Modernity

Question 1

What experiences of space and time characterize modernity?

Answer 1

• Progress, development, universality

- Destruction, confusion, fragmentation

Question 2

Issue with modernity as a historical era?

Answer 2

Real difficulty of neat periodisation or distinctions between modernity and post-modernity.

Question 3

How is modernity a social transformation?

Answer 3

Major social and material changes:
- The emergence of the modern state
- Industrial capitalism
- New forms of science and technology
- Time-space compression 
…and the growing consciousness of the novelty of these changes

Question 4

What is a Marxist conception of modernity?

Answer 4

Modernity reproduces inequality and squalor. The solidarity of social/cultural life appears to evaporate before it can be made sense of.
Harvey argues “Modernity is always about ‘creative destruction’, be it of the gentle and democratic, or the revolutionary, traumatic, and authoritarian kind”.

Question 5

Key elements of modernity?

Answer 5

Modernity is variable across space and time.
It is multiple.
Modernity creates new structures of feeling - in which movement is central.
Space/time becomes more ‘elastic’.

Question 6

What is the relevance of moving images to modernity?

Answer 6

Integral to the experiential space-times of modernities
Part of the kinetic quality of modernities
Shape the ‘realities’ of modernities

Question 7

How have geographers engaged with moving images?

Answer 7

Geographers have engaged with moving images

• As representations/cultural texts
• As expressions of underlying political and economic conditions
• As technologies of experience that shape our sense of space and time

Question 8

What do moving images do?

Answer 8

Moving images are not a representation of reality but a re-engineering of it.
Film multiplied time and space: it involved more than the unfolding of action in single shot.
Cinema invents spacetimes of experience.
Moving images capture the spatiotemporal confusion of modernity and the way technologies change our experience of life.