During the industrial revolution, according to Sternberg and other social psychologists, part of the problem with the collective psyche of society was a detachment from the dignity, pride, and uniqueness of their craft.
People began to view machines in a deterministic vs. instrumentalist way. This means that, as a determinist, you automatically assume that the machines and the technology is in complete control and that people are its by-product.
The reason why people viewed technology in a deterministic fashion was because, as the previous editors mentioned, the amount and lack of education of the hired hands made it nearly impossible to understand what the machines were put there to do.
In an instrumentalist view, the machines would have been embraced as tools for resource which go hand in hand with human agency. Yet, the competition of quantity versus quality left little room for analysis in those days.
Hence, we had a highly stressed, overworked and undercompensated society which suddenly became polluted, dusty, and sweaty, in times when we thought the machines would prevent us from that condition in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment