber, 1920–1921/1976, p. 182).

Alongside his exploration of what it means ‘to be’ – Dasein’s ‘there-being’ (Wheeler, 2020), Heidegger argues that temporality is a co-requirement of being. Potentiality of being (in the future) and experience of being (in the past) affects Dasein bringing about anxiety and fear in the present (Heidegger, 1927/2010); Dasein is a concern for ‘being’ which is embodied in day-to-day practices rather than in a detached metaphysical manner (Guignon, 1994).

Heidegger’s Dasein cannot be understood independently of time because Dasein is affected by consciousness of being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode). The human existence in the phenomenological (physical) realm is finite. Dasein knows that one day it will die, and the pressures to live authentically, meaningfully and even just to sustain itself is experienced phenomenologically and emotionally as angst, depression, happiness, and contentment. Therefore, concerns for an uncertain future are a key to understanding an individual’s current state of Dasein (Heidegger, 1927/2010).

Social acceleration means that both clock time and spatial time (the location of events with respect to other events) compress upon what Gibbs calls the ‘temporality of mood’, ‘that is the integration of past, present and future in the moment of being’ (Gibbs, 2015, p. 61). Heidegger argued that mood (stimmung) and state of mind (befindlichkeit) are not mere subjective happenings but literally the ways in which the world appears to Dasein (Heidegger, 1927/2010). Social acceleration has therefore a fundamental impact upon Dasein as potentiality of (and for) being is brought closer.

Rather like social acceleration itself, consciousness is continuously engaged in alteration. It flows and changes because nothing stays the same for very long. Intentionality is never satisfied, and what is actual (leibhäfte), becomes the past almost as soon as it comes to be (Husserl, 1928/1964). Before long, we are left with a ghostly legacy of the past (Erbe), a memory, a remembrance.

Therefore, the fossils of old education systems and the previous ways of educating live on in educators. Social acceleration is a direct challenge against these old ways, and may be experienced positively or negatively or neutrally by educators. Teachers themselves may have received very different kinds of education and regurgitated them with their students.

Dating from as far back as the eleventh century (Lochtie, McIntosh, Stork, & Walker, 2018), personal tutoring remains a key foundation of UK higher education – an academic is allocated to individual students to support their learning across the university. Despite increasing student numbers in higher education, teachers are expected to take on emotional support roles in relation to their students’ wellbeing and there can be confusion around boundaries ‘if boundaries are not considered and adhered to, your role as tutor may sometimes feel as though it is morphing into that of social worker or even counsellor’ (p. 52). Social acceleration here impacts on how that wellbeing support is provided, and the amount of time available for complex problems to be discussed and appropriate signposting to be offered.

Historically (probably before 1500 in Western Europe), most people saw little technological or social change in their lifetimes – time was a space within which ‘diverse histories’ were played out (Rosa, 2005/2013, p. 255). Whether acceleration began in earnest with Roman roads, the invention and proliferation of the printing press, or the Reformation is beyond the scope of this article, but the past 500 years have been characterised by a speeding up of social change and the general speed of life (McLuhan, 1964/1994). The industrial revolution necessitated clocks in factories and the development of national and international rail systems required the standardisation of time. The society in which an ordinary person now lived was increasingly national and global (see Adam, 2003).

Educational consequences of social acceleration

While there has been little direct consideration of social acceleration in the educational literature, there is a growing work around the explicit consideration of the importance of time in education (for example, Adam, 2003; Bennett & Burke, 2018; Clegg, 2010; Gibbs, 2010; 2015; Rappeleye & Komatsu, 2016; Stevenson & Clegg, 2013) Emergent themes from these discussions of time and education alongside the those of the theorists above include (but are not limited to):

1. The ways students and teachers manage their time (or have time managed on their behalf). This includes schools and ‘normalised’ work patterns, what Foucault (1975/2020) calls ‘political anatomy’ (p. 137).

2. A concern for the future and its impact on the present, e.g. preparing students for work/careers, life after graduation.

3. Concerns for progress through education, including what a student ought to have learned by a given age or stage.

4. The management of children’s time by others, not just in education but also in out-of-school activities.

5. A compression of time and space where linearity of time itself is questioned. This challenges the distinction between past being, current being and potentiality of being as these are compressed into a shorter and shorter timeframe. This has implications for a future sense of wellbeing and security in current knowledge.

