what are we going to call the modern era

one.six Cultural Periods

Learning Objectives

1. Identify recent cultural periods.
2. Identify the bear on of the Industrial Revolution on the modern era.
3. Explicate the ways that the postmodern era differs from the modern era.

Tabular array 1.i Cultural Periods

Modern Era	Early Modern Period (late 1400s–1700s)	Began with Johannes Gutenberg'southward invention of the movable type press printing; characterized past improved transportation, educational reform, and scientific inquiry.
	Late Modern Period (1700s–1900s)	Sparked past the Industrial Revolution; characterized past technical innovations, increasingly secular politics, and urbanization.
Postmodern Age (1950s–present)	Marked by skepticism, self-consciousness, commemoration of differences, and the digitalization of culture.

Later on exploring the ways technology, culture, and mass media have afflicted 1 another over the years, it may also be helpful to await at recent cultural eras more broadly. A cultural flow is a time marked by a particular way of understanding the earth through culture and technology. Changes in cultural periods are marked by fundamental switches in the way people perceive and understand the world. In the Centre Ages, truth was dictated by authorities like the king and the church. During the Renaissance, people turned to the scientific method as a way to reach truth through reason. And, in 2008, Wired mag's editor in chief proclaimed that Google was about to render the scientific method obsolete (Anderson, 2008). In each of these cases, it wasn't that the nature of truth changed, just the way humans attempted to brand sense of a world that was radically changing. For the purpose of studying culture and mass media, the post-Gutenberg modern and postmodern ages are the most relevant ones to explore.

The Modern Age

The Modern Age, or modernity, is the postmedieval era, a wide span of time marked in part past technological innovations, urbanization, scientific discoveries, and globalization. The Modern Age is generally split into two parts: the early and the late modern periods.

The early modern period began with Gutenberg'due south invention of the movable type printing press in the late 15th century and ended in the late 18th century. Cheers to Gutenberg'southward press, the European population of the early modern menstruum saw ascension literacy rates, which led to educational reform. Every bit noted in preceding sections, Gutenberg's automobile besides greatly enabled the spread of knowledge and, in turn, spurred the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. During the early modern period, transportation improved, politics became more secularized, capitalism spread, nation-states grew more powerful, and information became more widely accessible. Enlightenment ideals of reason, rationalism, and faith in scientific enquiry slowly began to replace the previously dominant authorities of male monarch and church building.

Huge political, social, and economic changes marked the stop of the 18th century and the offset of the tardily modernistic menstruation. The Industrial Revolution, which began in England around 1750, combined with the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789, marked the first of massive changes in the world.

The French and American revolutions were inspired past a rejection of monarchy in favor of national sovereignty and representative democracy. Both revolutions also heralded the ascension of secular society as opposed to church-based authorisation systems. Democracy was well suited to the so-called Age of Reason, with its ethics of individual rights and progress.

Though less political, the Industrial Revolution had equally far-reaching consequences. Information technology did not merely modify the way goods were produced—it also fundamentally inverse the economical, social, and cultural framework of its time. The Industrial Revolution doesn't have clear starting time or end dates. However, during the 19th century, several crucial inventions—the internal combustion engine, steam-powered ships, and railways, amongst others—led to innovations in various industries. Steam power and machine tools increased production dramatically. Merely some of the biggest changes coming out of the Industrial Revolution were social in character. An economy based on manufacturing instead of agriculture meant that more people moved to cities, where techniques of mass product led people to value efficiency both in and out of the factory. Newly urbanized factory laborers could no longer produce their own food, clothing, or supplies, and instead turned to consumer appurtenances. Increased product led to increases in wealth, though income inequalities between classes also started to abound.

These overwhelming changes afflicted (and were affected past) the media. Equally noted in preceding sections, the fusing of steam ability and the printing press enabled the explosive expansion of books and newspapers. Literacy rates rose, as did support for public participation in politics. More and more than people lived in the city, had an education, got their news from the paper, spent their wages on consumer goods, and identified as citizens of an industrialized nation. Urbanization, mass literacy, and new forms of mass media contributed to a sense of mass culture that united people beyond regional, social, and cultural boundaries.

Modernity and the Modernistic Age, information technology should be noted, are distinct from (merely related to) the cultural movement of modernism. The Modern Era lasted from the end of the Middle Ages to the middle of the 20th century; modernism, however, refers to the creative movement of late 19th and early 20th centuries that arose from the widespread changes that swept the world during that menstruation. Most notably, modernism questioned the limitations of traditional forms of art and culture. Modernist art was in part a reaction against the Enlightenment'southward certainty of progress and rationality. It celebrated subjectivity through abstraction, experimentalism, surrealism, and sometimes pessimism or even nihilism. Prominent examples of modernist works include James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness novels, cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso, atonal compositions by Claude Debussy, and absurdist plays by Luigi Pirandello.

The Postmodern Age

Modernism can also exist seen every bit a transitional phase between the modern and postmodern eras. While the exact definition and dates of the Postmodern Age are still being debated by cultural theorists and philosophers, the full general consensus is that the Postmodern Age began during the second half of the 20th century and was marked by skepticism, self-consciousness, commemoration of difference, and the reappraisal of mod conventions. The Modern Age took for granted scientific rationalism, the autonomous cocky, and the inevitability of progress; the Postmodern Age questioned or dismissed many of these assumptions. If the Mod Historic period valued order, reason, stability, and accented truth, the Postmodern Age reveled in contingency, fragmentation, and instability. The effect of technology on civilisation, the rising of the Internet, and the Cold War are all aspects that led to the Postmodern Age.

