Intrusion of New Technologies in Modernity - Essay Example

The intrusion of new technologies into the life-world lies at the heart of the story about 20th century modernity. Discuss Introduction: In recent times, the bombardment of innovation and technology on development and competitiveness, on the social and economical fronts, has gained recognition from a wide range of academic disciplines. Cairncross (1997) said, "In half a century's time, it may well seem extraordinary that millions of people once trooped from one building (their home) to another (their office) each morning, only to reverse the procedure each evening..." Industrialization of the European nations and the United States of America, have provided several examples of mechanisms underlying innovation in time and space. How this has impacted or intruded into the social fabric, and govern the interactions and correlations in the 20th century-society thereby bringing about changes in every nation, make interesting study. For the modern geographer, the nature of time and space, the relationship between technological innovation and social space, the implications of the modern condition in the construction of subjectivity in the context of the technological advancements especially the impact of industrialization and the spread of manufacturing houses in the twentieth century, become essential studies. Use of technology has provided a choice, to act responsibly given the type of tool in hand or, to reject; to choose selectively and communally and to make a conscious choice of weeding out the superfluous and bettering what is perceived to be good (Robinson, 2001). This dissertation shall analyze the advent and progress of industrialization, concept of factories as the spatial basis of modernity, its impact on the society its, especially in relation to the concepts of time and space, and the economic implications, through various perspectives of modern philosophers and geographers like, Max Weber, David Nye, Michel Foucault, Georg Simmel, Marshall Berman, Henri Lefebvre, to name a few. In the process, it is attempted to study the relevance of their observations, their limitations, drawing attention to their future connotations for the future. The Industrial Revolution: The term 'technology' was born in 1828 and spread with the railroads. The very first of such technologies is the rise of the telegraph system, which allowed important news to be transmitted across the country with rapid speed, and more pointedly the stock quotes, that aided the stock market bloom. Then, the railroad system, that allowed goods and people, to travel around anywhere at a faster pace. The importance of the railways was not only its speed and automation, but that it gave its riders freedom. Nye (1994) has wondered "What better way to measure oneself against nature than through the great works of manufacturing and engineering" Even more speed was achieved with the advent of the petroleum system, which with the use of pipes and railroads, was utilized move products and people. Then the telephone system that allowed people to interact with each other over long distances. This was closely followed by the advent of the electric system, which was developed by Thomas Edison, with the aid of Michael Faraday's electric generator. When Edison invented the light bulb, he founded the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. Very rapidly, almost within months, the world was witnessing a great transformation. Consequently, the United States of America and the European nations were being transformed from agricultural societies to those that were industrially dependant societies. Many farmers and other people were giving up the rural life and moving to urban and city areas to find jobs in factories. The Rise of the Factory: The history of technological revolutions in the past two centuries may be said to have started with the Industrial Revolution of 1760-1830, which witnessed the "rise of the factory." (Mokyr, 2001) Actually, there have been numerous precedents for large-scale enterprise and for people working in large plants even before the so-called Industrial Revolution and the age of industrialization may be said to be an approximation. Generally, in the pre-industrial revolution period, firms were operational; they were substitutes for contracts; they reduced uncertainty and opportunistic behavior, and set incentives to improve efficiency. Firms could hire workers or transact with suppliers in a long-term, repeated relationship, or on a one-shot basis. Big firms were quite widespread before the Industrial Revolution, but almost all of their work-force was domestic labor (cottage industry), much of it on a putting-out basis. Herein the "firm" (that is the merchant-entrepreneur) owned the raw materials, almost all the goods in process, tools and equipment, and outsourced physical production to workers' homes. Thereby ownership conferred residual rights of control and decision, but the technology may not have required it to locate the physical production in a central place. Much of the pre-Industrial Revolution population, in any case, were independent farmers or craftsmen making it quite unnecessary to distinguish between "firm," "plant," and "household". The real significance of the industrial revolution has been in the ever-growing physical separation of the unit of consumption (household) from the unit of production (plant). As Max Weber puts it the