The riders of these straight speeding bullets see nothing but a disorienting sight of the landscape shooting past to quickly for them to focus on. Nothing gets in their way, not river mountain or canyon. Since the ideal railway is hard, level and straight, they were not laid out sympathetically to the landscape but instead cut and carve their way through in a straight line. The detachment of man from nature and his perception of nature is finalized in the construction of the railways. To the perception of the people who had previously experienced every step of their journeys the world seemed to have shrunk. The railroad has annihilated the space and time, which were characterized by the old transport technology. Where in the olden days people experienced every step of the way with their senses now all they have to do is step on a train and step out onto a different place. Yet, by replacing the age-old use of the horse and carriage and through sheer speed they have made the world smaller and more accessible to the people. These engines do not succumb to the whims of weather or exhaustion and are reliable enough to keep and daily regulated schedule despite wind or rain. With fast and reliable steam power engines replacing previously expensive and unreliable natural sources of energy such as water or animal man is released from the constraints of nature. Shrinking and reshaping the world it touches with industrial fingers and alienating the riders to the world around them. Although the means of a quick and reliable mode of transport was and is an important part of industrialization, it denaturalized and desensualized the passengers. ![]() Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization.The thesis for seems to be that the railroad altered the traveler’s perceptions of space, time, distance, nature and the senses. Belonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. ![]() ![]() As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city. In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. But this was not always the case as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to technological change-the development of our modern, industrialized consciousness-was very much a learned behavior. The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society.
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