Soc 356: Transformative Technologies
spring 2001: The Clock

meets Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:25 - 12:40, E1 room 102
Professor: Bob Price, price@iit.edu, 312-567-5132, Wishnick 223
office hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:45 - 9:45 and by appointment
 

Examine your physical person: what machines have you strapped onto your body today?  Members of societies that have adopted the mechanical clock live in a fundamentally different way from people without clocks.  From the monks who first used clocks to regulate their prayer schedules, to the navigators who used clocks to reckon longitude, to the factory workers whose daily rhythms were dictated by the company whistle, to the average person today whose life is suffused with the clock as art, icon, status symbol, and governor, we see an unbroken chain of people whose lives have been changed by the clock.  These are people who live according to a schedule, who have a particular sensibility about the meaning of time that is not possible without clocks, and who benefit and suffer from a host of other technologies that are clock dependent.  In this class, we will explore the transformations that societies have undergone as a result of adopting the clock and its logic.