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What got me thinking about this - it strikes me that we are currently living in the Digital Age, which started with the rise of Microcomputers and Video Games in the 1970’s; that further, the eight decades of so preceding this era could be considered the Age of Mass Culture, which began with the rise of movies, radio, and mass journalism (yellow and muckraking) in the later 1890’s. These weren’t just, as I see them, periods defined by media technology systems, but by the very question of what mechanisms dominate in creating social consciousness; and, to at least some extent, the paradigms by which the people who lived in them took on the question of what it means to be human. And that, to take this a step further, we could think of most of the 19th Century as the Age of Industrial Society, where institutions like the factory, public schools, and the post office, would act as the stage for creating social consciousness, in the same way that “the media”, and later “the internet”, would in the century to follow.

Or that’s my hypothesis anyway. What particularly got me going on this point though, is that at least two of these seemingly technology and economic driven trends were preceded by very noticeable social movements; according to a fair amount of scholarship, this is not an accident. There is some notable academic literature drawing a connection between the Counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s and the birth of Digital Culture; likewise, there’s a fair amount of historical analysis that sees a connection between the Romanticism and Utopianism of the Napoleonic Era, and the early pioneers of the factory system in the 1820’s and 30’s.

And recalling this, it couldn’t escape my notice that both Romanticism and the Counterculture (be it the New Left, the New Communalists, or the Third Wave Feminists) were rebellions against the dominance of the Enlightenment and Mass Culture respectively - that is, not merely against the dominant ideologies of the time (the question of “What is normal?”) but against the very paradigms in which the various ideologies of the day did battle (“How do we determine what normal is, and who gets to decide?”).

So with all this said, here’s what I’m getting at - first, do you think I have something here? Second, and if so - if the first and third “eras” mentioned were both preceded by cultural movements which laid the groundwork, what about the second? Could it be said that there was, circa the 1880’s, a social rebellion against the dominant paradigms of the “Industrial Society”, in the same way there was a rebellion against the paradigms of “Mass Culture” in the 1960’s - an earlier “Counterculture”, if you will?

I can offer my own thoughts later on how I can see this working; but first, what do you guys think?
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