Over the past 300 years or so, humans have undergone a drastic skyrocketing in technology, information, affluence, standard of living, science, etc. Far more than all previous millennia combined. (Whereas someone even just five hundred years ago didn’t live a lifestyle all that different from someone five thousand years ago.)
Is there a specific sociological term or name for this period of history, or this ongoing trend? Not quite Industrial Revolution, since it’s much more than that.
“Future shock” refers to that and our psychological reaction to it.
But it is one aspect of it. More of a Technological Revolution.
The first part of that period is covered by the age of enlightenment and the industrial revolution and the rest is perhaps “post-Napoleonic” but that doesn’t really capture the accelerating pace of improvements as noted by the OP.
The technological revolution and information revolution are both contained within that longer period but perhaps we can come up with a more all-encompassing term for it.
“the great leap forward” would have been a good choice but that term has a somewhat murky reputation. Not sure it can be redeemed.
The word is “history”.
The same word is used for the huge advancement in the 300 years before that, and before that, and so on all the way back to the invention of language. And the same word will be used for the era of huge advancement to follow this one, that will make this one look completely insignificant.
Not quite what you’re asking for but some definitions of the proposed Anthropocene period coincide nicely with your time period, and its the part of the overall period where changes at global and regional landscape levels are most manifest.
Archaeologists - who like to create names for periods of time - have struggled with a name for this. We use terms like ‘post-medieval’, ‘industrial’ and ‘historical archaeological’ in specific ways, none of which really fits comfortably with the popular way these terms are interpreted. Even so, we recognise that this change is a real thing, and its key characteristics are the increasing intensification and integration of the global economy. We’d date it from around the end 15th century - European explorers leading to conquest and economic control of distant parts of the globe, and everything that unfolded from that.
That’s pretty optimistic. Another possibility is that civilization doesn’t complete the leap to sustainable energy and resource management. In that case, we run out of accessible resources in a couple of centuries, and what’s left of civilization descends to just above a subsistence level and loses the ability to produce advanced technologies. They can mine landfills for some materials, like aluminum, but others such as lithium or cobalt are too dilute or require too much reprocessing. Humanity finds it impossible to reach beyond a certain technological height because the naturally sustainable energy sources (like wood) aren’t enough to sustain a technological civilization. They stay that way essentially forever because there is no longer a cache of accessible petroleum to bootstrap it back to a high level.
I don’t think that’s a likely outcome, but I can’t rule it out, either.
I disagree with this statement, which seems to assume that all technological advancements are linear through history and there were the same levels of tech advancements in any 300 year period.
When my grandmother was a child, their home was lit by candles and lamps. They had to haul in wood and coal and then keep burning it in stoves to stay alive in winter. If they wanted to speak to a neighbour, they had to hitch up the horse and buggy and drive to the neighbouring farm. If they wanted to know what was happening in current events, they had to drive the buggy into town and get a newspaper, which might have the most recent news of what had happened in the country and the world a couple of weeks ago. If they wanted to communicate with relatives in the old country, they had to write a letter and post it. Immigration was a one way trip, because of the cost of travel - her parents never saw their old home and family again.
By the time of her death, if she wanted light, she flipped a switch. Her house kept warm automatically - no labour required. If she wanted to speak to a friend or relative next door, or across town, or in another town, or province, or country, she just had to pick up the phone. If she wanted to know what was happening in the country or the world, she watched the news on tv in the evening and there it was, stuff happening in the province, the country, the world, THAT DAY. If she wanted to visit relatives in other provinces or across the ocean, she bought a ticket at a pretty affordable price, and FLEW there.
I can’t think of any other hundred year period that had such a technological advance in one person’s lifetime.
No, the whole point is that it’s not linear. It’s exponential. Yes, you can look at the past n years and say that the amount of advancement in that amount of time is greater than all of history before that (the value of n can certainly be debated, but it’s fairly low). But that doesn’t mean that this time is special, because the same statement could have been made at any point in history. A graph of any exponential phenomenon, scaled to fit comfortably on a page, will look the same no matter what part of the curve you look at, with almost no change on the left, and a sudden growth on the right.
Yeah. My own maternal grandmother was born before the Wright brothers flew, and lived long past the Apollo landings and into the space shuttle era.
My favourite similar factoid is that Orville Wright lived long enough to see an airplane fly with a cargo hold longer than his initial flight.
I was going to post the same thought. That book was before its time because, in the intervening years, a strong social case has been made for its premise.
That’s flippin’ amazing.
He also lived long enough to see a military jet fighter. And I can’t Google the damn picture.
dammit.