The Man and his Work

Man and the Space Around Him

In the past, man lived in several scales: in part he lived in his personal scale, that is, by himself; in part, with his family; in part, with his immediate neighbours, with his distant neighbours, or with his fellow citizens in the city and in the city-state. His participation in the life of people beyond his city was very small, and his meetings with other nationals were very often limited to the battlefield.

Today the radio or television set occupies a considerable part of what used to be time for intra-family contacts, chats, and discussions, and people receive news from the other end of the world much more easily than they do from the other end of their small city. If we subdivide the whole earth into a scale of units of several classes -- man, room, family, city, the whole earth -- we see that it is becoming easier for us to get news from big distances and more and more difficult from small ones.

From Saturday Review, December 14, 1968, p. 21-23: ill.