Marshall Berman – Introduction in All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity.

To be modern is to live with contradictions. What are they in how we experience space and time? Consider the change in how we experience the world when we adopt different production, communication, and transportation technologies.


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There are many contradictions in the way we experience space and time in modernity. Technologies of communication and transportation enable quick or instant communication and seem to shrink space, because we can talk to people on the other side of the world, or visit them in a few hours on an aeroplane. But at the same time we can feel like the world is a bigger place, because we have access to more communication and information about more of the world than people used to.

The pace of life has sped up even though many technologies are supposed to make our lives easier and free us up. When we embrace technologies of communication and transportation, we have access to a large range of cultures that we can go visit easily, or view news of on TV, and import and export goods more quickly and cheaply. These technologies provide access to so many different cultures, yet there is a contradiction because while there seems to be easy access to do many different cultures, there is also a homogenisation of cultures, that all places in the world become more culturally similar by the technologies of communication and transport.