ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a short account of the place of speed in the constitution of global cultural modernity and moving on from this to broach the question of the affinity between media systems and technologies and the acceleration of modern life. The relationship between speed and space in the constitution of global modernity has of course been long recognized. The impetus towards increasing speed in the circulation of capital has always been a defining feature of modern industrial capitalist economies. The idea of fast capitalism points us towards something new, a step change in pace facilitated by the integration of media and communications systems into the operations of capitalist production, exchange and indeed culture. Some of the changes in the nature of capitalism relate to the techniques of the production and exchange of actual commodities, particularly those attributable to the connectivity of globalization.
