Overload : FASTER; The Acceleration of Just About Everything By James Gleick; Pantheon: 304 pp., $24

Reader, you may be reading these words while nibbling on your morning Pop-Tart, or sipping a cup of microwaved coffee, or looking up from the Sunday morning cartoons or tennis or “Meet the Press.” You may have learned to speed-read, thereby saving valuable seconds that you may spend dipping into a game of Doom or, on your portable phone, hitting the redial button to try Ticketmaster again--or, much better, setting your Power-Dialer to try up to 25 times a minute--because, in pursuit of the latest hot ticket, which just went on sale and is already tying up tens of thousands of long-distance lines, you keep getting a busy signal. Or you may be reading online, skimming from highlighted keyword to subhead, stopping at bulleted lists, one mouse click away from a classified ad, or a steaming Pamela Anderson Lee video, or an incoming instant message via AOL, or an offshore Internet bet, or a quick toss on the Singapore stock exchange, or the chance to order the book under review or an in-box of e-mails, each clamoring for reply (you will be thought rude if you take longer than overnight) while ads flash and wiggle across the margins.

We are surely an MTV culture, poised uneasily between mania and boredom, relentlessly churning out new goods and new means to access them, our standard of living widely believed to rest on the success of marketers in foisting their wares before a glutted populace and at least momentarily arresting our attention, converting our time to their money. Consider that, at this writing, 93% of American households possess at least one underestimated little gadget of this civilization: the remote-control device. “Every television programmer,” James Gleick writes in “Faster,” “works in the shadow of the awareness that the audience is armed.” The producer of “Meet the Press” wants to paralyze your itchy finger, lest you click your remote control device over to the competition. Toward that end, the networks have figured out how to pare fractions of a second out of the dead space between show and commercial. When Gleick goes on his book tour, he will be asked again and again by interviewers reading from bulleted lists on press releases just what is his thesis, what is his point, what is the bottom line, for his drive-time listeners have their fingers poised over the SCAN button, his TV watchers are remote-control-ready and his publisher has a lot at stake in getting you into the store before you can say “Faster” to pick up his book, because the time will come soon when the chains will have to return unsold copies to open up shelf space for the next cycle’s candidates for bestseller status.

In his engaging but breathless new book, Gleick, a former science and technology reporter for the New York Times and author of “Chaos: Making a New Science” and “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman,” has compiled many hundreds of facts, demonstrating conclusively, if you had any doubt, that for some number of Americans and others, life gets faster with every passing moment, gets busier, more cluttered with channels that bring us what we fancy to be information. If you have any doubt of the human toll, read Gleick’s sampling of the lives of telephone operators--a less common topic than the driven entrepreneurs, those who travel the fast lane, fearing that if they’re not up to speed, they’ll end up as road kill. Whatever Ben Franklin thought, time isn’t really money--you can swap money for things but not for an extra hour a day--though with time you can make money, and if, like many a company in charge of an 800 number, you can get your customers to touch-tone from one voice menu to another before intercepting an actual human operator in real time, you are getting them to work for you.

The daily speed cycle apes the investment and innovation cycles. Not so long ago, Gleick tells us, the automobile development cycle was five years, but Toyota’s development cycle is down to 18 months, aiming for 14. In his forthcoming book “High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars,” Internet entrepreneur Charles H. Ferguson writes that “the ultrafast development cycle that characterizes the entire Internet industry is in large part a consequence of using the Web to distribute and receive information and technology about the Web. . . .” In other words, speed causes speed--a point worth exploring. Microchips double their power every year and a half; modems and fiber optics do their equivalent things, and sufficient numbers of us are persuaded to upgrade our laptops, our modems and phone lines to keep up with the frenzy of progress.

Keeping pace, Gleick’s sentences zip along. Trouble is, he hyperventilates. “For example” is not an argument, and neither are hundreds of examples dropped end to end in chapters--each of which is about the length of this review--not long enough to build up a case or consider contrary evidence or ask (let alone answer) difficult questions. Gleick sprinkles fascinating tidbits around, but presto! he’s promptly off to another subject. Here is one tidbit that drops in just before the end: “‘Depressants like alcohol slow time, because the brain receives fewer inputs per second.” In the next sentence, Gleick is off to the sense of time accelerating as one grows old. But wouldn’t it be worth pausing to consider the difference between alcohol and marijuana, on the one hand, and methamphetamines and cocaine on the other? What might the bifurcation of drugs tell us about the fact that some people resist MTV culture? (There is, Gleick reports, an international Slow Food Movement, though by 1998 it had gone online with a “Virtual World Guide to Slow Places.”) He doesn’t much consider the interesting relation of the fast and the slow. Speed, after all, is relative; so is slowness.

About the existence of a mania for speed there can be no dispute, but though Gleick’s examples are sometimes surprising and fun, they tend to pile up rather than accumulate into an argument. The unasked questions pile up as well: To what degree is the speed mania driven by the cycle of innovation, investment and production, to what extent by the itchy fingers of consumers? Or is the egg running just as hard as the chicken? In his breakneck rundown, Gleick doesn’t pause often to ask difficult questions. For one thing, although he has some interesting etymological research on the origin of the word “speed,” he doesn’t consider other languages. Nor is he very interested in how Americans’ fascination with speed resembles, or doesn’t, that of other people. His account is historically thin. Just how new is the breakneck pursuit of speed, and for whom? “Our nature consists in motion,” wrote Blaise Pascal in 1660; “complete rest is death. . . . Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. . . . [M]en so much love noise and stir.” Here is Thomas Carlyle in the London of 1831: “How men are hurried here; how they are hunted and terrifically chased into double-quick speed; so that in self-defense they must not stay to look at one another!” Gleick could make the case that communication devices like the Internet and cell phones are diffusing throughout the population faster than did phones, radios, cars, rail and air travel, but he doesn’t. He is--yes!--in too much of a hurry.

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Finally, what is to be done? Gleick ends as a self-help counselor, advising that you “serve as your own director of your own time directorate.” There’s nothing wrong with personal slowdowns--better than co-dependency with the speed freaks in charge of the frenzied economy--but his denouement is, well, a quickie and somehow complacent. What, after all, are the dangers? Should we be reconciled with the pace of air traffic control? Do more financial bubbles take place nowadays, and do they burst faster? How to get out of the speed trap, if it is a trap? Why the pharmacological boom in attention deficit disorder? Centuries of economic, military, technical and psychic change brought us to the current mania, the boredom panic. When considering what to do about a culture on steroids, it’s best not to hurry.*