distinct feature of the modern factory was that "the concentration of ownership of workplace, means of work, source of power and raw material in one and the same hand. This combination was only rarely met before the eighteenth century" (1961, pp. 133, 224). "Factories" is a term that combines two economic phenomena: one is the collection of former artisans and domestic workers under one roof, wherein the workers continued to their original work, only away from home. They were also known as "manufactories." For the other, a complete change in production technique, with substantial investment in fixed capital combined with strict supervision and rigid discipline was required, consequently giving rise to what was known as "mills." Practically however, this discrimination did not last, and most of the new plants were blends of the "ideal" types, with the relative importance of the "manufactories" declining over time (Weber, 1961).The modern factories, the collection people under one roof, required the power of a large number of disciplined work-force to carry out the functions and the process of manufacture. This also paved the way for the increased need of inspection or surveillance. Subscribing to Bentham's theory in the 'Panoptican', Foucault describes the device by which the system of surveillance, can be carried out economically, on large congregation of populations to be kept under inspections, such as hospitals, hotels and schools and prisons, factories etc; and the 'political cost ', lesser than violence - with "the system of surveillance, which on the contrary involves very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints" (1974). The human body conditioned by disciplinary practises, becomes then a store-house of power, with surveillance directed inwards, in order to achieve the perceived goal. In capitalist societies, claims Foucault, "nothing is more material, physical, corporal than, the exercise of power" (1975). One reason for the decline of the firms was that labor to be paid a piece wage, and working at home made the monitoring of time impossible. Jay Walljasper (2000) has quoted a few chronological events. Like the advent of the wind-up alarm clocks introduced by Seth Thomas in the year 1876, after which punctuality has gained prominence. The more modern factory, factory towns, and an industrial wage labor force or proletariat were all created in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. As Elizabeth Wilson (1991) has stated on the consequence of the industrialization and the change it effected on the society "Young, unattached men and women flocked to the towns to find more remunerative work. There, freed from the bonds of social control, they were in danger of succumbing to temptations of every kind; immorality, illegitimacy, the breakdown of family life and bestial excess appeared to threaten from all sides. Perhaps worse was that, in the rough and tumble of the city-street and urban crowd, distinctions of rank of every kind were blurred" (p.2). The transition was long, but by the year 1914, the majority of the labor force was no longer working in their homes. This sudden opportunity of employment for all populations had already started drawing people in large numbers to where these factories were located. For example during the process of industrialization of London, "colossal centralization, this agglomeration of three and a half million people on a single spot has multiplied the strength of these three and a half million inhabitants a hundredfold" (Benjamin 1987). Thus was born the modern Metropolis. As Simmel (1950) observes in 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', "The horizon of the city expands in a manner comparable to the way in which wealth develops; a certain amount of property increases in a quasi-automatical way in ever more rapid progression. As soon as a certain limit has been passed, the economic, personal, and intellectual relations of the citizenry, the sphere of intellectual predominance of the city over its hinterland, grow as in geometrical progression." The modern metropolis and its inhabitants underwent fundamental and drastic transformation. "Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy and intellectualist character" (Simmel 1950). The proletarian workers dressed in industrial uniforms, walked in unison, in lock-step with their heads tilted downward, grouped in square rows, six persons wide and six persons deep. Standardized and mechanized, they were simulacra for the humans of mass production. They also symbolized the industrial factory worker, operating under the principles of total efficiency and acceleration, as theorized by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911) in the first decades of the twentieth century. David Nye's has observed in his essays, on the ways technology has been used by Americans to "construct and narrate their culture," the fields of material, environmental, and cultural history, among others. The transformation impacted by the technological developments on the spatial front was pominently visible in the World Fairs and exhibitions, their being benefited from night-time illumination; parallely the roadways, rail lines, planned foot paths, lookouts, and hotels transformed the Grand Canyon into a prime tourist destination; and the launches of Apollo space missions drew crowds of thousands wanting to witness history, Nye's compelling discussions of technological