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October 13 - October 13, 2018
the hidden cause of our Western bias toward sequence as “logic” in the all-pervasive technology of the alphabet.
pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in Babylonian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures represents an extension of the visual sense for storing and expediting access to human experience. All of these forms give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data and operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages. Such an achievement, however, involved the separation of both signs and sounds from their semantic
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It was not until the advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than a messenger. Before this, roads and the written word were closely interrelated.
When the thirteen colonies began to develop a considerable social and economic life of their own, they felt the need to become centers themselves, with their own margins. This is the time when the original center may make a more rigorous effort of centralized control of the margins,
Land powers can more easily attain a unified center-margin pattern than sea powers.
any new means of moving information will alter any power structure whatever.
Self-consciousness of the causes and limits of one’s own culture seems to threaten the ego structure
Nietzsche said understanding stops action,
Improvement of wheel and road more and more brought the town to the country in a reciprocal spongelike action of give-and-take.
Paradoxically, the effect of the wheel and of paper in organizing new power structures was not to decentralize but to centralize. A speedup in communications always enables a central authority to extend its operations to more distant margins.
The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity. In this mild form everyone could play many roles. Participation was high, and organization was low. This is the formula for stability in any type of organization.
All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change.
wheel, road, and alphabet.
new speed and power are never compatible with existing spatial and social arrangements.
Division of labor always creates a separation between producer and consumer, even as it tends to separate the place of work and the living space.
complex awareness slows down the achieving of expertness.
Any new medium, by its acceleration, disrupts the lives and investments of whole communities.
War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.
militarism is itself the main route of technological education and acceleration for lagging areas.
What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness.
the separation of the individual from the group in space (privacy), and in thought (“point of view”), and in work (specialism), has had the cultural and technological support of literacy, and its attendant galaxy of fragmented industrial and political institutions.
number, the language of science.
number is as mysterious as writing.
number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch.
The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of “common sense” that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on man.
the habit of seeing all things as continuous and connected.
both vanishing point and infinity were unknown in the Greek and Roman cultures
The power to translate knowledge into mechanical production by the breaking up of any process into fragmented aspects to be placed in a lineal sequence of movable, yet uniform, parts was the formal essence of the printing press.
the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
Clothing and housing, as extensions of skin and heat-control mechanisms, are media of communication, first of all, in the sense that they shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community.
The world was put in a frame.
Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and experience.
our Western use of money as store and translator of communal work and skill has depended upon long accustomation to the written word, and upon the power of the written word to specialize, to delegate, and to separate functions in an organization.
the enormous structures of statistical information that we call markets and prices.
Since all media are extensions of ourselves, or translations of some part of us into various materials, any study of one medium helps us to understand all the others. Money is no exception.
Language, like currency, acts as a store of perception and as a transmitter of the perceptions and experience of one person or of one generation to another.
As both a translator and storehouse of experience, language is, in addition, a reducer and a distorter of experience.
money as transmitter and expediter of any kind of work into any other kind.
The real task of a study of this one medium is identical with that of the study of all media; namely, as Keynes wrote, “to treat the problem dynamically, analyzing the different elements involved, in such a manner as to exhibit the causal process by which the price level is determined, and the method of transition from one position of equilibrium to another.”
money is not a closed system, and does not have its meaning alone. As a translator and amplifier, money has exceptional powers of substituting one kind of thing for another.
All media — or extension of man — are natural resources that exist by virtue of the shared knowledge and skill of a community.
The media of money and writing and clock began to converge into an organic whole
Printing, the first complete mechanization of a handicraft, breaks up the movement of the hand into a series of discrete steps that are as repeatable as the wheel is rotary. From this analytic sequence came the assembly-line principle,
Historians agree on the basic role of the clock in monastic life for the synchronization of human tasks. The acceptance of such fragmenting of life into minutes and hours was unthinkable, save in highly literate communities.
With universal literacy, time can take on the character of an enclosed or pictorial space that can be divided and subdivided. It can be filled in. “My schedule is filled up.” It can be kept free: “I have a free week next month.”
