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World of kaneva dead11/5/2022 The radical expansion of the Internet, in a way similar to the mushrooming of the commercial print age and the migration into cities, manifests in people a feeling of just how insignificant they have become in this new landscape. With the benefit of hindsight and an understanding of the anxiety and destabilization that modernity produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is apparent that the Internet age is again seeing a similar type of crisis. He noted that, after 1850, there were far fewer works printed anonymously because, as he posits, "…hat we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life, and the prime cause is not the vanity of our writers, but the craving – I had almost said the terror – of the general man who feels his personality sinking lower and lower into a whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization." It was also in 1926 that Henry Seidel Canby wrote on the death of anonymity. In One Way Street (1925-26), Walter Benjamin noted that the urban dweller had become alienated by the conditions created by modernity. At the turn of the twentieth century, the commercial print age and the rise of industrial cities were the driving forces in the bitterness that dominated that period. Today, academics such as Scott Seider and Howard Gardner have dubbed the generation that was born in the 1980s the “fragmented generation." What is important to realize, however, is that this fragmentation goes beyond the narrow band of individuals born during the Reagan years and refers to a Western world that is dominated by internet-related technology.Ĭuriously enough, one can see parallels between the way the generations are described and even the types of changes that occurred during both periods of time. The advent of the digital age has brought about an identity crisis not seen since the turn of the twentieth century a time which prompted Gertrude Stein to dub the generation of writers during that period the “lost generation." That term, though, is often applied and aptly so to the population-at-large in the West as so many were disillusioned about modernity.
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