Speed Culture: Fast Strategies in Televised Commercial Ads

While various theorists explain the postmodern moment or culture by pointing at an acceleration of transformations in macro-social institutions, such explanations remain often abstract and removed from everyday experience. Seeking to concretize how speed is articulated in popular texts, I analyze here the various strategies TV commercial ads deploy to inscribe speed as a normal and desirable quality of everyday life, objects, and self. Focusing on both pictorial and textual dimensions, I call the reader's attention to these strategies, and discuss the possible social and psychological consequences of the ideological orientations they articulate.