You've probably been, or have certainly seen someone getting quite annoyed over trivial technology-related situations. A simple experience with a power outage or an internet connection problem provides an immediate frustration in anyone used to urban life and dependent on devices electronics. This type of reaction is characteristic of modern civilization, that is, of societies that are developed from the scientific and technological revolutions that occurred in the modern and contemporary.
With the great technical innovations that science, born with Galileo Galilei and other scientists, even in the seventeenth century, have provided us, we ended up getting used to many facilities and a way of life whose practicality is unthinkable without the use of technology. From the process of industrialization, started in England in the 18th century, and which spread throughout Europe and then throughout the world in the following centuries, the experience of the passage of time began to be profoundly altered.
Daily life prior to the Industrial Revolution was essentially agrarian, with a strong connection to land cultivation and observation of the natural passage of time (seasons of the year, periods of rain and drought, etc.), whose objective was to predict periods of scarcity. Industrialization formed the great urban centers and demanded an accelerated dynamic of everyday life, never seen in traditional societies. The use of metals by heavy industry (metallurgical and steel), such as iron, enabled the creation of an enormous diversity of machinery.
Trains and cargo ships that transported products to very distant regions in a very short period of time, as well as traction trams electric, which functioned as urban transport for people, were some of the inventions that began to change the experience of the passage of the time. The invention of the first automobile by the German Karl Benz, in 1886, which was powered by gas and reached an average speed of 16 km/h, also contributed decisively for the perception of time, in everyday life, to become progressively more accelerated.
A Cuban stamp from 1984, illustrating nearly a hundred years of manufacturing the first automobile in history, created by Karl Benz in 1886.*
The experience of an accelerated daily life is also related to the very speed with which technological artifacts are invented and, in the same measure, as many of these artifacts become obsolete. We can cite, for example, two electronic devices that were considered very advanced just twenty years ago and that today are even more sophisticated. They are: the mobile phone (cell phone) and the personal computer.
In the 1990s, these two types of utensils were considered to have limited access due to their high price, related to their degree of sophistication. Nowadays, we have variations of the personal computer, such as the notebook and ultrabook, which are lighter, more portable and faster. Cell phones now have internet service, a camera and a digital camcorder, in addition to some other devices that allow us to they save time that would be wasted, for example, if we had to make a call, on public roads, in the old public telephones (“payphones”).
Several other examples could be addressed, but the essential thing is to be able to perceive the deep and intimate transformation that our civilization, so affected by industry, suffered in its way of perceiving time and its ability to manage its expectations to from that. The example given in the first paragraph of this text, of the irritation with the drop of the internet connection, illustrates the relationship between a accelerated time experience (fast internet access) and a frustrated expectation that is always generated by the immediate lack of that ease.
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*Image credits: Shutterstock / etiAmos
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