The belief in objective truth that characterized the Modernistic Historic period is one of the major assumptions overturned in the Postmodern Age. Postmodernists instead took their cues from Erwin Schrödinger, the breakthrough physicist who famously devised a thought experiment in which a cat is placed inside a sealed box with a small corporeality of radiation that may or may not impale it. While the box remains sealed, Schrödinger proclaimed, the true cat exists simultaneously in both states, expressionless and alive. Both potential states are equally true. Although the idea experiment was devised to explore issues in quantum physics, it appealed to postmodernists in its exclamation of radical dubiety. Rather than there beingness an absolute objective truth accessible by rational experimentation, the status of reality was contingent and depended on the observer.

This value of the relative over the absolute found its literary equivalent in the movement of deconstruction. While Victorian novelists took pains to make their books seem more than realistic, postmodern narratives distrusted professions of reality and constantly reminded readers of the artificial nature of the story they were reading. The accent was not on the all-knowing writer, simply instead on the reader. For the postmodernists, meaning was not injected into a piece of work by its creator, but depended on the reader'south subjective experience of the work. The poetry of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg exemplify this, as much of their piece of work is emotionally charged and designed to create a dialogue with the reader, oft forcing the reader to face controversial bug such equally mental illness or homosexuality.

Another way the Postmodern Age differed from the Mod Age was in the rejection of what philosopher Jean-François Lyotard deemed "grand narratives." The Mod Age was marked by different large-scale theories that attempted to explain the totality of homo experience, such equally capitalism, Marxism, rationalism, Freudianism, Darwinism, fascism, so on. Withal, increasing globalization and the rise of subcultures called into question the sorts of theories that claimed to explain everything at once. Totalitarian regimes during the 20th century, such as Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and the USSR under Joseph Stalin, led to a mistrust of power and the systems held upward by power. The Postmodern Age, Lyotard theorized, was one of micronarratives instead of thou narratives—that is, a multiplicity of small, localized understandings of the world, none of which can merits an ultimate or absolute truth. An older man in Kenya, for example, does not view the world in the same way equally a young woman from New York. Even people from the same cultural backgrounds have different views of the earth—when you lot were a teenager, did your parents understand your way of thinking? The multifariousness of human experience is a marked feature of the postmodern world. Every bit Lyotard noted, "Eclecticism is the caste aught of contemporary general culture; one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; noesis is a affair for Boob tube games (Lyotard, 1984)."

Postmodernists also mistrusted the thought of originality and freely borrowed across cultures and genres. William S. Burroughs gleefully proclaimed a sort of call to artillery for his generation of writers in 1985: "Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the globe. Everything belongs to the inspired and defended thief (Burroughs,1993)." The feminist creative person Barbara Kruger, for instance, creates works of art from old advertisements, and writers, such every bit Kathy Acker, reconstructed existing texts to form new stories. The rejection of traditional forms of art and expression embody the Postmodern Age.

From the early Modern Age through the Postmodern Age, people have experienced the world in vastly dissimilar means. Not merely has technology rapidly become more complex, but culture itself has changed with the times. When reading further, it's important to recall that forms of media and culture are hallmarks of different eras, and the different means in which media are presented frequently tell united states a lot virtually the culture and times.

Cardinal Takeaways

• A cultural period is a time marked past a particular way of understanding the world through culture and technology. Changes in cultural periods are marked by fundamental changes in the way nosotros perceive and understand the globe. The Modernistic Historic period began subsequently the Eye Ages and lasted through the early decades of the 20th century, when the Postmodern Age began.
• The Mod Age was marked by Enlightenment philosophy, which focused on the individual and placed a high value on rational decision making. This period saw the wide expansion of commercialism, colonialism, republic, and science-based rationalism. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the American and French Revolutions, and World War I were all significant events that took identify during the Modern Age. One of the most meaning, notwithstanding, was the Industrial Revolution; its emphasis on routinization and efficiency helped society restructure itself similarly.
• Postmodernity differed from modernity in its questioning of reason, rejection of thou narratives, and emphasis on subcultures. Rather than searching for one ultimate truth that could explain all of history, the postmodernists focused on contingency, context, and diverseness.

Exercises

Depict a Venn diagram of the two cultural periods discussed at length in this affiliate. Brand a list of the features, values, and events that mark each period. And then, answer the questions beneath. Each response should exist a minimum of i paragraph.

1. What defines a cultural menses?
2. How exercise the two periods differ? Do they overlap in whatever ways?
3. What do you lot predict the adjacent cultural era has in store? When will it begin?

References

Anderson, Chris. "The Finish of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete," Wired, June 23, 2008, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/mag/16-07/pb_theory.

Burroughs, William S. "Les Velours," The Adding Machine, (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), 19–21.

Lyotard, Jean-François The Postmodern Condition: A Study on Noesis, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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Source: https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/1-6-cultural-periods/

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