Lewis Mumford

Cultural critic and historian of technology whom Neil Postman draws on in Amusing Ourselves To Death to make the media-ecology case that a technology is never a neutral tool but a transformation of how a culture thinks. Postman cites Mumford’s Technics and Civilization on how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock “made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers” — teaching irreverence toward the sun and the seasons until “the authority of nature is superseded.” Mumford appears a second time on the printed book: print “released people from the domination of the immediate and the local,” made a greater impression than actual events, and turned learning into book-learning — “to exist was to exist in print.” Both quotes serve Postman’s central thesis that introducing a technique like writing or the clock is not merely an extension of human power but a reshaping of thought and of the content of a culture.

Context: Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was an American historian, sociologist, and critic of technology, cities, and architecture, author of Technics and Civilization (1934) and The City in History (1961).

Where this appears

• Amusing Ourselves To Death — quoted (from Technics and Civilization) on the clock turning humans into time-keepers and on print transforming culture; a core example for Postman’s media-ecology argument.