#technicsandcivilization — Public Fediverse posts

Lewis Mumford's _Technics and Civilization_ on the camera's influence brought this to mind:
> If #Instagram showed us what a world without art looks like, #TikTok shows us what a world without shame looks like. The old virtues of restraint — prudence, discretion, tact — are gone. There is only one virtue: to be seen.

https://www.roughtype.com/?paged=3

#NicolasCarr #CarrOnTikTok #TikTok #TechnicsAndCivilization #LewisMumford #MumfordOnTheCamera #SelfExposure
#GDM #EP3 #EP2 #EPGDM #IARichardsOnMedia

The English Through Pictures Book 3 page 47 makes me think of a line from Lewis Mumford:
> Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
#LewisMumford in #TechnicsAndCivilization p.301
#VillageIdiot #TownThug
Trump comes to mind...

The Clock!! as shown by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) via Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)

... with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.