Abstract This paper explores the impact that the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution had on society. The paper considers not only how the Industrial Revolution affected the amount of work people do and the amount of goods produced, but also the type of goods produced and how the machine age virtually eliminated the uniqueness and aesthetic qualities of the products. The paper looks at how the Industrial Revolution eventually led to the Arts and Crafts Movement, modernism, rationalism, and other aesthetic philosophies. The paper then examines the impact that the information revolution has had on society. How the information revolution affected democracy, power, the concentration of wealth, production, and new postmodernist philosophies is discussed as well.
From the Paper "It is difficult for anyone now alive to appreciate the radical changes that the Industrial Revolution brought to humanity. We imagine that we know what it was like before this shift in economics, in culture, in society: We think of farmers tilling fields and of their children piling hay into stacks for winter forage, or of trappers setting their snares for the soft-pelted animals of the forests, or of fishers casting their hand-woven and hand-knotted nets into the seas from the hand-sewn decks of ships. We imagine the hard physical work that nearly every person in society once had to do in the era before machines substituted their labor for ours ? and this exchange of human (and animal) labor for machine-driven labor is indeed one of the key elements of the Industrial Revolution."
Abstract This paper examines one of Norman Rockwell's paintings, entitled "Missed!", which depicts young boys playing golf and missing a putt, as a way of demonstrating both the artisanship that defines Rockwell's work as well as the way in which his images help to create a sort of cultural map of many of the significant events and beliefs of American life in the 20th century.
From the Paper "Norman Rockwell's work has for years been dismissed by art critics and cognoscenti as being egregiously overly sentimental as well as lacking in all of the nuance and ambiguity that are defining elements of high art in the post-Renaissance West. However, while there is certainly some merit in the former charge, a close examination of Rockwell's work reveals not only a high level of artisanship, something that even his critics admit to being present in his work but also the kind of..."
