The Industrial Revolution rapidly altered the rate of human achievement. Steam trains were first used around 1820 and remained the primary mode of modern transportation for the next hundred years. The Wright brothers achieved human flight in 1903, and space flight was accomplished only 60 years later. The exponential curve became even steeper with the technological revolution of the 20th century; new technologies rendered obsolete as soon as they roll off the assembly line (a stubborn remnant of the industrial age). Despite this progress, there was an atmosphere of stagnation as America entered the 21st century. Jennifer Egan's Look At Me explores this malaise. Examining the transience of personal identity in an age of branding, the commodification of character, and our cultures' preoccupation with violence, Egan uses Michael West and Moose as examples of America's fabrication of meaning in a culture with few real difficulties, while the two Charlottes illustrate the intrinsic struggle to find even those invented meanings. Charlotte is on the cusp of adulthood at a difficult time. The “poor thing – she looked nothing like her mother,” Ellen Metcalf described the narrator as cute and exotic (24). Like her mother, young Charlotte doesn't belong in Rockford, or perhaps anywhere else. Her eccentric interests in exotic fish help little with peer acceptance, and when after a sexual encounter in her sophomore year she was an untouchable, "no one came near her" (49). His father uses the small town of Rockford, Illinois, as a benchmark for mediocrity in his market research. Aside from her few eccentricities, Charlotte is pretty average. Like her mother, Charlotte is not interested in boys her age and, unlike her father... in the midst of a paper world... "lightened", where we have access to an unprecedented amount of information, the belief it's not important. facts. Young Charlotte's father considered Moose a fool and wondered how a century and a half of trivialities and useless facts could have given any insight into his breakdown. Eventually even Charlotte herself rejected the idea. Like Swenson, Charlotte found a new face, her own behind the makeup and a new name. He took off his glasses, the lens through which Moose would allow people to see clearly, and “the technological disaster” that would ruin us all (53). If we are what we see, then young Charlotte has become nothing, just an identity constructed to cope with the pain of her first heartbreak. Young Charlotte has become like a young Charlotte Swenson, and while the mirrored room may have changed, the meaning remains the same, to be someone different somewhere else..