This book analyzes how new technologies transformed life and thought between two periods, 1880-1920 and 1980-2020, with a focus on temporal experiences of past, present, future and the spatial experiences of form, distance, and direction.
The signature contrast is between experiences of time and space transformed by the telephone in the earlier period and the Internet in the later period along with other sharp contrasts: the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, World War I and the Gulf Wars, gravity bombs and smart bombs, the pandemics of 1918 and 2020, assembly lines and flexible production, Farmer’s Almanacs and computer-based weather predictions, cash transactions and one-click ordering, decolonization and globalization, internationalism and planetarity. The book also makes three interpretive arguments: the Epistemological Argument covers how greater knowledge introduced uncertainties; the Ethical Argument tracks how new technologies prompted ethical judgments about their value; and the Re-hierarchizing Argument tracks the erosion of spatial hierarchies most notably in religion, society, and politics with the increasing progress of secularization, social mobility, and democratization.
Time and Space in the Internet Age is a thought-provoking study for academics and general readers interested in the history of technology and science.
By:
Stephen Kern
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032739731
ISBN 10: 1032739738
Series: Routledge Studies in Modern History
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 01 August 2024
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction 1. THE NATURE OF TIME: Number, Texture, Order 2. PAST: Length, Force, Value, Retrieval 3. PRESENT: Spatially Expanded Present, Temporally Lengthened Present, Cognitively Thickened Present 4. FUTURE: Weather Forecasting, Genetic Disease, Climate Change, The End of the Universe, The Clock of the Long Now 5. PACE: Travel, Communication, Production, Lifestyle 6. THE NATURE OF SPACE: Number, Texture, Order 7. FORM: Self, Nation 8. DISTANCE: Sociology, Geopolitics, Economics, Social Life, Environment 9. DIRECTION: East-West Axis, The Cold War, North-South Axis, Up-Down Axis Conclusion
Stephen Kern is an Honorary Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. He has authored The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918; The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns; A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought; and The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction.