innovation and attendant meaning, highlighted the effects of technological change - the ability to depict the public wonder at the power of material progress is powerful and affecting.These transformations were the price to be paid in what is perceived as progress and development. The discovery of the Steam Engine, Electricity, the advent of the railroad, have been milestones in the revolutionary process which have changed the face of the modern world and its urbanized citizens. The dark side of these technological developments shocked the modern world and set off endless debated amongst philosophers and geographers alike. For example the first railroads were organized with a central control similar to the army, and were the precursors to later corporations. Wage cuts, loss of control and intermittent accidents united workers in their protests and resulted in conflicts and strikes. While the railroads did not succeed in uniting regions, it served to highlight the differences of the industry based economy and agriculture based economy. For the inhabitants of the industry based economy, the faster they adapted the better the pay. As the techniques employed in factories became more and more refined, the labor force was divided on the basis of knowledge and skill they were able acquire. In Simmel's words "the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, however, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others" ( 1950). Concept of Time and Annihilation of Distance: With the technological advancement, time keeping underwent an enormous technology metamorphosis. It has progressed greatly from the sundial of Roman times to the atomic clock of today. Time has become self-evident [de Grazia, 1963] given the great accuracy of time measurement. Today, Time is objective, universal, irreversible, non-projectable, quantitative or set in inelastic, non compressible units [de Grazia, 1963, p. 317], it seems that time can be recorded in only one possible way, one which is linear and objective: clock time. By the 1940s the mass production techniques that won Second World War were applied to civilian life too. Even towns were rapidly mass produced with in the shortest period of time, as seen in modern suburbs like Levittown, New York; with little attention being paid to the important connecting tissue of neighborhood shops, public spaces, and public life itself, they resembled towns. Le Corbusier (1986) felt cities to be unworthy of the industrial age, and he proposed that the modern metropolis should be constructed, similar to a machine, via centralized, fused coordination and mass production. Le Corbusier (1986) visualized future residences as "machines for living." This was very different from the mass-produced kitsch of Levittown. In 1913 when the first subway was sanctioned for the New York City, it was intended to save time and solve the problem of commuting space for the cities inhabitants who mostly lived in apartments. "Rapid transit's ability to transport large numbers of people quickly and efficiently permits the dense concentration of nighttime populations in residential neighborhoods and daytime populations in midtown and Wall Street" (Hood, 2004). Time became precious and became likened to any other commodity and speedier means of transportation and communication helped overcome physical distances, especially to workplaces and factories. The term 'Annihilation of distance' was coined by Frances Cairncross, literally meant 'the death of distance,' suggesting that distance may no longer be a limiting factor in people's ability to communicate or travel. If the advancement of the transportation systems helped surmount physical distances, the advancement of the telegraph technologies swept away the communication barriers. The age of Information may be said to have begun in 1844; the invention of telegraph de-linked the speed of information from the speed of human travel. Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone with mobile phones closely in the tow, have revolutionized the communication systems. The post-modern invention of the computer-system, its networking, has helped transcend the space of time and distance in communication. Harvey (1990) has argued the change in the sense of space and time carried it over to the financial arena. With faster and widespread telecommunications, financial markets came to encompass the entire globe in very short time spans.This concept of time greatly influenced the industrial economy. Simultaneously, production of real commodities ceased to be essential to the capitalist system. Through the space-time compression, the financial system came to be de-linked from active production of real commodities. The instabilities in capitalist production and a "radical shift in the manner in which value gets represented as money" (Harvey 1990, p.296) after 1973 further caused the change to a postmodern mode of capitalism. The age of information can be said as verily the heart of the story about 20th century modernity. The computer-based operating systems have permeated all walks of life. From doing simple calculations, to simulating hostile space environments; from expediting mail exchanges to incorporating multi-million dollar transactions through internet based commercial transactions; from aiding e-commerce to sophisticated geographical mapping which aid surveillance, new technologies, especially computer-aided systems, the broadband connectivity