"Mechanization takes command"

"The practical energy and technical skills unleashed at this time changed forever the material and psychic environment of the western world."

The very scale of human machinery grew to dwarf human scale.

Neil Postman. Technopoly, p. 40.

Question | Eras | New Order | Dates for these changes | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

An overview of what makes a technocracy.

How can technology and tool use alter what we think, feel, & do ?

 

From tools to technocracy to technopoly

Cases


Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

Technical re conceptualization of the past:

periods Eotechnical Paleotechnical Neotechnical
meaning
water and wind power
coal and coke powered
electrical powered
examples
windmills
steam engines
dynamo
complex
mechanization, 1170-1370 industrialization, 1776-1821 automation, 1886-1899
Ortega Y Gasset Technology of artisans Technology of the mechanic / machinist Technology of the technician

Lewis Mumford

pp. 21-22.

Dates of associated inventions or social responses to these changes

 

 

Authors:

The Two Cultures

Pursell | Pacey–World | Postman | Head | Tenner |Pacey–meaning| Eberhart | Snow | Kaku | Boulding | Delillo | Kranzberg

 

Other important names


A new taxonomy for understanding the power of the technical to alter the organizational in reforming the cultural or ideo-technic facet of how groups of people behave.

This development happens because of the emergence in history of a power we cannot control, nor can we resist its allure.

A new taxonomy emerged, that is; the categories we used to describe the world shifted.

    1. Tool-using
    2. technocracy: tool ruling: standardization and interchangeable parts,
    3. technopoly: "relentless" tool-mediated "utilitarianism." gave way to efficiency, uniformity and precision.

Postman, p. 22.

Postman seizes on this opportunity to reinterpret Mumford's three phases in the procession of tools from ancient to contemporary societies as he argues,

"tools play a central role in the thought-world of a culture. Everything must give way...."

Postman, p. 28.

 

Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

 

When?

datelinespectacles

1300, eyeglasses become widespread as a personal form of precision tools

1354, Strasbourg Cathedral built a mechanical clock sacred duration is ever so slowly divorced from "keeping" secular time.

1370, Charles V, of France, establishes Royal time as official national standard.alarm

1765, James Watt's improvement in the timing and precision of the steam engine adds flexibility to where it is used and for a wider variety of tasks.

1776, Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: pin factory elaborates on the benefits of specialization.

1811–16, The Luddite reaction in England to textile mechanization led by weavers.

1821, mass market develops due to interchangeable parts and standardization in the mechanization of armaments and textile factories in America and for printing of magazines and newspapers on cheaper paper and in greater numbers to advertize the new fabrics and gadgets.

1910-11, F. W. Taylor's ideas published The Principles of Scientific Management, what Pursell calls Taylorism emerges.

The National humanities center's illustrated version

Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

Significant names

Karl Marx, 1800s, dialectical materialism; power over the means of production is what drives history.

Marshall McLuhan, 1950s, argued that how it is said is as important as what is reported–the shape of the signal is as behaviorally influential as what is signaled, when distinguishing the signal from the background noise.

John Milton,1640s, Paradise Lost and the erosion of the divine elements in the human soul.

Johannes Kepler, 1600s, Laws of Planetary Motion, mechanistic viewpoint based on a standardization of time and space.

Galileo Galilei, 1564 - 1642, falling bodies, telescopes, censorship.

Francis Bacon,1561, The four idols and the New Order.

Robert Owen, 1821, Utopian socialism – "reduce the human costs of a technocracy."

Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1891-1911, Scientific management; scientism–had a goal to reduce working human beings to interchangeable parts of an automated technocracy.

Postman, p. 43.

Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

Postman's argument:

"As the spectacular triumphs of a technology mounted, something else was happening: old sources of belief came under siege."

"free will was an illusion."

p. 54.

"The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore in ourselves...,there remained one sure thing to believe in–technology."

Postman, p. 55.

Textiles & Richard Arkwright

"the regular celerity of the machine." Arkwright's goal"

1806; the power loom

1850s; the machine tool industry

1830-1895; the communications revolution

"tools have a way of intruding"

"the idea that if something could be done it should be done."

 

Authors:

The Two Cultures

Pursell | Pacey–World | Postman | Head | Tenner |Pacey–meaning| Eberhart | Snow | Kaku | Boulding | Delillo | Kranzberg

 

Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

A reinterpretation of his argument:

Technological changes do not bring about new values as much as new devices demand adaptive behavior that bring into the forefront those values already latent in the society in which changes become widespread.

New mechanically reinforced societal values: tricycle

"People are conceived of . . . . as consumers."

p. 42.

"A science of the industrial workplace. . . ."

p. 51.

"That is crucial, because it led to the idea that technique of any kind can do our thinking for us, which is among the basic principles of technopoly."

p. 52.

Cases

 

Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

Defining technopoly as an augmented form of technocratic society:

"technopoly – the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology –"

p. 52.

The tricycle that symbolizes the three facets which accurately define technology.
       
  tricycle

Cultural

 

 
Social & Technical or Tectonic
organizational      

 

see also: An Improbable World.

First mechanistic ideas followed by mechanization due to applying and adapting to fine technology became a new way to visualize and think about mechanized behavior, etiquette, and restraints on the acceptable way to act in social settings. As Pursell has argued; "the power to define is the power to control."

book
tulips
Tools of Toil: what to read.
Tools are historical building blocks of technology.

Authors:

The Two Cultures

Pursell | Pacey–World | Postman | Head | Tenner |Pacey–meaning| Eberhart | Snow | Kaku | Boulding | Delillo | Kranzberg

| Postman–Tech | Postman–Television |


Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget

More stories | time line for technology | terms | complexity of technological change | complexity of tools

Technology in History

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