Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/07043_Field_TCUM T608.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 855b | 15 lines

telephone network inside a single business. Like the typewriter,
the telephone fuses functions, enabling the call-girl, for
example, to be her own procurer and madam.

     Northcote Parkinson had discovered that any business or
bureaucratic structure functions by itself, independently of “the
work to be done.” The number of personnel and “the quality of
the work are not related to each other at all.” In any given
structure, the rate of staff accumulation is not related to the
work done but to the intercommunication among the staff,
itself. (In other words, the medium is the message.)
Mathematically stated, Parkinson’s Law says that the rate of
accumulation of office staff per annum will be between 5.17
per cent and 6.56 per cent, “irrespective of any variation in the
amount of work (if any) to be done.”