"Mechanization takes command"

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

From tools to technocracy to technopoly

• Stories
  • Thamus
  • Others
• 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?

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Technical reconceptualization of the past:

periods	Eotechnic	Paleotechnic	Neotechnic
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

Lewis Mumford

Other important names

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A new taxonomy for understanding the power of the technical to alter the organizational in reforming the cultural; because of the emergence in history of a power we cannot control, nor can we resist its allure.

Postman, p. 22

dateline

1300, eyeglasses become widespread

1354, Strasbourg Cathedral built a mechanical clock sacred divorced from secular time

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

1765, James Watt's improvement of the steam engine

1811--16, The Luddite reaction in England to textile mechanization

1821, mass market due to mechanization in America for magazines and newspapers

1911, Taylor's ideas published The Principles of Scientific Management

Significant names

Karl Marx, 1800s, dialectical materialism; power over the means of production.

Marshall McLuhan, 1950s, how it is said is as important as what is signaled.

John Milton,1640s, Paradise lost and the erosion of the divine human soul.

Johannes Kepler, 1600s, Laws of Planetary Motion, mechanistic viewpoint.

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

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

Robert Owen, 1821, Utopianism --"reduce the human costs of a technocracy."

Postman, p. 43.

Cases

• fire, matches, sexual intercourse and fires in African village
• Communication's Revolutions
  • photographs, 1830s
  • telegraph, 1830s
  • rotary powered printing press, 1840s
  • typewriter, 1860s
  • transatlantic cable, 1866
  • telephone, 1876
• The method of invention was the most inventive facet of the 1800s.
• Mechanization became the new way to think, and mechanized behavior the way to act.

	Tulips as tools?
	Tools of Toil: what to read.
	Tools are historical building blocks of technology.
Technology can be understood if tools have three facets.
Tools used in both Music and Architecture led to mechanization and automation.
Tools and the study of technology require us to reflect on the power of instruments,