Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman (PDF)

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A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transformation into a society that is shaped by technology—from the acclaimed author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. “A provocative book … A tool for fighting back against the tools that run our lives.” —Dallas Morning NewsThe story of our society’s transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it—with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I got to say, Neil Postman may not have embraced the idea of being a philosopher, he certainly never referred to himself as such, but I can’t help but feel he was very much a philosopher/curmudgeon of his day. I first read of him in “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Both these works critique how technology changes us. Technopoly takes a more in-depth look into the classic arguement of whether or not we control our machines or our machines control us. One thing he does better than anyone else is draws a sharp distinction between technology vs science. It is tempting to use those terms interchangeably when they infact are not.

⭐It is difficult, if not impossible, stray too far into the literature of contemporary cultural criticism without running headlong into a Neil Postman reference…typically brief, often coated with a benign diplomacy that betrays nothing useful, and sometimes with a tone of sighing obligation. It seems that, like Stanley Fish, Neil Postman is one of that breed of intellectual that takes an almost excessive delight in raining on OTHER people’s parades.I’ll admit, as a scholar in my own small right, I felt a bit uncomfortable reading a scholar who…well, deeply questioned whether or not our culture even really understood what “scholarship” really was. (Just read his thoughts on social “science” and the value of “statistics,” and you’ll understand that last sentence.)But Postman is not some sociology prof-reject out to right some past tenure-interview-gone-terribly-awry. The project of “Technology” is at once more basic and more profound. Honestly, I found the argument of the book incredibly simple and easy-to-follow: The relationship of humanity to its technologies has passed through two complete evolutionary stages: from tool-using to technocracy and has now entered a third phase that is the title of the book. The issue here is not the development of specific technologies (note the lowercase “t”) but a shift in the positioning of Technology (note the capital “T”) in relationship to other domains of knowledge. No longer content to coexist with, say, other realms of truth-telling like Religion and Tradition, Technology now threatens to overtake them. As Postman writes:”Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself…It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant” (p. 48).Technopoly is, he summarizes, “totalitarian technocracy.” To put his point in more theological terms that I can better grasp, modern Western societies (especially the USA) now have more faith in the promise of Technology than they do in the promise of Humanity. (Faith in the promise of Divinity began its slow fade with the rise of the Enlightenment, but that is a digression from the topic at hand.) The balance has subtly shifted from optimism that WE (Humanity) could shape Technology to meet OUR ends to a new kind of optimism that Technology could rescue/save US from the frightening ends to which we have put it. So, in the Technopolist world, the answer to, say, the threat of nuclear holocaust is—in fact, MUST be—a technological one. Bigger bombs, better defense systems, satellites with lasers…you get the point, I hope.Postman is not out to destroy Technology; he doesn’t promote some impossible return to a pre-technological age. Rather, he wants to break Technology’s DOMINATION over other ways and realms of human knowing. Postman simply tries to illuminate Technopoly’s slow creep. Ever so subtly, Technology has become the Master and Humanity has assumed the role of servant. Truth is reduced to Data; Wisdom is misidentified as Information. And anything that does not easily convert to a “data-stream” format—any Truth that cannot be spit out as a number in a data table—becomes useless. What makes the effects of Technopoly so insidious is both their subtlety and their pervasiveness. This kind of thinking is literally everywhere, from dating websites that match users based on some system of personality “profiling” to educational assessment strategies that focus on “data-driven decision-making processes” (if I had a dollar for every time I heard THAT phrase at an accreditation conference). And in a Technopoly, the educator doesn’t even think to ask: “Why should data be what drives educational decisions?” What a person earns after completing a college degree actually tells you very little about whether or not they are an “educated” person; it’s simply a good way for the government to track their ROI on student grants & loans programs, a classically Technopolist concern.I suppose it feels a bit overblown to describe a book as “revolutionary.” And perhaps you will think Postman’s work ISN’T that, after all. But it is the closest I’VE come to a “revolutionary” read in the past few years. Postman’s problem is not that his observations are off-base; his problem is that they are prophetic…observations that will “take on” meaning and significance as the decades pass. And, unfortunately, as with the observations of most prophets, I fear their truth will recognized by most in society at a point too late to matter.

