Review: Technopoly, by Neil Postman
Overall rating: 5/5
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology is a provocative, highly entertaining book. As you may expect from Postman (or from the in-your-face subtitle), this is not a paean to technology. Rather, it is a warning that technology comes at a high cost, a subtle, slow process in which humanity turns away from the values it once cherished, as it pursues the virtues of technology for its own sake. Whether you agree with this premise or not is not the point. Postman is a true intellectual. He has enough intellectual honesty to explore the strengths and weaknesses of his ideas, and to provide a rational, as opposed to a purely emotional, argument in favor of his views. Add to that the fact that Postman is a marvelously entertaining writer, and you have every reason to read this book.
Postman’s book starts out with an informal division of societies according to the way in which they interact with new technologies. The first type of society is a tool using society, characterized by a controlled interaction with technology. In a tool using society, society’s values, its mores, its sense of right and wrong, all these things are given meaning by the society as a whole. Such a society has a clear (possibly wrong, but always clear) story detailing how the universe works. This story may come from religion, or it may come from tradition, patriotism, or other similar sentiments. These societies may or may not be technologically advanced. Regardless of their technological sophistication, what sets these societies apart is the tight control with which they shackle technology’s sphere of influence.
The second type of society is a technocracy. These societies are characterized by the notion that technological progress equates to human progress. Technology, and the pursuit of technology, becomes a virtue in its own right, because new technology inevitably leads to human progress. As technological progress becomes a driving force, other virtues compete with technology for dominance in the culture. And as the ideas behind technology, such as science and mathematics, take hold of the society, other virtues find themselves competing on technology’s turf. This means that virtues which can not be quantized become peripheral. Quality of service (in terms of food, medicine, advice) are reduced to numbers, such as waiting time, or throughput.
This leads to a technopoly, the third type of society, in which technology has managed to push the other societal virtues aside. In a technopoly there is no room for feelings, or supernatural beliefs, or mystery. Truth is sacrificed in the name of precision, mystery in the name of science, and dignity in the name of efficiency. In a technopoly, the old stories that held society together become quaint relics, hurdles for the mind to cross over using technological means.
Postman’s theme is that every technology brings with it a worldview, a story, or a metaphor. And that these stories may come into conflict with the original stories of society, robbing the latter of their power and meaning. Postman explores several technologies — the printing press, the number zero, television, the stethoscope, formal education, the computer, and many others — and examines how they shaped the society in which they developed, and how they are shaping us today.
Many have accused Postman of being a Luddite, of trying to turn the clock back centuries. This is a misconception fueled in part by the title of one of his other books, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century. But that’s not it at all. Postman does not wish to give up writing, or electricity, or the printing press, or modern hygiene. Nor does he wish to do away with television, video games, rap music, or computers. What he does want is for us to look at these things with open eyes. He wants us to be “loving resistance fighters” to technology, fueled with a healthy skepticism towards progress, not to prevent progress from occurring, but to preserve the things we love that we may not even be aware of losing. He wants us, in other words, to consider what is the proper place for television (or computers, or ….) and decide what we want it to be, before such technology is so ingrained in our society that our virtues and our goals become television’s (or computers’, or ….) virtues and goals. That’s not too much to ask, is it?