which have tremendously transformed the way communications are carried out, technologies have transformed the modern urban and rural space of the 20th century. GIS, the acronym for Geographic Information Systems, are spatially-oriented computer systems that "map" various types of data so that their distribution is clearly visible. GIS consists of computer software translating information into a spatial format that can then be overlaid onto maps (Jonasse 1995). The source of information for this mapping is derived from a wide range of objects, including satellites, oceanographic vessels, weather stations, foresters, census takers, demographers, real-estate planners, wildlife biologists, etc. GIS applications span from environmental and medical research, to marketing, to land management and urban planning. As quoted in a 1991 issue of Business Week "There is a quite revolution going on. .. It affects the rates we pay for utility services and the quality of our roadways. It can influence the speed with which emergency vehicles respond to our calls and how quickly criminals are put behind bars. It can help prevent famine, blight, and pestilence. It has played a role in planning and fighting wars and then rebuilding war-torn communities. It is being used for applications as far flung as finding delinquent tax-payers, developing pizza delivery routes and setting insurance rates. It is even being used to increase the impact of the "junk" mail you receive". Thetechnology, which has made life much easier for the modern urban citizen, has become a powerful tool of surveillance too. The very GIS can accurately locate any person, with the aid of three-dimensional pictures and graphs if so required. Such powerful technologies have now become silent intrusions into the privacy of human beings. The direct consequence of the wedlock of computers and telecommunications has been described variously by optimists and pessimists, ranging from information overload, more opportunity, faster pace of life, more security, higher productivity on the positive side to more pressure, more anxiety, less privacy, more control, more unknowns, on the negative side. Shopping and managing financial investments from work has now been made possible; this is friction-free capitalism (Niles, 1998). The transformation on the social front has been greatly perceptible as "the increasingly technical sophistication of the economic world and the shift away from industrialized manufacturing to tertiary sector 'information age' production creates a hypermdernization that is at odds with the traditionalist impulse in conservatism, the desire that old forms and institutions be preserved. Yet the new technologies make possible alternative institutions and lifestyles, as well as the reconstruction of the social world. Perhaps this accounts for the desire for a more literal, natural world in conservative films. It is a reaction to the world that, they themselves help create through an ideal of efficient economic development" (Ibid, p. 65). Henri Lefebvre (1948), the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, is critical about modern urbanism; it has undermined urban life and contributed to an abstract space according to him. In his work 'The Production of Space' (1974), he has stated "With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space. It is recorded solely on measuring-instruments, on clocks, that are isolated and functionally specialized as this time itself. Lived time loses its form and its social interest -- with the exception, that is, of time spent working. Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as threatening and dangerous (to power). The primacy of the economic and above all of the political implies the supremacy of space over time." Urbanity should be linked with meetings of difference, life and play, speech and conversation including total strangers, and use all the senses. The city, its buildings, art and human lives are to be perceived as works of art (in French 'oeuvre') - contrary to routine production and profit. Lefebvre has also argued that alienation was a fundamental structure of human practice. All human actions were characterized by a three-stage evolution in which initially spontaneous forms of order were shaped into rational organizing structures, which finally lent themselves to abuse as a fixation of oppression. Applying this analysis, for example, to economics, he has pointed division of labor (like factories) gradually changes into the exploitation of workers; in politics, effective administration (or leadership) decays into a coercive state (or party) apparatus; and in philosophy, clarity of thinking finally hardens into a rigid ideology which those in power can wield as a blunt instrument. The intellectuals who supported the Marxian theories, also known as 'left-wing' theorists, especially in the 1950s, living through the greatest boom in the history of capitalism, felt cut off from the organized working class. For them, the concept of alienation was crucial in defending Marxism. Marshall Berman is a Marxist Humanist writer and philosopher, has argued, that the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 'provided a searing indictment of capitalism even at its most triumphant.' Berman has identified with Marx's description of a 'crude, mindless communism' as that which has laid the ground for the moral indictment of Stalinism (Alexander, 1999). On the factory scenario