Time ?

Not what you may have thought.

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1993

Carroll Pursell, White Heat: People and Technology, 1994

"The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore ourselves....the success of technology and the devaluation of traditional beliefs took on the exaggerated significance that pushed technocracy in America over into Technopoly."

From Technocracy to Technopoly

The Improbable World

"The invisible technologies"

The key to the transformation was "fine technology" adapted to meet new conditions and exapted to completely different means to revolutionary and novel ends.

Technocracy, or the rule of the machines, he says "did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic worlds."

• Social world was dominated by feudal elite and artisan or craft guilds with knowledge of materials.

• Symbolic world was dominated by religion, the clergy and morality based on faith in good works.

 

Symbolic Social world

Pacey's conceptual concept that technology is multi-faceted.

Our personal lives are permeated by not only tools but the mechanized social world and technology's symbolic impressions that take up residence in the mind without our even noticing how completely we are beguiled by its charm, ease of use or simple power without recognizing the occupant's darker sides.

Pursell | Renaissance | Modern | Mechanization | Adaptations

Social world was characterized by feudal elite and artisans who eventually formed craft guilds with often secret knowledge of materials.

Often dominated by older elite systems often in transition from positions of power to a loss of status.

The eclipse of religion, craft, custom, regional pride and hereditary aristocracy as means of control over new technology fostered an absence of control.

In the vacuum created by social decay, spiritual disintegration, and .

• Capital accumulation changes when newer, more profitable procedures, based on new or existing technology is introduced. The flow of resources may also lead to excess capital accumulating due to restricted policies or shortages created by new means or new techniques of acquiring raw materials or finished goods
• Accumulated behaviors that in their amalgam cause psychological changes. Such as operating dangerous machinery or flying in an airplane which dictate extreme caution because of the character of the tools, tool complex and techniques employed.
• Driving an automobile is the most complex psycho-motor function that most people ever perform; alertness is only one of many behavioral changes this machinery demands from users.
• Alienation, or the separation of the skilled worker from those capabilities a person possesses from training in specific crafts, is used to describe the impact of industrial production on the labor force and the value of that labor in terms of new automated machinery. Critics charge that skills are lost, such as Pacey does, with respect to the knowledge of materials that craft workers may have, that some architects and engineers may lack.

Symbolic world was dominated by imagery, religious iconography, and visual patterns of association.

Upon debating with Neils Bohr about the implications of quantum mechanics, Eintein asserted that "God does not play dice with the universe," in an attempting a rebuttal to the statistical uncertainties that were and remain, at the core of Bohr's interpretation (the Copenhagen Interpretation) of quantum dynamics, the behavior of atoms, and the play of light frequencies in the electromagnetic fields binding fermions, bosons and radiation together at the heart of matter.

Examples of symbolic expressions that inherently rely on technology, tools or implements:

Familial terms such as God the father, Madre de Dios (mother of God), or "Uncle Sam" are one form of making something abstract seem more real, or practical.

Technical references are another:

Jesus as the carpenter

Christ as the Good Shepard

"God as my copilot."

Rosie the Riveter

"21st Cenury schizoid man"

July 16, 1945 at the Trinity site, Alamagordo, New Mexico. Of it Eintein said "everything changed, except the way we think."

Like clockwork, out of time, time-out, timely, time is actually a delusion, as much as an illusion.

Advances in technical capacity :
wheel	fine technology	gears	molecules	nanno-atoms

The measure of technology's power over the symbolic word is how the very words we use in our language to denote important concepts have changed. See Pursell, Makes no Sense.

The appeal to mechanistic, material and machine qualities to justify behavior, ethics and education led to a redefinition of morals

• relativism, newest set of ideas that truth is not discernible, only related to what people think is so.
• pragmatism, older set of ideas that any criteria used to judge something's value is "what works."
• utilitarianism, the oldest set of beliefs in "the greatest good for the greatest number" trumps all competing values.
  

Industrial changes in tools, organization of work, and personal relations led to a monopoly of values in the hands of technologically astute (savvy) elite or a managerial control class:

• Richard Arkwright's textile factories and machine operators replacing weavers, loom crafts, and tailors.

• Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Principles of Scientific Management.

• Henry Ford and the industrial reform of manufacture, mass-production, urban design, & psychology.

In summary, the rule of machinery was replaced by a convergence of tool complexes as the sole source of meaning, value and identity the sources of change were so speedy and complete that public schools and media could not keep up

at this speed of change the changes became "invisible" to most participants and thus "irrelevant" to a discussion of social control of the new wealth, order and power created by machinery

key concepts, fundamental ideas, and older morality were all redefined and the challenges raised to technical expertise were largely swept aside by a "brave new world order."

Postman, Technopoly, pp. 40-55.

Pursell | Renaissance | Modern | Mechanization | Adaptations

Postman's analysis of the transition from a tool using to a tool commanding culture is not easy to summarize, but the above nine points to his argument force you to understand how material changes brought about psychological and intellectual changes that redefined customary boundaries that shape modern industrial cultures.

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