Election 2018

[David Horn]

(10-29-2018, 06:53 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-29-2018, 05:11 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Most of the above people are clearly Industrial Age.  Thus, using violence as a solution would be expected.  FDR is the cusp figure, who faced a double crisis.  

Sorry to interrupt, but how do you define the Industrial Age?  Wikipedia claims it started in 1760 without specifying an end date. 1991 looks plausible, since it marks the end of Bolshevism, an ideology designed for industrial workers above all. Orion's Arm has 1700-2000, which looks way to simplistic for me. My somewhat heretical choice is 2006, when MySpace kicked in and "You" (anonymous Internet user) was chosen as Time's person of the year. This marks a cultural transition to the Information Age, but as our global economy still uses fossils as the main energy source, one could argue we are still in the Industrial Age.

Using my own criteria, I would bracket social/cultural ages based on rising acceptance and impact.  For the Industrial Age, the marker is difficult.  This was the first transition in ~12,000 years, and the philosophical and cultural norms actually changed before the full impact of the technological changes were fully felt.  The Transcendentals reacted to religion and culture on a spiritual level.  If the impact of industry was involved in that thinking, it was certainly not obvious.  If anything, it should have been the railroads, which began in earnest in the 1830s and were important and impactful by the 1850s.  Somewhere in that period is what can be called the beginning of the Industrial Age, in cultural terms at least.

The Information Age is a bit of a misnomer.  It's less about information, per se, and more about easy access to it, but that's a quibble.  The advent of computers is the technological precursor, but the cultural impacts were due to the rise of the PC, the internet and digital cellphones.  Has our thinking changed all that much due to Facebook and Twitter?  I don't think so.  So a marker for that transition is somewhere in the 1990-2005 range.  A follow-on Age will emerge soon, but what it will encompass and what it will be called is still TBD.