The Jet Age

In the nineteenth century, history accelerated, according to Marx. History did not just get longer, it got faster. Marc Bloch also noted the changing pace-to-distance ratio that inaugurated the twentieth century: ‘Successive technological revolutions have immeasurably widened the psychological gap between generations [...]. The man of the age of electricity and of the airplane feels himself far removed from his ancestors’, he wrote. Building on these insights and my prior research in Jet Age Aesthetic (2020) that identified how informational and communicative images generated new forms of temporal awareness in mass societies, this paper asks about naming an age after a mode of transport.

In Metahistory, Hayden White identified the importance of emplotment in creating modern historical consciousness. I consider transport as a form of media and interrogate the physical circulation of images in order to offer a model of ‘emplacement’ as a key vector in the rise of a geography of time, a fundamental element of the process we otherwise define as globalization. Technologically reproduced images were vital components of media devoted to the efficiency and speed that compressed time and space. Such images also disseminated Western economic, political, and social visions on a global scale. By telescoping time, images also transformed what was once a serial sense of time into a spatially defined global consciousness. We now speak of an era such as the ‘Anthropocene’ and have a conception of the ‘moment’ of climate change as a global experience and imperative. Through the mass-produced and disseminated imagery of the jet age, people no longer simply traveled ‘back’ in time. They now traveled across space, and in the process, created the new experiences of time and pastness with which we contend today.