Frederick Winslow Taylor was an engineer during the late 1800s who invented a system to improve industrial efficiency. His methodology, called Taylorism, privileged the workings of the system over the individual––maximizing efficiency at any cost. Taylor’s focus on the scientific management of systems involving large numbers of humans is useful for Carr as the foundational ethic of Silicon Valley giants like Google who seek to control all aspects of Internet users’ affairs.
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Fredrick Winslow Taylor Character Timeline in The Shallows
The timeline below shows where the character Fredrick Winslow Taylor appears in The Shallows. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 8
...of productivity. Taylor observed factories and wanted to make a change. His new method, called Taylorism, achieved maximum speed and efficiency by favoring the system as a whole over the individual.
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Chapter 10
...as Carr warns, the easy road is the road search engines encourage us to take. Taylorism is a good analogy. After Taylor, workers in factories began to follow a script written...
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