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Modern Life
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What is Modern Life?

Modern life as an academic topic invites students to examine the conditions, pressures, and transformations that define contemporary human experience. It appears across a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, art history, cultural studies, philosophy, and communications. The topic holds academic interest because it sits at the intersection of the personal and the structural, asking how present-day social arrangements, technologies, and cultural forms shape the way people think, feel, and relate to one another. Questions about what it means to live in the current moment — and how that moment differs from the past — give the topic both analytical depth and immediate relevance.

Student papers on this topic take several distinct approaches. Some focus on visual culture and art history, analyzing how modern life is represented through artistic works and movements. Others examine technological change, particularly the evolution of communication technology, as a lens for understanding shifting social realities. Additional essays approach the topic through a sociological or philosophical frame, asking whether individuals are fundamentally shaped by the societies they inhabit. Some papers apply a case-study method, drawing lessons from specific events, while others take a comparative or critical-response form that weighs competing perspectives against one another.

A strong essay on modern life requires a focused, arguable thesis rather than a broad survey of everything contemporary. Evidence drawn from specific examples — a defined technology, a cultural artifact, a documented social trend — carries more weight than generalized claims about how people live. The most common pitfall is treating "modern life" as self-evident; a successful essay defines exactly which aspects of present reality it addresses and explains why those aspects matter analytically.

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Paper Doctorate
The Early Years Learning Framework and literacy-rich environments for kindergarten pupils
This assignment is based on the Early Years Learning Framework which describes a literacy rich learning environment for kindergarten to preprimary year pupils that draws on Boori Monty Pryor and Jan Ormerod's children's book, Shake a Leg. The paper presents a description of the learning environment, followed by a discussion concerning how the learning experience engages young learners to draw on their previous knowledge to enhance their comprehension and formulate new areas of inquiry and investigation. A summary of the research and important findings concerning the Early Years Learning Framework are provided in the conclusion.
Paper Undergraduate
The Industrial Revolution's transformation of technology, society, and culture
This document examines several different facets of the significance attributed to the Industrial Revolution. While viewing this important historical epoch through cultural, economic, and architectural lenses, it becomes obvious that this time period was instrumental in paving the way for modern life. Numerous sources and documents prove the veracity of this statement.
Research Paper Doctorate
Fatalism in Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native"
Fatalism of Thomas Hardy as Shown in His Novel Return of the Native
Research Paper Undergraduate
Sammy Glick as the archetype of modern ambition and moral decline
Hollywood and the Creation of the Archetype: The Modern Individual, Sammy Glick, and Dawn Steel
Research Paper Undergraduate
Earthquake early warning systems and disaster mitigation
As a resident of California, few things have the ability to terrify me as the thought of a major Pacific coast earthquake. Earthquakes are terrifying for a variety of reasons. First, they are sudden and occur without…
Essay Doctorate
Subway's labor costs and the law of diminishing returns
This paper deals with a variety of issues related to the demand and supply of labor, including industry-specific factors that affect demand; fixed versus variable costs; the law of diminishing returns regarding labor, and other macro and microeconomic factors that affect supply and demand. It uses the Subway organization as an example.
Research Paper Doctorate
Tolkien and Wagner's use of Nordic mythology in creating modern epics
Return of the Rings: Nordic Mythology co-created the epics of Tolkien and Wagner
Paper Doctorate
Henry Adams's view of technology as alienation and historical rupture
¶ … technological observations of Henry Adams: how they affected his life and his view of life in the United States and Europe
Essay Doctorate
Beauty in Miller's Death of a Salesman and Eliot's poetry
This paper examines the theme of beauty in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and in T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The two authors examine the lack of beauty in characters of the modern world, and show how they suffer as a result of not having found or possessed anything truly beautiful or good in their lives.
Paper Undergraduate
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and modern information technology
Neil Postman, in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" discusses how television has altered the medium by which information is transmitted, and the new nature of the medium forces the information being transmitted to be incomplete, un-sequential, lacking the ability to promote intellectual growth, and un-reasoned. Postman's book was originally published in 1985, a time when television was the main medium of information transmittance, however, several decades later the world is once again faced with a new technology that has fundamentally changed the way information is transmitted: the Internet. Much like Postman asserted that television has reduced the intellectual effectiveness of the nature of the information transmitted through television, the Internet, smart phones, pads and pods, and all the other new information technology tools have turned information into even more of a segmented, isolated, non-integrated, bits of trivia that have no relevance to the world in general.