Modernity and the Individual

This article discusses the social and psychological consequences of the modern era. It begins by outlining the characteristics that make modernity unique from previous periods of human history. These characteristics include rapid social change, the development of new institutions, new forms of social relations, and new technologies. The article considers the consequences of modernity on the human experience: work, family life, and social life. The article also reviews some of the political changes that have accompanied modernity. Finally, it considers the debate surrounding the transition to the post-modern era.

Keywords Alienation; Artisans; Capitalism; City-State; Critical Theory; Despot; Globalization; Industrialization; Modernity; Moral Relativism; Nation-State; Panopticon; Post-Modern; Service Work; Surveillance; Urbanization

Social Change > Modernity & the Individual

Overview

The term modernity refers to the period of human history ranging roughly from the end of the Middle Ages until the mid to late 20th century. While modernity was a global phenomenon, it is generally considered a European outgrowth. While modernity is often used as a descriptive term to demarcate one period of history from another, it is intriguing to sociologists because of the particular social conditions it gave rise to. Modernity is marked by four primary characteristics that differentiate it from prior periods of social history:

• Modernity incorporates newly rapid and extensive social change.
• It brings with it a new set of social institutions.
• Modernity involves a de-localization of social relations.
• It involves the development of new technologies that allow for increasing standardization and surveillance.

In modernity, change is rapid. This is true for all aspects of social life, but particularly so for technological developments. The scope of change is vastly expanded and change reaches around the entire globe, deeply affecting people's daily lives. This change is in part driven by the rapid expansion of knowledge, including new technological developments, that occurs during modernity. It is also driven by the development of a new, modern ideology. In modernity, for the first time, people became less concerned with tradition and turned their attention toward a new ideology focused on progress and making things "better."

New Social Institutions

Among these changes was the rise of new social institutions. Three of these institutions are particularly important for understanding the consequences of modernity and the differences between modernity and prior periods of human existence. First is industrialization. In pre-modern times, production was primarily undertaken by individuals at home or by artisans in their workshops. During modernity, though, factories and mass production were developed, leading to large-scale changes in the means of production and in the daily lives of individuals. These changes were in part enabled by the development of inanimate power sources such as the steam engine, freeing producers from the need to use human or animal labor to power their machines.

Industrialization was closely related to the second crucial development of modernity: the rise of capitalism. Capitalism altered the relations between different groups in society, replacing relationships governed by servitude and mutual responsibility with relationships governed by individual choice and alienation. It also led to the commodification of goods and services as part of the new money economy, quite a contrast to the practices of barter and exchange that were common in prior periods.

The third new social institution arising with modernity was the nation-state. The nation-state was a new way of organizing government and political life which ended prior periods that were characterized by both empire-building and city-states. However, the rise of the nation-state also brought new forms of military conflict between nations, forms that were not simply border scuffles but rather disastrous large-scale wars. One primary factor enabling the development of this form military conflict was the fact that nation-states were able to monopolize the use violence within their borders by developing professionalized police and military forces.

Social Relations

Alongside the development of these new social institutions, modernity altered the social relations between individuals. In pre-modern society, social relations were embedded in the local context. Most people did not travel much over the course of their lifetimes; almost everyone they new lived in the same village or group of villages and was part of the same social networks. In modernity, people were no longer tied to their places of origin and began moving far from home to distant parts of the nation-state or to former colonies. Additionally, the process of urbanization meant that more people were living in cities than in small villages. These changes led to the growth of social relations that spanned over long distances, relations that are now easy to sustain through the use of the telephone and the Internet but which were once governed by infrequent or non-existent communication through the mail. The new residents of cities also found that their social relations more often consisted of interactions with random strangers rather than with people in their social networks (Simmel, 1950).

These global population movements were facilitated by the development of new transportation technologies. However, these new technologies allowed population movements and industrial production, but also increased standardization and surveillance in social life. First of all, new technologies allowed for the development of precise, standard, and global measures of time and space. For the first time, synchronized clocks enabled the schedule coordination for schools, factories, and trains. In addition, measurements of distance allowed for the standardization of public roads, clothing sizes, building materials, and other commonly used goods and services. Such standardized measures became part of the emerging field of social science, as well. Scholars began to develop systematic knowledge about social life through population statistics and censuses. Surveillance extended into other aspects of life, as well. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, one of the founding scholars in the field of criminology, developed a new form of imprisonment called the panopticon which would allow for greater surveillance and thus, he argued, an improvement in the behavior of prisoners (Foucault, 1995).

