I recently read an article that discussed “sidewalk rage”. It seems society’s increasing need for speed is spreading beyond the streets into more aspects of our lives. Now, we humans are increasingly discontent when we’re stuck behind poky pedestrians and apt to express ourselves with glares, grunts, and aggressive maneuvering. And while you and I may be civil enough to contain our frustrations on the sidewalks and streets, I’ll go out on a limb to venture we’re less restrained in our responses to the internet running slow, our smartphones losing signal, or software crashing while we’re in the middle of getting stuff done.
Thanks to technology, modern life runs at an overall frenetic pace. Studies suggest we’ve become so accustomed to and expectant of technology’s immediacy that we are exhibiting measurably decreasing levels of patience offline, as well as on. To illustrate this reality, look at our acceptance of website page load times. In 2006, we all ‘tolerated’ the average four seconds it took for pages to load. In 2009, we ‘endured’ 2 seconds. Today, we expect pages to load in a quarter of a second and will likely click away if the wait extends to a second or more.