Industrial Revolution - Essay Example

Man has always been dissatisfied with his world. In prehistory man moved around the world in search of food and other needs, and eventually there wasmuch competition, and only the fastest man got what was available. Man's dissatisfaction led to remarkable advances. Before the Industrial Revolution, big "firms" (that is the merchant-entrepreneurs) were quite widespread, but almost all of their work-force was domestic labor (cottage industry). The firm owned the raw materials, almost all the goods in process, tools and equipment, and outsourced physical production to workers' homes. Much of the pre-Industrial Revolution population, in any case, were independent farmers or craftsmen making it quite unnecessary to distinguish between "firm", "plant", or "household". The advent of factories led to a fundamental shift in society. The introduction of efficient mechanized production techniques resulted in cheaper products produced much faster. There was no competition; individuals were forced to work-at the factories. The factories divided the day into shifts. Individuals no longer had control over their schedules, but were expected to conform to rigorous routine. Workers began to lose their sense of individuality. 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. They were operating under the principles of total efficiency and acceleration, as theorized by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911) in the first decades of the twentieth century. This objectification was furthered by the mechanistic work structures and the tendency to reward those who caught on quickest. An individual became a mere cog in the wheel, interchangeable, and dependent on the others to get his job completed. Money became the common denominator of values, of individuality. Everyone fit within a specific classification, and there was little appreciation for individuality. 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. The modern factories, the collection of 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. 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. 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. The term "technology" was born in 1828, and spread with the railroads. The very first of such technologies is the the telegraph system, which aided the stock market bloom. The railroad system allowed very fast travel. The importance of the railways was not only its speed and automation, but that it gave its riders freedom. 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). Invention of the steam engine was critical to the invention of the modern railroad and train. 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. it highlighted the differences of the industry based economy and agriculture based economy. The most amazing invention that further shrunk the world at the start of the twentieth century was by the Wright brothers, the aeroplane, a flying device. a major revolution in transport. This also gave birth to space crafts. Then the telephone system, which rendered long distance communication instantaneous. This was closely followed by the advent of the electric system, developed by Thomas Edison. He founded the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York. Very rapidly, almost within months, the world witnessed a great transformation. Punctuality has gained prominence at the advent of the wind-up alarm clocks in the year 1876. With the technological advancement, time keeping underwent an enormous technology metamorphosis. Even towns were rapidly mass produced within 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. 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'; distance is no longer a limiting factor in communication and travel. 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 disassociated the speed of information from the speed of human travel. The post-modern invention of the computer-system, its networking, has helped transcend the space of time and distance in communication. The age of information can be said to be the heart of the story about 20th century modernity. A particularly remarkable technoogy is GIS (Geographic Information Systems), which 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". The technology, 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." 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." 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. Lefebvre has also argued that alienation was a fundamental structure of human practice. 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, 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.' Of course, technology does not determine society. Neither does society script the course of technological change. 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. Today's culture experiences the industrial sublime: an awe for streamlined functionalism in machines "large enough to be a mesmerizing part of the landscape and powerful enough to kill you" (Fox, 2001). Read More