The Clock (and the MOOC)
By way of introduction to how technological innovations can influence what it is to be a human being, I want to take a very brief look at a groundbreaking example of modern technology.
The oldest still functioning mechanical clock in the world, Salisbury Cathedral
[via Wikimedia Commons]
In the 1930s the pioneering sociologist of technology Lewis Mumford wondered what the first step toward the mechanization of human life had been, and he suggested it had probably been the development of the mechanical clock. Way back in the 1300s, long before the Industrial Revolution, Christian monks invented mechanical clocks in Europe - mainly, it seems, to ensure the accurate observation of the various times for prayer throughout the day and night (Mumford 1933, 12ff).
Before we had the clock, human beings' sense of time was based on immediate and tactile experience of nature: the sun in the sky, the stars, the moon, the cyclical time of the seasons. These were all imprecise and impressionistic: they depended on the individual's sense perceptions, on group interpretations, and even on the whim of the weather. As one ardent critic of clock-time later put it,
before the clock human beings had only imprecise means of telling the time, such as the hour glass with its trickling sand or dripping water, the sundial, useless on a dull day, and the candle or lamp whose unburnt remnant of oil or wax indicated the hours. All these devices were approximate and inexact, and were often rendered unreliable by the weather or the personal laziness of the tender. Nowhere in the ancient or medieval world were more than a tiny minority of men concerned with time in the terms of mathematical exactitude. (Woodcock 1944)
Lewis Mumford suggested that the invention of the clock radically changed how humans do things, and how we see our existence in the world. The clock wrenched us out of a more organic and natural sense of time into an abstract world ruled by the human inventions of hours and minutes (there are no such things in nature). After the coming of the clock we followed not our instincts but the rule of the clock: "Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock; one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it" (Mumford 1933, 17).