Applications

The many changes brought by modernity have affected all areas of social life and led to profound changes in the way that individuals live and experience the world. The basic conditions of human life were changed as modernity brought with it a much greater degree of security for individuals, particularly in terms of freedom from hunger and disease, and increased individual autonomy by providing people with opportunities to travel, relocate, and seek new and different economic opportunities. Not all the changes that came from modernity were beneficial to individuals' lives, however. While modernity increased basic security for individuals, it also increased the risks faced by society. Modernity gave humans a greater capacity to destroy the environment and to engage in technologically-based worldwide warfare, both risks that could affect the life, health, and safety of individuals. Modernity also increased the possibilities for totalitarian rule. While previous eras certainly had their share of despotic rulers, totalitarian governments under modernity were able to use new surveillance technologies to extend their reach and power into new areas of human life. Beyond these changed in the basic conditions of human life, modernity also brought changes in terms of the conditions under which individuals work, build families, and engage in social life.

Modernity & Work

As noted above, the development of modernity led to significant changes in economic and employment relations. In pre-modern times, production occurred within the realm of the family. Even where small shops or businesses existed, they were largely extensions of family and village life. Industrialization brought an end to home and family based employment. After industrialization, people went to work outside of their homes and earned a wage to compensate them for their labor. This new form of economic and employment relations led people to move away from their homes in search of better economic opportunities. However, industrial production methods ultimately led to the de-skilling of much factory labor since, when work was broken down into routine tasks that can be done by anyone, individual employees became interchangeable. This de-skilling has left industrial workers to work under the constant fear that they will be fired and replaced with a different worker. In addition, the global communications and transportation networks that developed in modernity have made it easy for production to be moved to other cities and state and even outsourced to other countries where labor is cheaper. Workers thus work harder and faster to ensure that they will keep their jobs and, according to author Joanne Ciulla, earn the opportunity to work more (2002).

Work in modernity has also been affected by the development of surveillance technologies. Whereas work done at home with the family group, or even piecework done for an outside employer, was largely free from employer surveillance, modern work is carried out under employers' watchful eyes. Workers have to punch time clocks to record when they arrived at work, when they took breaks, and when they leave for the day. Video cameras monitor workplace activities, and in some cases employers go so far as to forbid employees from talking to one another, monitor their telephone conversations, and install software to record their keystrokes. Commentators have been expressing concerns about the consequences of such surveillance for decades (see, for instance, George Orwell's classic fictional portrayal of surveillance society in 1984), and more recent scholarship has found that employees take surveillance for granted as an appropriate part of their work lives (Mason, et. al., 2002).

The constant social change and emphasis on progress that are central to the modern condition have continued to affect the nature of work (Smith, 1997). Technological developments in production as well as global resource flows have reduced the presence of industrial and manufacturing jobs in developed countries, leading to a transition away from the industrial economy. In its place has emerged the service economy, in which services are produced in place of goods. Employment opportunities in the service economy largely consist of low-wage service work in fields like food and healthcare along with professional knowledge work in fields like media and social services. These shifts have dramatically increased the importance of education for obtaining a high-paying job; however, education itself faces changes as well, as providing specific content knowledge is no longer as important as equipping employees with the tools to handle the constant changes of modern work life. Many scholars have argued that these changes have lead to increased economic inequality between low-paid and high-paid service and knowledge workers.

Modernity & Family Life

Before modernity, most individuals lived in extended family groups close to where they were born. But, as in other areas of life, modernity has dramatically reshaped patterns of family life (Mintz, 1988). The primary agent of change in family life has been geographical relocations occasioned by searches for new economic opportunities. Such relocations led to the development of what most Americans now think of as the traditional family: the nuclear family of two married parents and their dependent children. However, the continuing progression of modernity has led to a decline in even this family form, as a minority of Americans live in nuclear-family households today. Instead, families take a variety of forms, such as grandparents raising their grandchildren, single parents with children, same-sex couples with or without children, and even single individuals living in their own households.

Such changes, along with economic pressures that have resulted in the need for more adults in each household to work, have necessitated the placement of more children in forms of care that are outside the home, such as center-based day care and after-school programs. Additionally, the increasing distance between members of an extended family has resulted in a decline in social connections and social support. In modernity, families and individuals that are facing problems often cannot turn to their relatives for economic support, a place to live, or sometimes even a shoulder to cry on. In the place of relatives, we now build our own support networks. This dislocation from traditional means of support has been one of the driving forces behind the establishment of social safety net programs like welfare and housing assistance.

