Technics and Civilization

Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226550273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934—before television, the personal computer, and the Internet even appeared on our periphery. Drawing upon art, science, philosophy, and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explained the origin of the machine age and traced its social results, asserting that the development of modern technology had its roots in the Middle Ages rather than the Industrial Revolution. Mumford sagely argued that it was the moral, economic, and political choices we made, not the machines that we used, that determined our then industrially driven economy. Equal parts powerful history and polemic criticism, Technics and Civilization was the first comprehensive attempt in English to portray the development of the machine age over the last thousand years—and to predict the pull the technological still holds over us today. “The questions posed in the first paragraph of Technics and Civilization still deserve our attention, nearly three quarters of a century after they were written.”—Journal of Technology and Culture

Technics and Civilization

Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Peter Smith Pub Incorporated
ISBN: 9780844661155
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
This is a history of the machine and a critical study of its effects on civilization. Mumford has drawn on every aspect of life to explain the machine and to trace its social results. "An extraordinarily wide-ranging, sensitive, and provocative book about a subject upon which philosophers have so far shed but little light" (Journal of Philosophy). Index; illustrations.

Art and Technics

Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231121057
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Lewis Mumford was the author of more than thirty influential books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with technics. This text provides the essence of Mumford's views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture.

Routledge Revivals: Man and Technics (1932)

Author: Oswald Spengler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351980947
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 59

Book Description
First published in 1932, this book, based on an address delivered in 1931, presents a concise and lucid summary of the philosophy of the author of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler. It was his conviction that the technical age — the culture of the machine age — which man had created in virtue of his unique capacity for individual as well as racial technique, had already reached its peak, and that the future held only catastrophe. He argued it lacked progressive cultural life and instead was dominated by a lust for power and possession. The triumph of the machine led to mass regimentation rather than fewer workers and less work — spelling the doom of Western civilization.

The Myth of the Machine: The pentagon of power : New explorations, new worlds

Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mass media
Languages : en
Pages : 554

Book Description
An in-depth look at the forces that have shaped modern technology since prehistoric times. Mumford criticizes the modern trend of technology, which emphasizes constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement. He contends that these goals work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and overall human satisfaction. Modern technology fails to produce lasting, quality products by using devices such as consumer credit, installment buying, non-functioning and defective designs, built-in fragility, and frequent superficial "fashion" changes. "Without constant enticement by advertising," he writes, "production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year."

Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes

Author: Frank G. Novak Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134813783
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
I am a disciple of Patrick Geddes, and I am an abject admirer of everything he has said and done. The tantalising nearness of everything we most want; were it not for some fatal, stubborn grain in both of us, Geddes and I, linked together, intellectual and emotional, might still conquer the world. For lack of this, he will be imperfectly articulate and I, perhaps, will have nothing to say. These two comments by Lewis Mumford, written at either end of his largely epistolary relationship with Patrick Geddes, frame an astonishing correspondence between two of our century's greatest thinkers on Western civilisation. Mumford was the versatile New York cultural critic, famous for his writings on architecture, the city and technology. His master, Geddes, was the Scots biologist, sociologist and planner, the professor of things in general. The letters reveal much about the intellectual culture of the first half of the Twentieth Century as they chart an extraordinary Anglo-American relationship between very different men; this friendship, initially of master and disciple, even father/son, was based on a shared intellectual quest, and inspired the work of both. All that exists of those letters, and much previously unpublished material besides, has been meticulously collected and edited by Frank G. Novak Jnr..

The City in History

Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156180351
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 788

Book Description
The city's development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. "One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century" (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.

The Condition of Man

Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Book Description
A study of the development of the personality and the community.

Technology and Human Becoming

Author: Philip Hefner
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9781451407266
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
From a leader in the field of religion and science come these reflections on the role of technology in human life and culture. Philip Hefner sees the human spirit at issue in our assessment of and attitude toward technology and the many technological creations that humans spawn. Technology, he argues, tells us much about ourselves-especially our innate drive toward exploration of possibilities-and poses questions about the final meaning of creating, of human cultural evolution, and even the being of God.

Notes on the Underground, new edition

Author: Rosalind Williams
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262731908
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Real and imagined undergrounds in the late nineteenth century viewed as offering a prophetic look at life in today's technology-dominated world. The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet's deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization. Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today's technology-dominated society. In a new essay written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”