Agger (2004) presents children’s lives as occupied by homework and structured, adult-guided, time-bound, extra-curricular activities, e.g. sport, music, church, etc., which limit opportunities for self-exploration, extending Foucault’s ‘political anatomy’ (p. 89). Agger laments a generation of students good at rote learning, but lacking in creative thought, unable or unwilling to read beyond the syllabus and uninterested in getting feedback on their work (see Carless & Boud, 2018).

Rosa (2005/2013, pp. 115–116), drawing on Gerhard De Hann (1996) identifies a generation which learns more from peers rather than elders. As society accelerates, the knowledge valued by older generations (including teachers) ceases to be as culturally, economically or technologically valued when knowledge is superseded so quickly. Generations in technological terms are not 25-year human biological generations, but a few years or even months.

So what should be taught when the knowledge taught may become obsolete quickly? The argument that university degrees ought to meet present economic needs is contradicted by the need to produce graduates to meet future needs, many of which are unknown – preparing students for jobs which do not yet exist which will use technologies, sometimes yet to be invented to address problems not yet known (Fisch, McLeod, & Brenman, 2011). The idea of the ‘oven-ready’, ‘self-basting’ graduate, equipped with all skills and knowledge to (quickly) return the economic investment society has made in them is not a new idea (Atkins, 1999); in fact Newman (1852/1907) responded to contemporary arguments that ‘education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured’ (p. 153), by warning that those who focus on immediate knowledge risk of being ‘absorbed and narrowed by his [sic] pursuit’ whereas as university education enables the student to come to their ideas ‘from a great height’ (p. 166) and ‘a largeness of mind and freedom of self-possession’ (p. 167). The fact that Newman addressed this issue should caution us against the belief that such utilitarian beliefs are a recent innovation and that looking from a ‘great height’ is precisely what enables us to understand social acceleration in its broader historical context.

While in education studies there has been some engagement with the ideas of Rosa, Eriksen and others – notably Land (2006) and Clegg (2010) – other education writers have considered the consequences of ‘social acceleration’, even if they do not use the specific term or cite the theorists. In higher education, this applies to research as well as teaching – the pressure to continually ‘produce’ research in volume and quality. To be recognised as ‘a machine’ when it comes to research is seen as a compliment (Berg & Seeber, 2016). Orr (1996) presents ‘fast knowledge’ as knowledge applied with limited thought to consequences: ‘We rushed to develop nuclear energy without the faintest idea of what to do with the radioactive wastes’ (p. 700). Clegg (2010) relates this lack of reflexivity to student employability where university students always need to be going ‘somewhere’. Not moving means not progressing and this constitutes a personal failure.

In short, students need to be ‘somewhere else’ and that ‘somewhere else’ needs to be arrived fast: ‘The timespaces of the academy are short term, fast and inimical to reflection about longer term ethical consequences’ (Clegg, 2010, p. 347). Concern for the future, awaiting, the potentiality of being, belong to what Heidegger (1927/2010) calls ‘the existential and temporal constitution of fear’ (p. 326).

Land (2006) draws on Eriksen’s (2001) concept of ‘vertical stacking’ to observe how the idea of linearity in learning, i.e. we learn A first which provides the foundation for learning B is called into question. Rather than events following each other, everything is happening at the same time and the order of events is not clear. Change, notably in technology, is happening faster than we have time to learn it or understand it, yet this technology underpins central educational pedagogy such as Virtual Learning Environments.

Social acceleration in education and the COVID-19 pandemic

Social acceleration has been epitomised in the global COVID-19 pandemic. First identified in China in December 2019, the virus reached at least 18 countries by the end of January 2020 (WHO, 2020). Despite national lockdowns, social distancing and vaccination programmes, the virus claimed over five million lives by November 2021. While the longer-term medical, health, social, economic and political consequences of the pandemic will emerge, it is possible to make some observations around the educational actions, consequences and responses to pandemic.

First, social acceleration explains how the virus travelled so rapidly around the globe. As the severity of the virus became evident, most countries localised and had national lockdowns to control the spread of the virus. In the UK, schools and universities were ‘closed’ to most students. The word ‘closed’ is in inverted commas as school buildings remained open to children of key workers (e.g. medical staff, police) and all pupils were set work or taught online. Universities were permitted to teach certain subjects in person and schools and universities continued educating students. However, the idea of educational institutions being ‘closed’ was prevalent in media discourse.

Second, educational institutions rapidly supported students in learning from home via online learning platforms, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software, and other technologies. This was not the development of new technology, but the intensification of existing technologies. However, lockdown accelerated the development of software; providers of VoIP software and educational software accelerated the development of new features and upgrades; e.g. MSTeams introduced breakout rooms to complete with Zoom.

