Below I've included some snippets from my lecture on American Progress from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

Last class we talked about the Idea of Progress. Today I want to to continue with this theme by talking about how Americans in the late 19th century to early 20th century embraced progress as the one of the key ideas of social thinking. In particular, the type of progress that was valorized was technological progress. For instance, in the ...

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The newly emergent capitalist class were especially drawn to the belief that progress is equal to social progress. Why?

Recall that from the 1780s-1890s, the USA and Western Europe experienced dramatic groth in economic individualism and an expansion of an urban-based workforce. The new 19th Century middle and upper class were not rich from owning land but from their control over new technologies. These technologies made available new material goods; their message to the publoc at this time was that these new goods were in fact the definition of progress.

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Again, by the turn of the 20th Centory, technological progress had become an end in itself.

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