• I was once told that, after reading a book, if a few questions that are both interesting to the reader and closely related to the conducted themes could be immediately generated, then this book is a good one. Mark Smith's "Mastered by the Clock" exactly fits this standard from my viewpoint.

• Smith was often mastered by his own metaphors. I found myself wondering what he could have been thinking when he wrote things like "a society born in nature's diurnal womb and suckled on her agricultural and crop-producing climate and geography," ...

• what is the relation of time discipline and time consciousness to a more general historical consciousness?

• Time as we conceive it today is so internalized as a natural phenomenon that we don't identify it as existing until its existence has been singled out. On a very basic level therefore, this book was revealing to me.

• I had some serious issues with his treatment of "West African" cultures, which should never be lumped together with such appalling eagerness.

• Smith has a persuasive argument tracing the ways in which southern slaveholders and other members of southern society came to care about mechanical time in a way they never had before in the years leading up to the civil war.

• The reader doesn't really need Smith to tell them that "Dam [sic]" actually meant "Damn."

• Would time then be considered a form of technology? Or does technology only refer to the mechanical time pieces? (How do STS people define "technology"?!!)

• There is an interesting implied tension between the south and the north in both popular and historical conceptions, and Smith works hard to show that these may in fact be misconceptions.

• Smith repeatedly refers to clock-time "mentalities" or "psychologies" or "consciousness" (e.g. pgs. 15, 38, 79, 88) to emphasize what I interpret to be a type of person that must somehow accompany and arise from the interaction with clock technology.

• This study would have certainly benefited from an investigation of early Southern attempts to perfect indoor plumbing technology. This surely must relate to "natural time."

• Smith provides wonderful analysis of the heterogeneous elements involved in the southerners' understanding and use of clock time in organizing their slave plantation economy that are not aptly reduced to "the monolithic process of modernization."

• A closer examination of how other larger context of South, such as pro-slavery discourse, interplayed with the increasing modern time consciousness of southerners would have made his analysis more interesting.

• In terms of its objective, to provide a discussion of time-sense in the South, Smith's work proves interesting.

• ... this is what makes this book an excellent piece of work - it addresses current historiographical concerns from within those disciplines while taking a new approach to attempt to solve them. My critiques of this book are limited to standard critiques of all but the most groundbreaking works - what does modernity really mean?

• As a history of technology question, this seems especially important: What's at stake when a historian characterizes responses to technological innovations in terms of categories of mental dispositions?

• Whilst his evidence for the co-existence of time-disciplined and task-oriented forms of work is strong, I am not convinced that one is definitively modern and the other is pre-modern.

• I would have been interested to know more about people's lives, beyond their conception of time!

Click here to return to the STS.340 home page.