Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

I love technology. I tell you this, even though it must be obvious to you considering where these words are appearing. I love technology, but I'm not blind to its problems. To those who say technology has no faults, I ask you when was the last time your computer crashed or whatever happened to that grand notion of a "paperless office"? Technology is something between Pandora's box and Prometheus' gift; I would not want to live without it because I've read history, but I can also imagine an even better world.Neil Postman may or may not love technology, but he certainly knows its failings. Postman is the author of several books on the interplay between American culture and technology, and his most recent, Technopoly, is in some ways a culmination of his previous efforts. Postman is an educator who is distressed by the state of American education. Instead of simply decrying the fact that schools are changing and moaning for a return to the "good ol' days," Postman took the time to understand the nature of the beast, dissect it, and present his conservation strategy. As he states, his idea of getting "back to the basics" is not quite the same as that typically bandied about by politicians and policy makers.First, the argument. Postman describes what he calls the three stages of how a culture deals with technology: 1) tool-using, 2) technocracy, 3) technopoly. In a tool-using culture, technical improvements are limited to the uses at hand. This differs from the technocracy, where the tools "play a central role in the thought world of the culture." In the technopoly, tools become the culture. Astute readers may sense a possible linkage here with Alvin Toffler's three waves of culture detailed in The Third Wave. Toffler views each wave as having a trough and crest, with monumental social impact happening as each wave breaks upon the shore of human culture. Toffler says the reason for the breakdown in our traditional structures today is that we are in the break between the second and third wave. Toffler predicts a time of stability in the future, in which this new wave of culture and technology will have enhanced all of our lives. Postman and Toffler are not exactly foes in their views of the waves of culture, but differ on how we are to approach this change. Toffler implies that it will sort itself out -- a type of laissez-faire view of societal change that makes it easier to understand Toffler's ties to Newt Gingrich. Postman feels we must address the change, or it will destroy us.To that end, Postman writes a history of the growth of technology in American society. His history centers on the impact of technology on the medical profession -- how it saw the progression of each technological stage to the detriment of both doctors and patients. As damning as this evaluation is, he follows it with an even better one from our standpoint: the impact of computers on American culture. As I said before, I love technology, and computer technology most of all, bu

I first picked this book up in high school more than 10 years ago. More recently, as a Ph.D. candidate in engineering, I gave it another read. From both perspectives, a teenager with some grade-school science courses and a tech-saavy graduate student, I have thoroughly enjoyed this book.This is a book about how technology affects the way a society interprets and thinks about all aspects of life and culture. Postman starts by looking at the past and very low tech (writing, for instance) and ends up examining the tech of the present. This book was first published in the 80s with a reprint in 1993, so some of Post's observations about computers and TV are very dated. I would love to see a 2nd edition to this book to address the technology of today and it's accessibility.Despite the dated comments on present tech (which in the present age is understandibly difficult to keep up with) the overall thesis is highly relevant and this book should be read by all, science and tech enthusiast or no. It will definitely make you think about things you have previously taken for granted. The next time you use any technology, from a pen to a pda to a dvd player, you will ask yourself how this skews your world view.Highly reccomended.

There is much to learn from this important book. Over the last two hundred years, both science & technology have rapidly & irrevocably changed the face of the earth. In the postindustrial world, we've banished infectious diseases from our midst (at least temporarily), have instituted public health & sanitation measures, and have made creature comfort a part of everyman's lifestyle. Yet, there is profound and widespread concern regarding exactly where technological innovation is taking us, what this mysterious journey will cost us in terms of a sustainable and palatable ecosystem, and exactly who (if anyone) is driving this huge and anonymous innovative juggernaut. This book deals provocatively with this issue; i.e. the promulgation of a culture in which science and technology have come to assume the pivotal role in our society.Sociologist Max Weber warned almost 100 years ago of an alarming tendency in western civilization to displace our tradition-based religious cultural ethos with a dangerously superficial "faux" rationality in which all decisions and all measures would come to be made more and more exclusively by scientific and logical means. Yet science by its very nature cannot answer questions dealing with values, advising us as to what is right, or good, or best. It can only speak to us in terms of effective and efficient means to achieve such cultural values and social ends. It is this tension between a human-oriented cultural ethos, on the one hand, and scientific progress through technological innovation not so oriented on the other that is Mr. Postman's real subject. Mr. Postman understands that science and technology are both our friends and our antagonists, and as our amigo the Unabomber has pointed out, what technical innovation introduces as "voluntary and optional" soon becomes "compulsory and obligatory", as did the introduction of automobiles and traffic regulation. In this fashion, by flooding our social, economic, and political environment with items and objects that drive the nature of society as much as enhance it (can anyone now doubt that the introduction of personal computers poses such a double-bind?), we are radically changing the nature of our society and its culture without benefit of any guiding values, precepts, or notions as to what is best for our people and our community other than to allow frenzied competition between technological rivals to see who can unlease the latest/neatest technological innovation to make our lives easier or entertain us more cleverly. Our direction in terms of progress seems to be random, at best, and Postman argues most persuasively that there are hidden dangers to our freedoms, our prosperity, and even our awareness that result from this surrender to the indifferent impulses of technological innovation. We best recognize this indifference and the dangers it poses for a free and open society.As author Sales Kirkpatrick notes in his wonderf