Book Review: W. Sztumski, Quo ruis homo? Środowisko życia, czas, ludzie, 2008

Ignacy S. Fiut

Abstract

The concept of ecology of time presented by the author is in many respects close to the vision of man and society created by the authors of the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School (including Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and recently Jürgen Habermas). On the other hand, this analysis has many moments in common with the findings based on the theory of technological determinism, which were created in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada and the USA by Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Derrick de Kerckhove, and Neil Postman, according to whose social development and the nature of interpersonal interactions are strictly determined by technological progress in communication, as a result of which the media become extensions of man, and he, without his own will, is connected to the global communication system as the so-called homo praticipans – homo participans, subconsciously taking over technological rationality from the media, and as a result of the acceleration of communication between people on a global scale, time and space implode and our world becomes a “global village” or a “global technopoly”.