In supporting colleagues, the author read works like Salmon (2011, 2013) about developing online resources and studying online. While these presented principles of effective online learning, it was assumed that the development of online learning needed substantial lead-in time and needed to be well-planned. The pandemic and lockdown meant that these principles needed to be adapted rapidly without regard for the planning and reflection time assumed by Salmon. It is inaccurate to suggest that the resulting adaptations fully reflected the existing scholarship around online learning, but the speed with which the transition was achieved was notable.

Third, there is concern about students being ‘left behind’ due to lack of technology (e.g. a computer or internet access) or in the case of children a lack of support in the home (Zhang et al., 2022). Students shared technology and bandwidth with siblings, parents, or roommates. Some students did not have technology powerful enough to run specific software – they previously relied on technology available at school or university. Interestingly, some software companies were quick to change access and pricing structures.

Fourth, there is a political and educational concern around learning ‘loss’, that students are failing to progress in their learning and even ‘losing’ existing knowledge (Engzell, Frey, & Verhagen, 2021). This has become a battleground between Government, schools, parents, and teaching unions; schools or Government or both were not doing enough to help students compensate for this loss.

Fifth, the idea of the relationship between university and value for money has intensified its focus. Without physical access to the university, students are deprived of a ‘proper’ experience of university, and online learning was presented as a pedagogically inferior experience of university. The rapidity of the change challenged assumptions made by Salmon and others that those who teach online do so because they want to, and those who study online do so because they want to, or because it is more convenient for them to do so, or because it is the only way they could study at this time of life. This is an intensification of an ongoing pre-pandemic UK Government discourse about ‘low quality’ and ‘low value’ higher education courses (Department for Education, 2019).

In addition to the rapid move to online learning, ‘normal’ business continued at our university. A major restructuring continued with a limited delay. New policies and strategies planned before the pandemic were implemented – these were mitigated through the experience of the pandemic, but not informed by it. UK-wide regulatory processes such as the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) continued. The work of academics was ‘measured with the blunt instruments of key performance indicators and they [were] subject to various forms of speed-up and increasing bureaucratic demands’ (Morgan & Wood, 2017, p. 82). The pandemic disrupted many taken for granted pre-pandemic processes, but the bureaucracy (a term associated with slowness) could not slow down, but only increase in speed and volume.

Being and learning in COVID-19

In Heideggeran terms, social acceleration offers a fundamental challenge to Dasein, challenging being and potentiality of being. The pandemic-based uncertainty about the present extends to the future. Anxiety is increased – not only is there a threat to learning, but also there is a fast track to an anxiety-laden potentiality of being. What are the consequences for students of learning being ‘missed’? Will this render them unemployable? Or has the pandemic and lockdown done so much damage to the economy that future opportunities will cease to exist, or the new post-pandemic opportunities be so different from the previous ones that entirely different skills are needed? Can students be ‘blamed’ for their failure to choose the most appropriate subjects to prepare them for a world which is inherently different from what they previously expected?

And what does it mean to learn in this environment? As noted above the idea of learning deficit gathers apace. Schools have been running catch-up sessions during vacations or after hours. The impact of the pandemic is not the same for all learners and many will have been disadvantaged through lack of a supportive home environment or a lack of technology (e.g. Sevilla et al., 2020). Assessments have been changed away from time-constrained unseen invigilated examinations in both schools and universities undermining the UK Government’s contention such assessments are the best way to assess student learning (Stacey, 2020). The use of ‘inferior assessments’ potentially undermines a generation’s confidence in the validity of their academic achievements.

Time has not stopped. Society has not shut down or gone into hibernation/brumation. Students have still been making their way through the calendar years of study, learning in an unprecedented social and educational context. The pandemic has not been an effective brake on social acceleration.

An early pandemic internet meme claimed that Isaac Newton discovered the theory of gravity when in lockdown from the 1665 plague, and that perhaps a similar breakthrough might be made during the 2020 lockdown. However, the meme quipped that Newton did not have Netflix to keep him entertained; the biggest threat to scientific progress was presented as entertainment. The suggestion that the pandemic might present academics with a space to develop new ideas or make a significant academic breakthrough is an interesting one, and it is plausible that lockdowns gave some academics space to make progress in their academic field. (The story that Newton was able to put his mind to scientific problems simply ‘because of’ the plague has been fact checked by Levenson [2020] and found wanting).

