LIBS 7007: Technology & Society

1. LIBS 7007: Technology & Society Do mechanical clocks produce mechanical time?

2. Introduction: ‘Time’ as Technology • “Once a new technology comes into the social milieu, it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated.” • Marshall McLuhan • Time is a social concept (in a non-fuzzy way!) • The Gods Must be Crazy • Each society conceives time uniquely • Western clocks are machines the output of which is linear numerical time. • ‘time’ in the West is a mechanical product

3. Clock-Time • From Latin, clocca = bell • In medieval monasteries, an automatic system of bells which rang to mark the seven hours of prayer. • Properly speaking, a clock is simply a machine which displays a fixed numerical series. • An act of the human mind is required to associate this successive display with time. • This means that the society is what makes the equation “linear numerical series = time.”

4. Pre-Modern Clocks & Non-Western Clocks • In is an anachronism in the first case and civilisation bigotry in the second to say that methods of measuring time are ‘clocks’. • Another way of saying this is that neither pre-modern or non-Western concepts of time are ‘clock-time’ • A sundial matches the movement of the sun, but it can have religious or aesthetic motivation and experience • Self-evidently—experientially- not ‘clock-time’

5. Sensory Aspect of Clocks • Chinese & Japanese monks using incense burning to mark time • Involves scent with its power of memory as well as sight • Direct religious aspect • Similar to original ‘clocks’ which were not visual but auditory

6. Clocks & Absolute Abtract Time • Clock-Time is a numerical and geometric concept: • an absolute of logic, geometry and space • an abstraction: a theoretical first-principle. • Newton needed an absolute space and an absolute time to make his formulae—and his full science—work • Einstein’s counter-concept is that time is experiential: relative to the situation of the ‘experiencer’.

7. Experiential Time • “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." Albert Einstein Quotation

8. Medieval Painting: Perspective

9. Marshall McLuhan & Number • Marshall McLuhan presents number as an extension of touch. • We count the trees in the forest because we can’t touch them all. • Touch—the haptic sense—is a fundamental human experience. • deprived of touch a child will grow insane or sociopathic • Resurgence of touch in computers is a response to the amputation of the haptic sense in a numeric and visual world • part of the ‘global village’ consequence of electronic speed.