⭐The late Neil Postman’s book, Technopoly, is a sobering assessment of a technologically obsessed American culture. The fact that the book was presciently published in 1992, long before the Internet became ubiquitous, is alarming. Don’t be fooled though, Postman isn’t a pure Luddite and this isn’t a book that is anti-technology. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that Postman harbors a sense of digital ambivalence. Like Postman, I don’t necessarily condemn the technologies themselves per se, although I certainly share some of his concerns. Technology can complement human values or it can desecrate them. It all depends on its application. So how did American culture become a Technopoly?According to Postman, a technological history of a society can be broken into three phases: tool-using, technocracy, and Technopoly. In a tool-using culture, technology is used merely as a physical tool (think utensils), where as in a technocracy the tools “play a central role in the thought world of the culture”. In a Technopoly, then, the culture can only be understood through the tools. Technopoly can thus be thought of as a “totalitarian technocracy”. At the time this book was published Postman claimed that United States was the only Technopoly in existence (I suspect he would revise that statement today if he were still alive).A Technopoly is a society that thinks that knowledge can only be had through numbers and thus, it is a society that puts an obsessive focus on trying to quantify life and puts excessive trust in experts. It’s also a society that believes that management is a science. I suspect Postman, if he were still alive, would agree with me that it’s the soft technologies that are the most insidious. You know, things like IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls.The idea of trying to quantify things like mercy, love, hate, beauty, or creativity simply wouldn’t make sense to the likes of Galileo, Shakespeare, or Thomas Jefferson, according to Postman. Yet, this is exactly what many of our platonified social scientists try to do today. He goes on to say that, “If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did.” Or as Marshall McLuhan succinctly put it: “The medium is the message.”So where did this obsessive focus on quantifying begin? Postman traces its history back to the first instance of grading students’ papers (quantitatively), which occurred at Cambridge University in 1792, thanks to the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. Farish’s idea of applying a quantitative value to human thought was crucial to those who believed we could construct a mathematical concept of reality.So what beliefs emerge in the technological onslaught? Here’s one passage that resonated with me.These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.Another modern side effect of Technopoly is information overload and I think it’s fair to say that Postman was disgusted by our obsession with information and statistics. There are statistics and studies that support almost any belief, no matter how nonsensical. Personally, I think Nassim Taleb put it well: “To bankrupt a fool, give him information.” Postman stretches a popular adage to drive home this point himself. “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and therefore, “to a man with a computer, everything looks like data.”Postman reminds us, however, that not all information is created equal. He writes: “Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.” For example, consider the following noise that I’ve made up, but could easily be recited on ESPN: 77% of all Superbowl games have at least one field goal scored within the last seven minutes and 27 seconds of the third quarter. Even if this were true, does it really tell us anything useful? If one has an opinion they want verified, they can easily go on the Web and find “statistics” to support their belief. Sadly, there seems to be not only a market for useless information on the Web today, but for harmful information too.A Technopoly, according to Postman, also promotes the idea that education is a means to an end, instead of being an end in itself. He laments the fact that education is now meant to merely train people for employment instead of instilling a purpose and human values in them.Ultimately, reading this book reminded me that those who don’t learn how to use technology will be used by it.

⭐This book is more relevant now than at the time it was written. Every page had me nodding, dropping my jaw, or saying yes, that’s it exactly. Could not recommend more highly.