In practice additional work was required to keep the machinery of the education working, and this meant working harder and faster. Student assessments had to be modified and staff trained in the processes, technicalities, and pedagogies of remote learning. As students were unable to physically attend their place of study, ‘missed learning’ became the prevailing discourse. As everybody is ‘behind’ we must all work faster; students must learn more and faster to make up these deficits. Teachers provide extra classes or extra resources so that their students can catch up. Yet, the clock is still ticking, the pages of the calendar continue to turn, and the cycle of educational life cannot be stopped or set back. We cannot come back next academic year and pick up where we left off pre-Pandemic; the economy and the educational infrastructure cannot cope with a halt.

Responding to social acceleration

A difficulty to identifying appropriate responses to social acceleration is the feeling that speed is out of control and the direction of travel cannot be influenced. It permeates every dimension of life without exception, and education is only one domain. Agger (2004) states ‘People’s lives are so accelerated that they cannot slow down sufficiently to take stock, let alone begin to change things’ (2004, p. 132). He proposes we turn off our emails, the cell phone and the TV:

[W]e must slow down and think things through, carefully evaluating modernity for its strengths and weaknesses and simply accepting existence as a plenitude of social being. (p. 133)

Agger is aware of his privileged position as a well-educated professor who has more control over his time than those who work in lower paid and economically marginal roles; however, he is unapologetic about having a romantic notion of being able to step back and critically evaluate our culture from a distance (2004, p. 134). Bozalek (2017) refers to ‘respons-able pedagogy’ as a part of slow scholarship, where ‘corporate values of possessive individualism, competition and calculable performativity’ can be escaped (p. 44). However, taking longer to complete a course or write a paper is sub-optimal in a social accelerated system, and must come with personal cost.

Gibbs (2015) states that consumerist notions of higher education induce anxiety deliberately – students are asked to evaluate their education in terms of brands, entertainment and excitement; in response to shortcomings, providers of higher education aim to meet perceived consumer needs. Drawing on Heidegger, Gibbs (2015) proposes higher education:

… ought to be an environment in which amour propre can be recognised for what it is, relating to what might be for oneself. Such contentment is neither transient happiness nor desire satisfaction, and is achieved by taking a willed stance to what, how and with what values one’s being can be realised in social context. (p. 59)

The need for new methods

Despite increasing awareness of social acceleration, our methods and approaches to educational research and practice remain those designed in a different social, economic, and technological ‘modernist’ era; therefore, we need to explore whether these methods are still fit for purpose. As in Eriksen’s (2016b) discipline of social anthropology practices of undertaking research into teaching and learning have not changed in recent decades (p. 481). Just as ethnography alone is inadequate for anthropology in an increasingly accelerated society, traditional methods of conducting pedagogic research (e.g. interviews, questionnaires) may be similarly inadequate if they are not situated in a broader theoretical understanding of the social accelerated context in which that research is taking place.

Emphasis on ‘local studies’ moves educational research towards a policy-based or problem-solving approach which at best offers a temporary safety valve. For example, the UK National Student Survey (NSS) may lead us to identify ‘problems’ with assessment and therefore we need to ‘fix’ these problems. We may try new techniques, issue new institutional policies, publish research that our approach ‘works’ really well. The UK-funded scheme What works? (Thomas, 2012) is indicative of such processes where questions for whom it works, and for how long it ‘works’ are scantly addressed. Replacing a broken fan belt with pantyhose may ‘work’, in terms of getting home, but it is not a sustainable long-term solution. Yet, need for ‘rapid improvement’ can lead to the pedagogic equivalent of the pantyhose fan belt. The annual publication of university league tables can lead to rapid and temporary fixes rather than well-thought-out understanding. For Gibbs (2015) these measures of satisfaction induce anxiety rather than contentment. They present education as a consumable good with a view of the future in which students must consume the best brands; a rapidly accelerated society means that response precedes understanding the issue (or even determining if the issue exists).

Public accountability, transparency and the evaluation of individuals and institutions can have noble motivations, but the short-term need to stay ahead (or keep up) have placed barriers to good teaching and good research, the precise activities they are meant to incentivise. Frequently, this generates information which is not needed and has not been asked for (Eriksen, 2016a). The ‘dramatic, unintended consequences of actions are more conscious than the intended outcomes’ (Eriksen, 2016a, p. 124). Hall (2021) equates this with the trend to ‘lack of autonomy … deepening performance management, and the intensification of work’, the consequence of which is ‘overwork’ and ‘self-harm’ (p. 2). Since at least the 1960s in the USA and 1990s in the UK, students are labelled as ‘consumers’ in a marketised system, where payment of fees leads to a sense of having purchased a product (a degree) and ‘access to a certain level of service (staff and resources) (Williams, 2012, pp. 2–5).

