Technology in American History.

In today’s world a normal day at home would be as follows: Get up, take a shower, make breakfast, wash the clothes, vacuum the carpet, mow the lawn, drive to the grocery, make dinner, wash the dishes, and go to bed.  Whereas in the past most of this would have been impossible or unneeded.  A shower would be very difficult because there was no running water in houses.  Taking a shower or a bath was something that was done infrequently and when it was done the whole family would take one at the same time, because it was a great deal of work to carry all the water into the house and heat it up.  Washing clothes was something that was done maybe once a month because of the all work that was involved in keeping them clean.  Vacuuming the carpet would be impossible because there was no vacuum cleaner; moreover there was no wall to wall carpet to keep clean on a daily basis.  Mowing the lawn would also be unnecessary because a beautiful, green, fertilized lawn that must be kept in good order was not an issue.  A drive to the grocery store, wow, where to begin with what is wrong with that concept?  First of all, there would have been no car to spend hours on end in traffic each week going from store to store.  Even after the food from the grocery was purchased, there was no place to store it since refrigerators had yet to be invented.  Most importantly, there was no canned food, TV dinners, or other pre-made storable food available.  This is just a short list of the things that have changed over the years in a normal house worker’s life.

It is obvious to see that no matter how much easier one of these tasks became, another one or two would show up to fill the free time which had been created.  For every step forward there was one step back.  Ruth Schwartz Cowan saw this occurrence as well and states, “We try to obtain the tools that will do the jobs that we want done; but, once obtained, the tools organize our work for us in ways that we may not have anticipated.  People use tools to do work, but tools also define and constrain the ways in which it is possible and likely that people will behave.”

The house is not the only place where technology has impacted human lives and progress; it is also evident in the community in which houses reside.  The most influential of these technological advances is the automobile.  This doesn’t mean that the automobile by itself is the most influential.  The technology that came along with the car, like roads and highways, was just as important.  The automobile has brought cities to the brink of extinction, brought the United States of America to its knees because of the reliance on foreign oil, and helped destroy communities.  Once highways were built, people could commute to work which meant it was possible to move away from the city and out into the suburbs.  In these suburbs it was no longer commonplace to see your neighbor walking by to go to the store or to go to work.  It was now more common to see them driving by in their car with all the windows up to close off the outside world.  The sense of a community was now gone in this fast paced world.

This universal sense of the un-community can be seen, for one, in the way the designs of houses have “progressed.”  Back in the days of old, houses were designed for outside use, and outside involvement.  There were large front yards for playing, large porches for sitting and talking to the neighbors, and walkways up to the house.  Since the automobile has become an integral part of daily living, the habits for interacting in a community have changed.  Today houses have small to no front porch, large rooms meant, not for living, but for storing automobiles, and large back yards for playing away from the dangerous, busy streets where the automobile resides.  Interaction with others is no longer commonplace but unusual.  The only time neighbors see each other is when they are pulling their cars into the garage and before the garage door closes, keeping the seclusion even more prominent.    

It can be argued the things which have been described in this essay are a perfect example of progress.  What was once impossible is now possible. What was once hard is now easy, but is it really?  While technology of the past has changed life, it has not progressed it.  For every step forward there is one step back.  A step forward in saving time, a step backward in tasks to be done.  A step forward in transportation, a step backward in social interaction.  Technology and progress are forever caught dancing an unbreakable two-step danced to the “overture of bulldozers and gunfire.”  While the dance of the ages continues to the overture of technology and progress, humankind is stuck in the middle waiting for one of them to lead.