"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
- Stories
- Technocracy or rule by technology; technical domination replaced tool use.
- Media was completely changed by technical innovation & mechanization.
- Technopoly triumphs in the USA, 1861-1911, slow emergence of order.
- Richard Arkwright the eighteenth century hairdresser and visionary.
- Tool complexes already delineate periods in the past, do they describe us?
- stone age
- bronze age
- iron age
- Eotechnical was the age of water, wind and wood
- Paleotechnical was the age of steam, coal, and wrought iron
- Neotechnical was the age of electricity, oil, and steel
- now <binary>?
Question | Eras | New Order | Dates | People | Passing Away | Case evidence | Technopoly defined | Never forget
Technical re conceptualization of the past:
periods Eotechnical Paleotechnical Neotechnical mechanization, 1170-1370 industrialization, 1776-1821 automation, 1886-1899 Ortega Y Gasset Technology of artisans Technology of the mechanic / machinist Technology of the technician pp. 21-22.
Dates of associated inventions or social responses to these changes
Authors:
Pursell | Pacey–World | Postman | Head | Tenner |Pacey–meaning| Eberhart | Snow | Kaku | Boulding | Delillo | Kranzberg
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.
- Tool-using
- technocracy: tool ruling: standardization and interchangeable parts,
- 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
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.
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.
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
"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.
"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:
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:
- division of labor
- measurement
- objectivity to positivism
- standardization
- interchangeable parts
- precision
- timing
- specialization
- expertise
- behaviorism
- pragmatism
- efficiency
- progress
"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
- fire, matches, sexual intercourse and fires in African village
- Communication's Revolution:
- photographs, 1830s
- telegraph, 1830s
- rotary powered printing press, 1840s
- typewriter, 1860s
- transatlantic cable for telecommunications connected Britain & America, 1866
- telephone, 1876
- The method of invention was the most inventive facet of the 1800s.
- "That people's lives are changed by machinery is taken as a matter of course..." (p. 52)
- "Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself..." (p. 48)
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. 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."
Tools of Toil: what to read. Tools are historical building blocks of technology.
Authors:
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