As everything is interconnected and there is a ‘clash of scales’, so this is not an education problem alone – what seems sensible on a large scale does not always make sense locally. Slowing down our research or our teaching practice to enable deeper and more meaningful reflection, would disadvantage our career progression and cause conflict with colleagues who may see us as lazy: ‘Here, the idea that University work is a labour of love, becomes weaponised against students, teachers, professional services’ staff and researchers’ (Hall, 2021, p. 3) The amount of information and the speed of its turnover ‘militates against deep thinking and serious intellectual work’ (Eriksen, 2016a, p. 125); moreover, ‘The University has been forced into a constant rear-guard action, having to defend its governance, regulation and funding against relentless scrutiny’ (Hall, 2021, p. 5). This is not only an educational predicament, but one of exponential growth in volume and turnover of information and metrics to which we are required to spend more time responding, in addition to responding to the consumer pressures outlined above. COVID changes to assessments and delivery were as much as contractual and regulatory as they were pedagogic:

UK universities responded in mostly similar ways. Courses were redesigned to deal with the time lost to lockdown and staff were rapidly upskilled to teach online. A massive amount of new digital content was created by digitising existing teaching materials but much also had to be created from scratch … At the same time, a lot of final summative assessments were cancelled, increasing reliance on coursework. All the changes had to pass through the quality assurance processes of universities and, in some cases, professional, statutory and regulatory bodies (PSRBs), to ensure that standards were maintained. (Maguire, Dale, & Pauli, 2020, pp. 9–10)

Hall (2021) argues that the commodification of the university brings about a need for increased labour efficiency:

… speed-up exacerbates the loss of space and autonomy, whilst it also catalyses the defence of scarce or fragile power and prestige. This amplifies and transmits anxiety throughout the academic peloton, reinforced through surplus-focused, performance indicators, impact and satisfaction metrics, and discourses of student-as-consumer. (p. 46)

Therefore, the student consumer, labour efficiency and other performance indicators have gone beyond being merely inadequate proxies for student learning and the advancement of knowledge, but are ends in themselves.

Overheated education

The organisational and operational practices of universities have changed less than we may imagine. While everything from email to computerised timetabling to online learning offer some gains, universities are managed by the same committee, departmental, policy documents and decision-making structures as they were in the twentieth century. The topics, scope and composition of these structures may have changed but the essential apparatus has not. Innovations such as ‘flipped learning’ are little more than a rebranding and repackaging of the practice of asking students to read a book or journal article before the face-to-face session (Macfarlane & Yeung, 2023, p. 7).

To some extent, online learning is an extension of the practice of distance learning. In short, technological innovations offer new wrappers for long standing practices. This is not to argue there has been no real innovation or that no positive gains made, but that these are less radical than we may have been led to believe. In Eriksen’s terms the motor gets faster and faster, hotter and hotter, and the motor eventually burns out, bringing about a state of ‘numbness’ (McLuhan, 1964/1994, p. 46).

Competition between schools, universities, individuals, and national systems leads to ever faster speeds. A culture of measurement and metrics can only be sustained by building failure into the system, a ‘taken for granted notion of low performance’ (Serder & Ideland, 2016, p. 341) which can be only resolved through faster achievement and the constant changing of rules as the participants learn to game the system. This cult of measurement necessitates proxies for progress and achievement are constantly defined, measured, re-defined, and re-measured; teachers, students, and policy makers are imprisoned in the same overheating system.

Final thoughts

This paper has offered an examination of the effects of and the importance of an understanding of social acceleration for education studies. Rather than offering conclusions, this final section maps out a research agenda to further develop educational scholarship around social acceleration.

First, social acceleration must become a critical concern in education studies. It is not a minor intellectual curiosity but a central condition under which global educational practice takes place.

Second, with Land (2006) who draws on Eriksen’s (2001) concept of ‘vertical stacking’ (p. 6), we need to think about the whole concept of linearity and ‘learning order’ in a world where social acceleration has reached a point of overheating and everything overlays everything else arriving at the same point of time as everything else. Linearity is a key fundamental principle in education and we need a greater understanding of the consequences of a society in which the production and speed of knowledge is beginning to exceed that of learning and teaching.

Finally, the future and purpose of our educational institutions need to be explored in the context of social acceleration where outcomes need to be instant, and both teaching and research need to be fast and relevant, not only for the present, but also for an unknown future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).