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Avg. Rating: 3.5
Boring ... nothing special
This book is unoriginal, shallow, poorly organized, and overly wordy (he sounds like he is just rambling on, trying to sound "learned", but saying nothing of substance most of the time). I had to force myself to finish this one.
There are several better books on the topics that are covered in "Technopoly" -- I would especially recommend "Autonomous Technology" (Winner) and "Technological Society" (Ellul), "Cult of Information" (Roszak), and "The Arrogance of Humanism" (Ehrenfield). These are much more in-depth, better written, and interesting.
Technopoly
I've long appreciated Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society and Lewis Mumford's two volume study, The Myth of the Machine. Many of the things which most concern us, much of what we tend to lament--whether in the schools or churches or environment--results from our naively enthusiastic embrace of technology during the past two centuries. Then, ignoring the past, we often want to solve today's problems without addressing their root cause--technology--because we enjoy its comforts. With Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, c. 1992), Neil Postman joins Ellul and Mumford by adding insight to the indictment of contemporary culture he initiated a decade ago with Amusing Ourselves to Death.
"Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made," Postman writes in his Introduction, "that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make life worth living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy" (p. xii). And that's what makes the issue so difficult, for usually friends are friends and enemies are enemies. As a friend, technology obviously makes life easier in many ways. Yet, as an enemy, it tends to sever us from those traditions which make life truly worthwhile. So while it eases our bodies it empties our hearts! The Brave New World Aldous Huxley imagined half-a-century ago seems to have actually emerged, a world controlled by a "Technopoly" which redefines what we traditionally understood "by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence" (p. 48).
Postman pursues his theme through such diverse realms as medical care, computers, statistics, opinion polls and politics, education, advertising. Everywhere, he finds, the deadening hand of Technopoly, sustained by the ideology of "Scientism," is at work destroying traditional culture. As a professor of education, Postman performs best when discussing his own province. "In Technopoly," he says, "we improve the education by improving what are called `learning technologies'" (p. 171). Thus the latest computers are always judged necessary, though one would be hard pressed to prove they help students read or write or think better than they did 100 years ago. Computers are purchased (while library book budgets go unfunded) because they've become an unquestioned necessity. That's because they do some things more "efficiently," more rapidly, in more volume. Should we ask "what is learning for," the computer compulsive can only answer in terms of means, not ends.
"Modern secular education is failing," Postman says, in a probing analysis, "not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer, and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a `course of study' at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses `skills.' In other words, a technocrat's ideal--a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills" (p. 186).
This, of course, brushes aside thousands of years of philosophical reflection on the reasons, the whys of education. Plato and Cicero, Augustine and Jefferson, all knew what to aim at in educating our young. Thus they focused on great texts, which told stories, which gave learners a sense of place and history, of value and values. Our technically-oriented modern education, singularly concerned with producing functionaries for the economic mysteries, lacks such. Religious educators, especially, struggle with Technopoly. In the traditional approach, "learning is done for the greater glory of God and, more particularly, to prepare the young to embrace intelligently and gracefully the moral directives of the church" (p. 178). Such an agenda is so unlike modernity's mainstream "education" that religious educators generally ease away from traditional disciplines to join their more respected secular counterparts, reducing "education" to specialized competencies of some sort.
Given Postman's doleful discussion, one wonders what then we should do! In response he concludes: "No one is an expert on how to live a life. I can, however, offer a Talmudic-like principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of the American Technopoly. It is this: you must try to be a loving resistance fighter" (p. 182). To do this, he says, you must constantly remember and reflect upon the energizing symbols, re-telling the formative stories which under gird our nation. Religiously, resistance fighters "take the great narratives of religion seriously and do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth" (p. 184). We who live by The Book should find nothing new in this, of course, for the incessant refrain of Deuteronomy, and other sections as well, is the injunction to remember. Remember who God is, remember who we are, remember what God has done for us! And don't stop telling the story!
Postman's work is readable, contemporary, full of helpful illustrations and data. While Ellul and Mumford remain the best analysts of our technological society and its predicaments, Postman is more accessible and equally stimulating.
