measured time scents would tend to be so cohesive and so 
profoundly unified as to resist every kind of change.

     Lewis Mumford has suggested that the clock preceded 
the printing press in order of influence on the mechanization of 
society. But Mumford takes no account of the phonetic 
alphabet as the technology that had made possible the visual 
and uniform fragmentation of time. Mumford, in fact, is 
unaware of the alphabet as the source of Western mechanism, 
just as he is unaware of mechanization as the translation of 
society from audile-tactile modes into visual values. Our new 
electric technology is organic and non-mechanical in tendency 
because it extends, not our eyes, but our central nervous 
systems as a planetary vesture. In the space-time world of 
electric technology, the older mechanical time begins to feel 
unacceptable, if only because it is uniform.