The Industrial Revolution and Computation
In talking about the Industrial Revolution and computation this week, I realized I had no idea of the small detailed impacts that went into creating the technology we have today. In the class discussions and the lectures, we discussed how these innovations that revolutionized the industry made a job that took 8 workers need only one worker, for example the Spinning Jenny and the Colossus. The readings were also so mind blowing because in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction the author, Walter Benjamin, talks about how art is not authentic and really art when its replicated so many times saying it loses its “aura” which is something I never thought about but when you think about it, it is so eerily true. In the other reading I also found it fascinating to fully learn the history of how the computer came to be. In Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi, I even learned how big of an impact the modernization and innovation of the phone had on the making of computers. The author in the book writes that the phone had an “indirect” influence to the computers success but was a major factor which gave me a broader understanding on how each technological innovation can make even the slightest impact to a future technological innovation.
As a result, learning about the Industrial Revolution and computation through the lectures, class discussions, and the readings really has helped me fully understand how each innovation can weave into the systems we have as a society to make our lives more efficient. I also can determine now how the radio, telecommunications, and computational innovations have all affected each other just by looking at the history of how each was created and the impact they have now. As a final look into the impact of the technology focused more on a computational perspective, I posted on my Instagram the question, “What do you normally use a computer for?”. The amount of answers I received was impressive but made sense because we are in a pandemic where many are stuck on their phones and computers at home so the answers were all/either tv, entertainment, youtube, school, or work. This social post has definitely revealed the increase of computation in everyones daily lives and the affects computation has placed on our society especially now due to the impact of the global pandemic. The use of computation is not just increasing due to the pandemic but the reality is the use of computation will continue impacting our world because computational advancements are almost inevitable.
