The book largely ignores the misery and slowness of prerailway travel and tends to idealize the pastoral nature of everyday life in preindustrial times. The greater speeds, dangers, and impersonal qual ity of travel had a profound effect on the traveling public-much of it negative, according to Schivelbusch’s interpretation of the data. The author is more convincing when he stays with the main themes of the book, and chapters 3 through 9 represent something of a pioneering attempt to explain the physiological and psychological ef fects of rail travel on passengers accustomed to life in the pre industrial age. He supports the claims of Winans as inventor of the eight-wheel railroad car and Whitney as the developer of inter changeable parts, despite long-standing criticism of these canards. Nor is it really a history of technology, for whenever the author attempts to discuss such matters, he reveals a poor under standing of the subject. It is not intended to be a history of travel. This book is about the social/psychological impact of' railway travel in Western Europe ancl North America. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 515 The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century. As in real life, the most connected points of the basket are the strongest.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: As time progresses, even these loosely connected fibers begin to weave themselves together, finishing the basket at some point in the future when almost evereything is connected. Envision a conical basket whose weave is becoming tighter at one end while the other end remains loose and unconnected, fibers sticking out of the unfinished side of the basket. There become a range of those who are connecting more tightly together and a series of those who remain loosely connected in the analog space. Each reported moment becomes social capital, increasing the amount of embeddedness that networks and nodes have with each other.Īs node distance decreases, communication becomes more liquid, and digital geography between two people, thoughts, ideas, or groups becomes more instantly traversed. In the end, all text becomes linkable, all history becomes linkable to the future, every moment capable of being saved, reported, commented on and played back in slow or fast motion. People begin to become hyperlinks, text begins to become social objects, developing personality and having social value. In the same way that a cell phone opens up a wormhole between two users for a limited amount of time, social networks open up wormholes to each other through text, creating invisible, 4th dimensional wormholes from person to object to person to object through text. But with a computer or iPhone, the travel time between those different geographies is almost instantaneous. Each space has different social classes and entrance requirements. Each space has different social norms and different ways of presenting oneself. Each digital geography has a different set if natives, some imports, and some immigrants. Facebook, Twitter, SMS, Voicemail, websites, news, incoming calls, notes to my future self, apps, ect. My iPhone collapses multiple social geographies into one. This 'fractal time' annihilates geography, allowing the punctuation of one space with another space, one piece of time with another. Geography can be rapidly switched with the touch of a button. While you sit in your apartment, you are experiencing your local time and space but also the digital time and space.īy opening up the terminal or browser window, you can experience an entirely different time and space. Time has compressed itself so far that we now have time within time, and space within space. As technosocial humans we are no longer living in one place at one time. The compression and experience of space and time are becoming increasingly important. Henry Shivelbusch wrote The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space, which concerned the altered perception of time and space at the dawn of the train industry. The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch Summary
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