The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution
James W. Carey, John J. Quirk · 2016
idea of an electrical utopia, as we attempted to show in first part of this article, took root in Europe with Enlightenment and onset of industrialism. It began as a literary convention adopted as a cultural strategy: an attempt to explore meaning of industrialization and promise of technology for what Raymond Williams has come to call The Long Transferred to this continent, idea of an electrical Utopia emerges as a literal expectation as well as literature. European ideas had made us particularly susceptible to notion that creation of America signaled a new departure in social history. America's redemption from past was to come from Nature and a Virgin Land, a new scene of human society filled with unique possibilities. Developed into a political and social theory under labels such as the theory of propitious circumstances, rhetoric of technological sublime forecast that mechanization and industrialization would not produce untoward consequences apparent in European version of Industrial Revolution. Instead America was to realize, through a marriage of nature and mechanics, an unprecedented solution to problem of industrialization, a solution that would rejuvenate all immigrants who ventured into new world and allow us to transcend typical evils of industrial society. In last third of nineteenth century, it became steadily