Such programs, however, have experienced cutbacks in recent years. Some of these cutbacks have been in response to changing national and global economic circumstances. Others have been responses to the social and political controversies that surround them. While many scholars see the development of social safety net programs as a response to the social dislocations of modernity, some scholars and political commentators view such programs as the cause of social dislocations and the breakdown of the nuclear family form. This later view is particularly prevalent among conservative think tanks and policy organizations, who urge in response that the government should abandon safety net programs or redesign them to encourage marriage and nuclear family life.

Modernity & Social Life

As suggested in the discussions above, the rise of modernity has lead to significant social dislocations. We no longer live near large numbers of people whom we know. Instead, we experience a world full of strangers, a world that has changed the way we interact with one another. The foundational sociologist Georg Simmel called the type of people acting in this new, modern way "metropolitan men." The idea of the metropolitan man is intricately tied to modernity as a period, as is clear from comparing the characteristics of the two. Modernity generally and the metropolitan man specifically value rational and objective thought over subjective ideas and emotions; both rely on standardized measures of time and distance; and both emphasize the money economy as the root of the new social relations. The metropolitan man, in fact, lives in a world in which all social relationships are mediated by money — a trend which can be observed clearly by considering the lives of young professionals in American cities. Such individuals tend to make friends through their place of work; to primarily interact on a daily basis with coworkers, bosses, employees, cashiers, and others involved in relationships of economic exchange; and to engage primarily in recreational activities with an economic cost, such as going out to dinner or to see a concert.

The defining features of the metropolitan man's existence also include the fact that neighbors (and other individuals) tend to remain strangers to one another. In the traditional village environment, everyone in town — and maybe even everyone in a group of nearby towns — would have known one another. They would have been acquainted with each other's families, histories, and daily lives. Today, residents of an apartment building or even a suburban block can go about their lives without getting to know each other. Not only does this lead to a sense of disconnection from the world, but it also contributes further to the decline in social support discussed above. Yet at the same time, the growth of stranger relationships leads to another change in our social lives: there is a decline in social sanctions for those who do not conform to expectations. In the modern world, people who do not fit in can simply move elsewhere to seek a hospitable social environment or simply the freedom to be themselves. One final aspect of the metropolitan man's existence that contributes to modernity's newfound freedom is what Simmel called the blasé attitude. This is the ability to avoid reacting to even the most outrageous things going on in the world around us. The blasé attitude can be seen as responsible for the development of political apathy, the lack of involvement in volunteer efforts, and even our ability to watch horror movies without flinching. It has certainly led neighbors to care less about each other's lives.

More recently, technological innovations like social networking sites and text messages have led to further changes in social life. For some commentators, such technologies have led to further social dislocation as young people stay at home on the computer instead of going out with their friends or have text messaging conversations instead of talking to the people they are with. But for others, new communication technologies have reduced the costs of modernity's social dislocations. For these commentators, such technologies have allowed us to remain in touch with those we might otherwise have left behind, thereby taking a little bit of the village with us into the world of strangers.

Viewpoints

Modernity & Postmodernity

One of the biggest controversies among scholars of modernity deals with the end of the modern period and the beginning of the period known as postmodernity. For some scholars, modernity ended with World War II and the development of the atomic bomb. For others, modernity ended near the end of the 20th century as new communications technologies, globalization, and the development of service work reshaped economic, political, and social life. For others, the modern period is still continuing, and postmodernity is simply a component of the late modern period. There are no answers to these debates, but a good understanding of the complex notion of postmodernity is essential for people who are seeking to understand modernity and its consequences.

Modernity, as discussed above, is understood as a period of constant change in search of progress; postmodernity is its culmination. In postmodernity, constant change has become taken for granted and constant progress no longer seems possible. While in modernity scholars sought the truth and tried to answer questions about the nature of reality, postmodern scholars no longer believe that objective truth is possible. Rather than being defined by technological and social developments, postmodernity is defined by the fragmentation of social groups, political ideologies, and cultural forms. A few examples will make this clearer. For instance, when the new technology of television became mainstream in the 1950s, most Americans were watching the three main broadcast networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Today, Americans consume media from thousands of different outlets, including hundreds of cable or satellite television channels as well as an ever expanding number of websites. Similarly, instead of identifying with one of the two major political parties, many people have either become disengaged from politics or have developed an affiliation with a particular identity group.