of the industrialized economy, Berman has argued, "The workers may sustain each other today on the assembly line or on the picket line, only to find them-selves scattered tomorrow among different collectivities, with different conditions, different processes and products, different needs and interests". Alexander argues that, here Berman has missed what was crucial about Marx's definition of class. What bonded these workers together was not geographical location, nor the fact that they worked for the same company, nor even that they did the same kind of job. For Marx, their position as workers was defined by their relationship to the means of production. This meant that even if the factory closed and the former assembly line workers found themselves stacking shelves in a supermarket, they would still remain workers, and retain fundamentally the same class interests and conditions. (1999). As Bo Gronlund (1993) has stated, capitalism has indeed created contradictions in urban space, giving rise to varied spaces. Those spaces have been, and, can be transformed into counter-spaces, of new human possibilities. He has referred to 'The Production of Space' of Lefebvre (1974) on the city and on space thoroughly, and has pointed to the important qualities of differential space and counter-space have to do with aspects like: social and other human differences, the meeting of strangers, play and eroticism, human works as unique objects, possibilities for the unplanned, unpredictability, inter-change and inter-active communication, as well as the use of all senses. Conclusion: The urban spaces have certainly had new technologies at the heart of its progress into the 20th century. The technological advancements have determined the social changes and the transformations, giving rise to new social constructs. Manuel Castells's thoughts on the relationship between history, society, technology and causality in The Rise of the Network Society (1996) are worthy of being pondered over here: "Of course technology does not determine society. Neither does society script the course of technological change, since many factors, including individual inventiveness and entrepreneurialism, intervene in the process of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and social applications, so that the final outcome depends on a complex pattern of interaction. Indeed, the dilemma of technological determinism is probably a false problem, since technology is society, and society cannot be understood or represented without its technological tools." What is today commonplace was a technology feat of the past the examples of which are: in a piece of woven clothing, a wrist watch, a baseball bat. It is thought that technology is something foreign, outside of us, and not a reflection of our-selves. Maybe it is now the time to re-think newer constructs which shall better explain the hitherto taken for granted concepts, replacing them with newer advanced constructs that match the pace of technological developments. Bibliography Alexander, Anne (1999). All power to the imagination. A review of Marshall Berman, Adventures in Marxism. Verso. London. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj85/alexander.htm last accessed on 01/02/06. Benjamin, Walter (1987). "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in his Illuminations". Bentham, Jeremy (1787). The Panopticon Writings. Ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1995). p. 29-95 Berman, Marshall,(1999) Adventures in Marxism (Verso), p118. Business Week. "GIS: Special Advertising Section." Business Week. (July, 1) 1991. Cairncross,Frances. 1997. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution will change our Lives. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Castells, Manuel(1996). The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture 1, on the U.S. Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers) p. 5 Debord, Guy (1967) The Organization of Territory, The Society of the Spectacle. Black&Red Publishers. De Grazia, S. (1963), Of Time, Work and Leisure (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund). Foucault, Michel, (1974) "Eye of Power" Excerpts from "Power/Knowledge". Goss, Jon. 'We Know Who You Are and We Know Where You live': The Instrumental Rationality of Geodemographic Systems". In Economic Geography 71,2 (April 1995). Greog Simmel (1950). The Metropolis and Mental Life. Adapted by D. Weinstein from Kurt Wolff (Trans.) 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Michigan State University p. 1 Marx, Karl (1976). Collected Works, vol VI (London) pp210-211. Mokyr, Joel (2001). The Rise and Fall of the Factory System: Technology, firms, and households since the Industrial Revolution. Prepared for the Carnegie-Rochester Conference on macroeconomics, Pittsburgh, Nov.17-19, 2000. Northwestern University. Niles, S. John (1998). Telecommunications' Big Idea. NTQ (New Telecom Quarterly), Volume 6, Number 4, Fourth Quarter . Nye, David (1994). American Technological Sublime. MIT Press. Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. Courier Dover Publications.(1998). Walljasper, Jay (2000). "Speed of Life" in Citizen At Large. Conscious Choice. A Conscious Group Publication. Chicago. Weber, Max (1961). General Economic History. New York: Collier Books (translated from German ed., published in 1923). Wilson, Elizabeth (1991). "The Invisible Flaneur", The Sphinx in the City. London. Pp 2. Read More