America as the first-ever technology-worshipping culture
Postman is perhaps (and rightly) better-known for his Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. That books stands alone, but it logically follows his argument in this earlier work. The argument is that there are three types of cultures in the history of the world: 1) Tool-using cultures, of which most cultures are examples, 2) "Technocracies", in which a culture's tools play a significant role in defining the culture (e.g., seafaring in the British Empire), and 3) "Technopoly" (singular because the US is the only historical example), in which a culture is indistinguishable from the tools it uses.
Postman argues that if you take away America's tools (i.e., the television, the automobile, and increasingly the computer), that there would be nothing distinct left to describe as "American culture." He argues persuasively with statistics and anecdotal evidence.
Extremely challenging and insightful -- a must read for every thoughtful American.
Maybe one day the doomsday Postman seemed to be anticipating in this book will come to pass. But I don't think it will be today
Neil Postman was, apparently, a big deal. Upon starting his 1992 book Technopoly I learned that he had died in 2003, which makes the negative parts of this review feel vaguely like I'm speaking ill of the dead. Sorry, Mr. Postman.
Anyway, Technopoly takes the idea behind Aldous Huxley's dystopic novel Brave New World very seriously. Unlike 1984, Huxley's novel imagined a world where we are ruined by what we love, not what we fear. (This idea crops up again in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies to some extent--Huxley was also apparently a big deal.)
What did everyone love in 1992? Technology. Postman fears that as cultures embrace technology more and more readily, they would lose something of themselves. Specifically, in an era that Postman coincidentally calls "Technopoly," people will begin to depend on technology for everything. Problems will be created to be fixed with technology. Faced with an information glut, people will revere data sorting software despite its ostensibly doing nothing of actual use.
I don't know if Postman would agree with me here, but Technopoly seems to be about how to deal with (and resist) a world where computers are becoming more human while humans become more tied to machines than ever before.
While this book was interesting, and likely important, I couldn't take it completely seriously. Postman's use of self-made terms like "technocracy" and "technopoly" made it impossible for me to read the text seriously. Postman's moralistic warnings against technology's dangers also seemed very close to a doomsday scenario. And somewhat one sided.
An entire chapter is dedicated to medical technology. It details the dangers of a technological medial profession: more surgeries and relying on machines for diagnosis. But he almost completely ignores the technological miracles like incubators, which almost exclusively save lives. This one-sided look at technology would be fine, if Postman had not started his book with a drawnout summary of a story about an Egyptian king named Thamus who was famous for looking at a matter from all sides.
There is value Technopoly, particularly when Postman warns of the information glut inherent to a Technopoly culture where computers are so dedicated to producing data. And yet, being in school to become an information professional, I can't help but think we're still smarter than computers. We create all of this information, but there are still discerning information-controllers like teachers and librarians who will maintain the order.
Maybe one day the doomsday Postman seemed to be anticipating in this book will come to pass. But I don't think it will be today or even tomorrow.
Sometimes hard to swallow
Neil Postman could be considered a reactionary against television. Certaintly, this is how many people see him. However, if you really look into his beliefs you'll see that he doesn't like commerical media because it effectively restricts all but the most common denominator. This is because by challenging an audience you run the risk of alienating them which means that your ratings go down and, subsequently, so do your commercial rates... meaning less money.
In a speech to a group of conservative Austrians, Postman stated that television and other new, commericial technologies were all a part of a seductive imperialism of the USA (though not implemented by the government). The real conundrum for Postman though, is that conservatives have come to be defined as always for the capitalist free market, yet state run media, as propossed by conservatives such as Herbert Hoover, would actually be far LESS restricting than commercial media. Because of that, a state run programme would have more content and less focus on sensation. A side affect would eb the return of attention spans greater than a minute or two.
And this, in a nutshell, is how Postman's arguments work. I personally agree with him, but he does often make me depressed... ah well. Was Postman a reactionary? I don't think so. I think, by a cultural vantage, you can clearly see the negative aspects that he's pointing out. But will his message ever be practised? I wouldn't be betting on it.
Like all of Neil Postman's writing, this book is thought provoking and accesable. I highly recommend it.
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