The postmodern period has generated its own controversy. For instance, scholars like Allen Bloom have argued that discussions of postmodernity ignore the continuing relevance of objective truth (Bloom, 1987). Yet the critique of objectivity that postmodernism offers has become essential to scholarly movements such as critical theory. These debates are not particularly relevant to the lives of average individuals; rather they tend to be centered around issues of academic controversy. Postmodernity does, however, have concrete consequences for individual lives. Primary examples are information overload and paralysis by analysis, phenomena that make it hard for individuals to distinguish between all of the hundreds or thousands of options that are available to them at any given time, a difficulty that some scholars believe leads to difficulties in developing connections with others, contemplative thought, and self-knowledge (Edmundson, 2008). Others have argued that the increasing fragmentation of knowledge and activity has led to an inability to concentrate or to engage with written texts and that the lack of belief in objective truth has led to a trend towards moral relativism.

Terms & Concepts

Alienation: The process whereby individuals lose control over and connection with their autonomous selves due to the control exerted by outside, structural forces such as work in an industrial production system.

Artisans: Skilled workers who practice a trade. Examples of artisans would be potters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, or carpenters.

Capitalism: An economic system in which individuals have control over private property and workers sell their labor power on the market in exchange for wages that they use to purchase the things they need to survive.

City-State: A city with an independent government not under the control of any other nation. City-states can incorporate some surrounding villages or rural areas. While most city-states were incorporated into nations during periods of nation-building, Monaco and Singapore stand as modern examples of the city-state form.

Critical Theory: A form of academic writing and thinking in the humanities and social sciences that is rooted in analysis and interpretation. In the social sciences, critical theory is oriented towards a radical critique of society; some humanities scholars who use critical theory are similarly oriented, while others focus their attention on close textual analysis.

Despot: A ruler who has absolute power.

Globalization: The spread of practices, social relations, and social organization worldwide and the development of a shared global consciousness.

Industrialization: Industrialization is the process which transforms a society's economic base from an agricultural one to an industrial one. The main component of industrialization is the development of organized systems of labor and production outside the home to that produce saleable goods for a market economy. Industrialization in developed countries occurred during the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when factory production was invented; industrialization is still occurring in many less-developed countries. However, most developed countries are currently seeing a transition to post-industrial economies in which services rather than goods are produced.

Modernity: Modernity refers to the period of human history ranging roughly from the end of the Middle Ages until the mid to late 20th century. Modernity is marked by four primary characteristics: rapid and extensive social change; a new set of social institutions; a de-localization of social relations; and the development of new technologies that allow for increased standardization and surveillance.

Moral Relativism: The view that statements about morals, ethics, or values do not reflect any universal, essential, or objective truth. Moral relativism usually has the connotation that any particular moral perspective is just as good as any other.

Nation-State: The notion of a nation-state roughly corresponds to what most people think of as a country. However, nation-states must be independent of any control by other political forces such as colonial powers. In addition, the common usage of nation-state assumes some degree of ethnic or other common identity among citizens and that this identity forms the basis of nationalism.

Panopticon: The panopticon is a design for a type of prison, first proposed by Jeremy Bentham, in which prison cells are arranged around the outside of a circle, at the center of which stands an observation tower occupied by guards. In the panopticon, the guards can always see the prisoners, but the prisoners are unable to tell when they are being observed. In modern usage, the term can refer to any structure, institution, or organization in which central surveillance is possible and individuals cannot be sure when they are being observed.

Post-Modern: A term used to describe the characteristics of the historical and cultural period following modernity, particularly skepticism around notions of truth, objectivity, and progress as well as the taking for granted of rapid and constant social change.

Service Work: A type of employment in which workers are engaged in providing services rather than producing consumable goods.

Surveillance: Close observation and monitoring.

Urbanization: The process whereby larger proportions of the population come to live and work in cities and through which cities themselves grow larger.

Bibliography

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Simmel, G. (1950). The metropolis and mental life. In K. Wolff (Ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 409-426). Free Press: New York.

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Suggested Reading

Baumann, Z. (1991). Modernity and ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Boyd, D. M. & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 210-30.

Ertman, T. (1997). Birth of the Leviathan: Building states and regimes in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Heaphy, B. (2007). Late modernity and social change: Reconstructing social and personal life. Oxon, UK: Routledge.

Lee, R. (2013). Modernity, modernities and modernization: Tradition reappraised. Social Science Information, 52, 409-424. doi:10.1177/0539018413482779 Retrieved October 29, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text:http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=89566121&site=ehost-live

McGuigan, J. (1999). Modernity and post-modern culture. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.

Skocpol, T. (1979). States and social revolutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Tilly, C. (1973). Does modernization breed revolution? Comparative Politics, 5, 425-47.

Wernet, C. A., Elman, C., & Pendleton, B. F. (2005). The postmodern individual: Structural determinants of attitudes. Comparative Sociology, 4(3/4), 339-64. Retrieved November 25, 2008 EBSCO online database Academic Search Premier: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=19031347&site=ehost-live