Kind of long period time of silence between 'printing press' and '19 century' was bothered by 'industrialization'. The scale and speed of development seem to have experienced big step of upgrades by industrial revolution.
The power of technology started to affect our daily lives as Beniger took an example of 'Henry Crowell's creating concept of 'breakfast'. This example helped me understand easily the concept of 'Control of Revolution'.
Beniger said that before this guy, Henry Crowell, there was not exact concept of 'Breakfast'. Just people ate some food when they feel hungry after getting up in the morning. But, Crowell had a mill and could make mass production of 'oatmeal' and could use 'railroad' to distribute his product to the people. Also, he could use the method of 'advertising' or 'getting feedback' by controling consumption.
How perfectly he used all the power of controlling 'production, distribution, and consumption' with the help of industrialization! I can tell he is so lucky and smart, which seem two prerequisite factors for a success even today. Really I have to agree with this because our family start a day with creal as our breakfast.
What caught my attention was that Beniger's use of word, 'crisis' about the control. So I've thought about when we use the word, 'crisis'. I think we use the word, crisis, especially when we didn't expect the situation and even after we face it, when we have a hard time controlling them.
The speed and scale of controlling power of production, distribution, and consumption became so huge beyond the level of individuals and seems to have brought another identity which seems to have own life from birth, growing up, even to death with another generation. That is 'information'!
Like the movie, 'Transformer', wearing a huge body of robot, industrialization, the information became the huge real entity in the society which everybody has to admit the existence of it. But, personally what I believe is that we, human beings, can be stronger and control them because we do have our emotions.
Expecting more connection to the effect of our communication and existence as human beings..
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I like the oatmeal example, too. It seems to me that we have reached a whole new stage in the control revolution when it comes to the consumption feedback loop. The way advertisers can target us online and come up with new ways to try to track how effective that advertising is is really kind of frightening.
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