The Medium Is the Message
Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to
say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical
technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine,
but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in
which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the
least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and
association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine
technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and
decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its
patterning of human relationships.
The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light
is pure information..
annaabi.ee 
