But technologies alone can never manufacture time, any more than clocks, which indicate time. This requires interaction between people, from which mechanisms of coordination arise, functionally instrumental, but which are also used as symbolic means of orientation. Technologies mediate in these processes, channel, guide, give directions, and tend to alleviate or aggravate, increase or reduce social differences and distances between people. But they are not the neutral tool’ they are still often portrayed to be. Such a point of view denies the history of every technology, its derivation from previous generations of technology and their social origins and foundations. Michael Young views social evolution as essentially driven forward by the evolution of tools, parallel to biological evolution, which have developed into external organs of human beings. Like Leroi-Gourhan before him, he stresses the extra-somatic character of technological evolution by means of tools, which above all results in the range and capabilities of human sense organs being increased. By means of technological tools and equipment, the human eye can see, and the ear can hear, things which remain closed to it by nature. Information technologies, and especially the computer, are similarly beginning to increase and to amplify the capabilities of the human brain far beyond present achievements. The tools and machines with which human beings have surrounded themselves are being incorporated by them again in a certain sense. Society is assimilating its technologies again, they are becoming a habit, a habitualized way of life which leads to further use of the external sense organs. Like all habits, they soon become a matter of course; the habit of machinery then blends with the biological and social rhythms. A tool of any complexity', writes Michael Young, is a kind of material habit which encapsulates in the present the past experience of countless generations, and which is further elaborated before being handed on in a modified form, to be discarded or modified again.'26
The Illusion of Simultaneity
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