Characteristics of Modernity:

Modernization is usually taken to denote the complex constellation of socioeconomic phenomena which originated themselves in the context of Western development but which have since manifested themselves around the globe in various forms: scientific and technological innovation, the industrialization of production, rapid urbanization, and ever expanding capitalist market, the development of the nation state, and so on.

Modern society can be said to consist of:

1. A comparatively high degree of urbanization and the increasingly urban-centeredness of the total society.

2. A relatively high degree of use of inanimate energy, the widespread circulation of commodities, and the growth of service facilities.

3. Extensive spatial interraction of members of society and the widespread participation of such members in economic and political affairs.

4. Widespread literacy accompanied by the spread of secular, and increasingly scientific orientation of the educational system and the individual.

5. An extensive and penetrative network of mass communication.

6. The existence of large-scale social institutions such as government, business, industry, and the increasingly bureaucratic organization of such institutions (i.e., rationalized and routinized).

7. Increased unification and integration of large bodies of population under one control (nations) and the growing interaction of such units (international relations).

Putting it simply, the "modern" is defined as urban, literate, scientific, industrialzed, organized, bureaucratic, integrated and founded upon a modern education system that features a scientific view of the universe, and sustained by a mass communication system which allows for the development of a mass consumer society.

Tokugawa Japan was by all accounts going through much of which is known as the "Early Modern" period in Europe. See the following:

"Early Modern" is to describe the condition of Western History either since the mid-1400's, or roughly the European discovery of moveable type and the printing press, or the early 1600's, the period associated with the rise of the Enlightenment project. These periods can be characterized by:

In addition, the 19th century can be said to add the following facets to modernity:

Consider also the following:

The conception of the naked self, beyond institutions and roles, as the ens realissimum [the most real being, or the human being at its essence] of human being, is the very heart of modernity.

Peter Berger, quoted in David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity. University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Peter Berger is a very well-respected sociologist who writes on the process of becoming modern. His remark above seems to be all about the individual self, often thought to be a modern construct. Many others woulod be hard-pressed to think of the individual EVER being beyond the reach of institutions and rules which shape us and construct our very being from our earliest years. What do you think?

More ideas on becoming modern:

The adjective 'modern' designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. When the word 'modern', 'modernization', or 'modernity' appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. ..


Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1994.

Many writers think about how the speed and scale of life change as a society become more modern. All of a sudden there are lights--gas or electric--in the cities, trains, trams and automibiles. Noise, spectacle, ruptures, breaks with the past in the form of new fashions, new behaviors--sometimes shocking by the old mores and standards. New social types emerge along with new occuopations--office workers, telephone operators, mail carriers, bureaucrats, police officers, military, waiters and waitresses, hotel staff people, shop clerks, elevator girls...you name it. In the cities were found new kinds of leisure opportunities: cafes, dance halls with new music forms, especially jazz, professional sports like baseball, movie theaters, cinema as a new art form, radio, commerials, advertisements--all these familiar trappings of modern life that surround us today.

 

OR, a classic definition from Stuart Hall:

What we mean by "modern" is that each process led to the emergence of certain distinctive features or social characteristics, and it is these features which, taken together, provide us with our definition of "modernity."

1. The dominance of secular forms of political power and authority and conceptions of sovereignty and legitimacy, operating within defined territorial boundaries, which are characteristic of the large, complex structures of the modern nation-state.
2. A monetarized exchange economy, based on the large-scale production and consumption of commodities for the market, extensive ownership of private property and the accumulation of capital on a systematic, long-term basis. (The economies of Eastern Europe communist states were an exception to some of these features, though they were based on the large-scale industrial production and consumption of goods.
3. The decline of the traditional social order, with its fixed social hierarchies and overlapping allegiances, and the appearance of a dynamic social and sexual division of labor. In modern capitalist societies, this was characterized by new class formations, and distinctive patriarchal relations between men and women.
4. The decline of the religious world-view typical of traditional societies and the rise of secular and materialistic culture, exhibiting those individualistic, rationalist, and instrumental impulses now so familiar to us.
There are two other aspects of our definition of modernity which should be loosely included under the rubric of "the cultural."

a)The first refers to ways of producing and classifying knowledge. The emergence of modern societies was marked by the birth of a new intellectual and cognitive world, which gradually emerged with the Reformation, the Renaissance, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. This shift in Europe's intellectual and moral universe was dramatic, and as constitutive for the formation of modern societies as early capitalism or the rise of the nation-state.

b)Second, "Formations of Modernity" follows modern social analysis in the emphasis it gives to the construction of cultural and social identities as part of the formation process. By this we mean the construction of a sense of belonging which draws people together into an "imagined community" and the construction of symbolic boundaries which define who does not belong or is excluded from it. For many centuries, being "Christian" or "Catholic" was the only common identity shared by the peoples of Western Europe. "European" was an identity which only slowly emerged. So the formation of modern societies in Europe had to include the construction of the language, the images, and symbols which defined these societies as "communities" and set them apart, in their represented differences, from others.

Stuart Hall, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Blackwell, 1996

And an online dictionary definition of "modern" is:

Modern describes the characteristics of modern societies that have capitalistic economies and democratic political structures, and are highly industrialized and divided into social classes based on economic status. These characteristics include regular pattern of everyday life, urbanization, influx of women at all levels of employment and business, secular outlook, sexual freedom, sharp reduction in birth rate and death rate, centralized bureaucratic government, standardized education system, and pervasive use of technology specially in communications.(http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/modernity.html)