Through his analyses of work, mechanization, and automation, he helped establish the critical tradition that continues to ask how technological societies might remain truly human.
5/Final

Friedmann’s interdisciplinary approach bridged sociology and philosophy, influencing later thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul, and Bernard Stiegler.
4/

For Friedmann, technology was a double-edged force: it held the promise of liberation through efficiency and creativity, but also the danger of alienation, fragmentation, and the loss of meaning in modern life.
3/

In works such as Le travail en miettes (The Anatomy of Work, 1956), he examined how industrial automation and the rationalization of labor were transforming not only production but the human experience of work itself.
2/

Given the bias against history and continuity that Innis equated with the dominant media of the twentieth century, it is little wonder that one of his last essays was titled "A Plea for Time."
10/Final

Those dominated by space-biased media, such as paper or electronic images, accord high value to abstract knowledge, bureaucracy, and to exercising control over space, but place relatively little value on, and even denigrate, tradition or continuity with the past.
9/

Societies shaped by time-biased media, in the purest form, are oral cultures: they emphasize continuity, collectivity, and practical knowledge.
8/

He did this by defining media as either space-biased or time-biased. The latter are durable media, like stone and papyrus, that are difficult to transport and reproduce, while the former are light and easily transported, such as paper, TV images, and digital communication.
7/

Like other media theorists, Innis argued that the form of media and not its content privileged particular types of knowledge.
6/

The characteristics of the great empires that dominate Western history—Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, Europe, and North America—are the characteristics of particular media of communication, like hieroglyphics, papyrus, and print.
5/

In these books, Innis argued that the history of any civilization could be studied as a history of the dominant media of communication of that civilization.
4/

Trained as a political economist, Innis wrote two important books about the materiality of communication: Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951).
3/

Often pointed to as the one of the originators of media theory, his work strongly influenced Marshall McLuhan, who famously claimed that The Gutenberg Galaxy was merely "a footnote of explanation" to Innis' work.
2/

And and Endowed Chair in History of Technology (nice salary) at UC Irvine, due Dec 1.

recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09897

As a technology, the clock produces seconds, minutes, and hours, disassociating time from human events and creating the belief in a separate world of mathematically measurable sequences. As clocks began to appear, time keeping turned into time serving—we became slaves to time.
5/Final

In "Technics and Civilization," Mumford made the persuasive argument that the mechanical clock, invented in the monasteries of medieval Europe, was the starting point of the industrial revolution.
4/

His later work, including the two volumes of "The Myth of the Machine" (1967/1970) took a more pessimistic view on the relationship between humans, the environment, technology, and power and his influence on writers such as Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner was evident.
3/

Strongly influenced by the nineteenth-century American transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville) Mumford was an early American philosopher of technology, whose work "Technics and Civilization" (1934) was one of the first books dedicated to philosophical reflection on technology.
2/