Attribution, Sensus Communis

Attribution

February 5, 2021

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Feb

Finally, many industrial societies now appear to be entering yet another phase of technological development. In the early 1970s, Daniel Bell (1976) invented the term post-industrialism to refer to computer-linked technology supporting an information-based economy. While production in industrial societies focuses on factories and machinery that generate material goods, post-industrial production focuses on computers and other electronics that create, process, store and apply information.

It is the information society, the network society, the cyber-society, the postmodern society. At the individual level, industrial societies members concentrate on learning mechanical skills. People in post-industrial societies, however, work on gaining information-based skills for work involving computers, facsimile machines, satellites, and other communication forms technology.

Post-industrialism’s emergence dramatically changes a society’s occupational structure. Post-industrial societies utilises less and less of its labour force for industrial production. Simultaneously, the ranks of clerical worker, managers and other people who process information (in fields ranging from academia and advertising to marketing and public relations) swell rapidly. New skills – often less physical and more mental – are needed to handle fragmented work, multi-tasking and non-linear patterns of work. We are facing the new challenges as well – the cognitive pressure for us and our brain is higher than ever before in the sociocultural development of our societies.

The Information Revolution is, of course, most pronounced in industrial, high-income societies, yet the reach of this new technology is so great that it is affecting the entire world. The unprecedented worldwide flow of information originating in wealthy nations has the predictable effect of tying far-flung societies together and fostering common global culture patterns.

This extends the process of globalisation and brings a society that some peak of postmodernism (postmodernism is the ways of thinking that stress a plurality of perspectives as opposed to a unified, single-core). It is a world where change is significantly speeding up, where classical boundaries across societies break down, and a new sense of society is in the making.

Read full article on the History of Societies

Feb

Until industrialism, the main source of energy used in everyday activities was human and animals power. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around the 1750s, mills and factories started to rely on an absolutely new technology – flowing water and later – steam to power the ever-larger machinery that was never seen before. Industrialism is technology that powers sophisticated machinery with advanced sources of energy.

When this technology spread and became available, societies began to change extremely fast. Industrial societies transformed themselves more in one century than they had in thousands of years before. During the 19th century, railways and steamships revolutionised transportation, and steel-framed skyscrapers recast the urban landscape, dwarfing the cathedrals that symbolised an earlier age.

As the 20th century began, the internal combustion engine further reshaped Western societies, and electricity was fast becoming the basis for countless ‘modern conveniences’. Electronic communication, including the telephone, radio and television, was mass-producing cultural patterns and gradually making a big world seem smaller and smaller. More recently, transportation technology has given humanity the capacity to fly faster than sound and even break the bonds of earth. Nuclear power has also changed the world forever. And, during the last generation, computers have ushered in the Information Revolution, dramatically increasing humanity’s capacity to process words and numbers.

As it could be deducted – work, too, has changed. In agrarian societies, most men and women work in the home and on the land. Industrial societies, however, creates factories near centralised machinery and energy sources. Lost in the process are close working relationships and strong kinship ties and many of the traditional beliefs that guide agrarian life.

Even though if health in Europe and North America’s new industrial cities was poor in the beginning, a rising standard of living and advancing health-related technology gradually helped to put infectious diseases under control. As a consequence, life expectancy increased causing a rapid population growth. Industrialisation also pushed people from the countryside to the cities where the factories were built. This is a topic worth an individual piece – how bourgeoisie (owners of the capital) managed to create “free labour” needed for their production and forced people out of the rural areas to the cities.

Occupational specialisation became more distinctive than ever before. In industrial societies people often size up one another in terms of their jobs, rather than according to their kinship ties as agrarian people do. Rapid change and movement from place to place also generate anonymity and cultural diversity, sparking numerous subcultures and countercultures.

Industrial technology recasts the family relations, too, diminishing its traditional importance as the centre of social life. No longer does the family serve as the primary setting for economic production, learning and religious worship. Technological change also underlies the trend away from so-called traditional families to many single people, divorced people, single-parent families, lesbian and gay couples and stepfamilies.

Important to mention, that early industrialisation concentrated the benefits of advancing technology on a small population segment, with the majority living in poverty. There is a shocking amount of homeless people or people with mental disorders, due to the rapid change of social relations, drop of the family ties or religious importance.

While most people in agrarian societies are illiterate, industrial societies provide state-funded schooling and confer numerous political rights on virtually everyone. Industrialisation, in fact, intensifies demands for political participation, as seen recently in South Korea, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, the former Soviet Union, and the societies of eastern Europe.

Read full article on the History of Societies

Feb

About 5,000 years ago another technological revolution came starting in the Middle East that in the end will transform most of the world. This was the discovery of agriculture, the technology of large-scale farming using ploughs harnessed to animals or more powerful energy sources. The social significance of the animal-drawn plough and other technological innovations of the period clearly indicated the arrival of a new kind of society.

While horticulturalists spend their days working small-sized plots, agriculturalists with animal-drawn ploughs were already able to cultivate way much bigger areas. This kind of new technology encouraged agrarian societies to farm the same land for decades, which led to humanity’s first permanent settlements.

As we already saw before, increasing production meant greater specialisation. Tasks that were performed in the past by everyone now became distinct occupations. Here it was the time where the invention of money exchange came into the play and replaced barter trade system. This appearance of money facilitated trade, helped cities to grow as economic centres with populations reaching millions of people.

As we already saw, the increasing specialization and ability to keep surplus materials sparked the fire of inequalities. Agrarian societies are no exception – people lived in dramatic social inequality. In many cases, peasants or slaves constitute a significant share of the population and labour for elites. Freed from manual work, elites can then devote their time to studying philosophy, art and literature.

When it comes to gender equality – among the hunters and gatherers, and horticulturists, women were the primary food providers. The development of agriculture, however, has put men into a position of social dominance.

Religion was used to reinforce the power of agricultural elites. Religious doctrine typically propounds the idea that people are morally obligated to perform whatever tasks correspond to their place in the social order.

Read full article on the History of Societies