Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Huma ...

Instrumentalized modes of information and communication have been modifying how knowledge is exchanged and valued. However, the presence of instrumentalized modes of discourse and their effects on language are not new concepts. Yet, they have been erroneously historicized as by-products of modernization rather than as perpetual effects of industrialization during the early and middle Victorian era. The encroachment of technology into the Victorian public sphere transformed how people communicated in the mid-nineteenth century, a transformation realized by the diminution of critical speech. The displacement of subjectively informed communicative actions within objectively framed, technically oriented systems of reasoning inculcated apathy by demonizing critical speech.

I do not wish to imply that technology has not advanced human interests, for it has done so without hesitation. Nor do I wish to argue that technology may not again be called in service of such interests. However, I do hope to explain how and why technical progress has been obfuscating social concerns in order to assure the direct dissemination and implementation of technical-value rational imperatives throughout society. I do not intend to argue that technological achievements and human history maintained parallel courses that became divergent, for the error of such a conclusion would not require further evidence. Rather, I wish to suggest that human agency has assumed a tertiary status to technical processes and human history has abridged its narrative to suit the demands of technical progress. Rather than diverging from human history, technology has been subsuming it, and this process of subsumption was initiated during the Industrial Revolution and has continued to the present day.

In postmodern society, technologies of sign systems have been affecting conceptions of the self through the regulation of discourses of production and consumption. Technologies of sign