Looking back to what he called the “First Machine Age” of the early twentieth century, the architectural critic Reyner Banham, writing in 1960, noted how his own age had been given numerous epithets: the Atomic Age, the Jet Age, the Detergent Decade – to which might be added the Age of Conformity, of Affluence, of Television, and of Advertising. The 1950s also saw, Banham wrote, a Second Industrial Revolution, one of “domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry”, characterized by the way in which technology revolutionized the “small things” of everyday life. Television was the “symbolic machine” of the age, part of a revolution in technology that changed the way people acted and thought, breeding new forms of subjective experience.
