New media enable us to do things more quickly. Activities such as transferring funds between bank accounts, enrolling in a course, or buying an airline ticket can now be completed in minutes, whereas before they could often take hours. Search engines such as Google also give us instant access to easily downloadable information from our personal computers. The Internet has also generated a 24 hour new cycle, where it is expected that online sites are constantly updated as new information emerges, rather than relying on the traditional time routines of print or broadcast news production. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (1999) identified ‘business at the speed of thought’ as the key to success in the digital economy, while popular texts such as Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Gleick 2000) and The Future Just Happened (Lewis2001) draw attention to the connection made between speed and new media. Cranny-Francis (2005) has noted that one of the sky way in which we evaluate ICTs and Web content sites is by their speed: how quickly can relevant material be upload, downloaded, distributed, and modified. The question of whether this emphasis on speed is having a corrosive impact on politics, culture, and social life was initially raised by the Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis (1951) in his critique of the spatial bias of communication in 20th-century media. Contemporary theorists such as Paul Virilo have questioned the impact of new media in terms of accelerated modernity (Redhead 2004), while Mattelart (2003) has referred to ‘informational neo-Darwinism’, which fetishes speed at the expense of critical and reflective thought.