{"id":3524,"date":"2019-11-19T12:54:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-19T16:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=3524"},"modified":"2022-03-11T14:16:08","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T18:16:08","slug":"social-impact-of-industrial-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/social-impact-of-industrial-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Major Social Impacts of the Industrial Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What were the social impacts of the Industrial Revolution<\/a>? What effects of the Industrial Revolution remain in our society today?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll cover the Industrial Revolution and its consequences: artificial time, the rise of the state and market, and relative peace. We’ll also look at how the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the idea of individualism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Industrial Revolution caused many upheavals to society, including urbanization, the rise in power of the common person, the decline of patriarchy, and democratization. But the two biggest upheavals to society were artificial time and the replacement of family and community with state and market.
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Social Effect #1: Artificial Time<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One social impact of the Industrial Revolution was the industrialization of time, our turn away from natural time to mechanized time.
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Agricultural v. Industrial Time<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Most societies in history couldn\u2019t make accurate measurements of time, and it didn\u2019t really matter. Time was dictated by the day and the seasons. This was \u201cagricultural time.\u201d The sun told you when to wake up and go to work and when to go home and go to sleep, and it also told you when to harvest your crops and when to plant new ones. You didn\u2019t need a more accurate measure of time than where the sun was in the sky. 
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But with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, precise time started to matter. Let\u2019s see why: if you\u2019re a shoemaker in medieval times, you make every part of the shoe, from the sole to the buckle. If another shoemaker shows up late for work, it doesn\u2019t affect you. But if you work in a factory that makes shoes today, and your job is to work the machine that makes the sole, others depend on you to do your role promptly. If you\u2019re late for work, and the soles don\u2019t get made, it holds up the process for everyone else.
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Businesses needed a way to keep everyone on the same schedule<\/strong>, so they mandated that every worker come to work at the same time (regardless of where the sun was in the sky), eat lunch at the same time (regardless of whether they were hungry), and leave at the same time (regardless of whether they\u2019d finished their project). This was a major social effect of the Industrial Revolution
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Timetables Take Over<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

These schedules became the model for almost everything we do in our day-to-day lives, even those things that don\u2019t involve coordinating with other workers. This is the social impact of the Industrial Revolution today.
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The railway system played a large part in popularizing the use of timetables.<\/strong> In Britain in 1784, each city had its own local time, dependent on the rise and setting of the sun. Before easy transportation and communication between cities, it didn\u2019t matter that each city ran on its own time. But the development of faster trains in 1830 meant people could get to other cities more easily, and the time discrepancies became an inconvenience. The train companies started making schedules according to Greenwich Observatory time rather than local times. This prompted the first establishment of a national time, in 1880, and Brits had to start living according to an artificial clock rather than the natural time dictated by the position of the sun in the sky.
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Today, we do everything according to artificial time, and it\u2019s hard to not<\/em> know what the time is: it\u2019s on your watch, your phone, your laptop, TV, and the microwave.
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Social Effect #2: Replacement of Family and Community with State and Market<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Another social impact of the Industrial Revolution was the rise of the state and market. Traditionally, you lived your life in the bubbles of three levels of intimate groupings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n