⭐Postman is good at showing us the significance of past events and putting a certain history of technology into persppective, and his central complaint, that our unthinking acceptance of technology has taken away something from our lives, is one I applaud and would like youngsters in particular to be aware of. His arguments, however, are rather muddled, and keep coming back to the idea of an earlier culture that worked better for us. This garden of Eden rests on Postman’s faith in Humanism, the idea that if you treat people right all will be well, as a sort of replacement for the earlier and more prescriptive Christian religion.I don’t think the religion of earlier centuries in Britain was good for us; yes it kept people in order, but that order was unfair at best and downright cruel for many (read Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ for an account of cruelty in the name of religious teaching). What went wrong was not so much down to technology as the adoption of money, something that Postman fails to emphasise. Money, by it’s one-dimensional nature that takes no account of damage, pollution, harm to others etc, gave individuals incentives to succeed at things that were not in the interests of society as a whole. Thus selling books became a way of making money, rather than a way of spreading good ideas. Advertising completed the job of creating our consumer society in which wealthy owners of production use others as both slaves to make things, and consumers to demand them – even if they are not really needed.Postman was a writer, not a scientist, and as such I think he lacks the ability to truly understand science. When he points out that people today have no way of knowing whether a statement is true or not (with his examples of ‘false news’ about a miracle compound ‘dyoxin’) he is missing the fact that some of us are indeed able to separate fact from fiction, though it is by a method that is impossible for the majority, who are non-scientists, to understand as it relies on a mode of thinking that has I think to be inculcated from youth. To give my own example of this, take the fact that Toxoplasma Gondii, an organism that multiplies in the guts of cats, also exists in ten to fifty percent of humans in dormant form (depending which country they live in) and appears to change their behaviour. Bizarrely, people involved in serious road accidents are three times more likely to be carrying Toxoplasma. How can I know that this is the cause? Are risk-takers more likely to own cats, or to have bad hygiene around cats? Asking such questions is part of the method by which we arrive at facts, but there is something else. Toxoplasma has been genetically sequenced and found to contain a gene for an enzyme that makes a precursor to Dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain connected with mood. But Toxoplasma has no nervous system, so why would it do that? We understand that it makes it in order to change the brain of rats in order to promote it’s life cycle, by making them attracted to cats! Are humans suffering ‘collateral damage’ because they are mammals with similar nervous systems? Probably!! This is a long example, but it demonstrates that real thinkers do not simply ‘know’ or ‘not know’ but have the ability to find then fit together all the evidence to prove a case. This is what our society is really missing! Instead of teaching facts by rote in schools, we should be teaching real science, it’s methods, and real independent thinking. We also need polymaths; scientists able to cross the artificial boundaries of disciplines; in this case of epidemiology, genetics, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and psychology. Polymaths are in short supply because scientists need jobs that pay them a living, and are not free to follow where their thoughts take them as in Darwin’s day. E O Wilson, famous scientist and evolutionary psychologist pressed for this cross-disciplinary approach in his book ‘consilience’ ePostman would not disagree with this, but he doesn’t even begin to follow it through; instead he seems more of a Luddite wanting to return to former belief systems, despite his emphasis that some technology is beneficial.A topic of urgent importance, much more urgent than Postman could ever have imagined, but a book that is rather out of date and lacking in ideas.

⭐Absolutely fantastic book. Postman organises his points very consicely, often providing some kind of reference or quote with nearly every single one. He packs so many points into a relatively small book, that I found myself making notes of the significant points (of which there were many) as I was going along. I found the book itself to be pretty eye opening and it has certainly changed my perspective on technology.

⭐The book started a bit slowly for me, but after the third or fourth chapter it became really engrossing. There are eleven chapters in all, the last of these contains a prescription for educational systems as well as individuals. The book reads more like a monologue than a traditional philosophy book. It is well-written but easily accessible to non-academics. The main thrust of the author’s thesis is (as I understand it) technology is a moral question: just because something can be done does not imply we ought to do it. Furthermore, we have become indiscriminate in our acceptance of information, which complicates our lives. As I write this, more ideas come to me…I imagine I will re-read this book sometime. There is a lot of good information; this book is an important one for any and all.

⭐Prophetic. It is as Neil Postman knew what was in store for us with the internet (and search engines, and social media) era. To me, this is a book with almost a deliberate disappearence from the mainstream libraries, with such display of hard truths.

⭐Great read, Neil Postman was a great thinker and writer. Highly recommended read for people who think technology is beneficial for our development and overlooking the destructive nature of human domestication and addiction.

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