The Industrial Age saw the introduction of technology on a large scale, and we began to believe in technology as saviour. Does communication + technology = progress?
To understand this question there must be a definition of the industrial age. Industries such as mining, smelting and manufacturing of metal products have been around for thousands of years but to define the industrial age it should be said that it starts at the dawn of the steam age. It was here that the Industrial Revolution was started and has changed the world ever since with an accelerated rate of change to technology and society in general. It was during this time that a technology picked up a speed where faster manufacturing increased the speed of innovation. “‘Technological momentum’ is a particularly useful concept for understanding large-scale systems, such as the electric grid, the railway, or the automobile.” (Nye, 2006. p.52). This term is used describe a technology that creates its own natural path with societies and creates a momentum that creates its own infrastructures. Automobiles need roads to be created, electrical power plants need a network of wiring to deliver power and railroads need a series of tracks to transport people and goods.
It is at this point in history that technology starts working at furthering the speed of communications. The speed of which societies are able to communicate with themselves is drastically faster than a man walking. The development of rail systems and the telegraph shorten response times in the way we communicate. As opposed to sending written letters and waiting for a response through a horse or foot delivered system, a response that covers huge distances can be sent back in a day or within hours.This now shortened the spacial communications and made the world “smaller” in regards to societies. “Our electric extensions of ourselves simply by-pass space and time, and create problems of human involvement and organization for which there is no precedent.” (McLuhan, 2013. p.14). Through every progression of communication there is always a reaction in society to it, wether that be positive or negative.
Through the Industrial Age, the progress that communication made was often misunderstood. The invention of the telegraph was not readily adapted for long distance communication or not for the purposes we can now see in hindsight. Inventors could make these innovations but they were blind to the uses behind it. “Thomas Edison thought the chief use of his phonograph would be to record speech, not music. Morse did not fully understand the enormous commercial potential of his telegraph, and he tried to sell it to the federal government. While many European countries chose to make the telegraph part of the postal service. Congress refused, and it took five years before it granted Morse $30,000 to build a line from Washington to Baltimore.” (Nye, 1997. pg. 2). It can be seen that only through use, that the adaptability of the communications invented will progress. Innovation in communication is only as good as society wields it. Inventions of communications technology do not have a direct impact on society as soon as they are made. It is through human choices through the interactions of inventing, marketing and using these inventions that progress is made on them.
There is a price for this progress though, and it comes through the use of technology and communications. Surveillance and social control have grown during these times and it is not only to kept to espionage. Through the use of electronic communications. The human need for discipline and regularity created the use of automation. “companies began to install time clocks, where a worker had to "punch in" and "punch out" whenever he came and went. Once a national time system had been invented by the railroads, being "on time" became an absolute rather than a relative standard.” (Nye, 1997. pg. 13). This system of electronic management has led to massive layoffs in the name of electronic progress at the cost of human labour. This can be seen from the industrial revolution where steam-powered looms and cotton gins replaced human labour to recently where robotics in factories have replaced humans on the assembly line. Automation may have created a system that streamlines the communication between management and the bottom line but has a human cost.
By the late Twentieth-century communication technology has become ingrained in everyday life, space and time that separated villages, cities, countries and continents has drastically become smaller. Marshall MacLuhans idea of the global village has now become the norm. Progress has now created global news networks and what happens on the other side of the world can be instantly viewed by the rest of the world. Although communications technology cannot be the savior of all the problems. “In the mid-1990s, when skyrocketing prices for newsprint and a weakened advertising market forced cost-control measures on most newspapers, the foreign news departments were nearly always the first to feel the pinch. Editors meekly recalled New York Times publisher A. H. Sulzberger's cute formula: "Along with responsible newspapers we must have responsible readers," because "the fountain serves no useful purpose if the horse refuses to drink." (Moisy. 1997. p. 11). The Industrial Age is susceptible to outside factors that can not be controlled by communication technologies, in fact, it is that technology that will inform the populous faster that a part of the market will be failing.
The last point to be made is the fact that space and time may be made smaller in a theoretical manner, the amount of time that technology has given us has not added any time to the day. The progress of communication technologies is now at our fingertips, which means anyone can reach out and connect with you. An employer can now reach you when you are enjoying leisure time. Even with defined boundaries, others can now share that time with you just by communicating. “Time is only a resource if positively and enjoyably occupied.Increases in work hours, for example, suggest a compression of leisure time driven socially and economically, not technologically, creating among other things, the phenomenon of the ‘resource-rich and time poor’.” (Goulding. 2000. p.13)
Through the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the end of the Industrial Age communication and technology have grown together to create society as we know it now. It has sped up communication through large geographical spaces, though at the cost of economic prosperity of the populous. Through the twentieth century technology has built itself higher with less reliance on human observers. As it works to the end of the industrial age it challenges the concept of time, to the detriment of personal time. At the dawn of the digital age, we see another quickening but at what cost is to be determined.
Question to be Answered:
In the dawn of the new age of the digital revolution, does communication and technology equal any new progress to society?
Golding, P. (2000). Forthcoming Features: Information and CommunicationsTechnologies and the Sociology of the Future. United Kingdom: BSA Publications Limited
Moisy, C. A. (1997). Myths of the Global Information Village. Foreign Policy, (107), 78. doi:10.2307/1149334
McLuhan, M., & Gordon, W. T. (2013). Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. New York: Gingko Press.
Nye, D. E. (2006). Technology matters : questions to live with. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Nye D. E. (1997). Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer. Social Research, (3), 1067.
