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06641_Field_TCUM T206.txt
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1996-04-10
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Mumford explains in The City in History , had achieved a social
and institutional extension of all human faculties. Speed-up
and city aggregates only served to separate these from one
another in more specialist forms. The electronic age cannot
sustain the very low gear of a centre-margin structure such as
we associate with the past two thousand years of the Western
world. Nor is this a question of values. If we understood our
older media, such as roads and the written word, and if we
valued their human effects sufficiently, we could reduce or even
eliminate the electronic factor from our lives. Is there an
instance of any culture that understood the technology that
sustained its structure and was prepared to keep it that way?
If so, that would be an instance of values or reasoned
preference. The values or preferences that arise from the mere
automatic operation of this or that technology in our social
lives are not capable of being perpetuated.