| | |  | Scott Berkun | Home » » Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology | | | | | | | Description: | | In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our 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. | | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780679745402
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Neil Postman | | Paperback:
| 240 pages | | Publisher:
| Vintage | | Publication Date:
| March 31, 1993 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0679745408 | | Package Length:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.2 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.8 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.65 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 62 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Technopoly: Very thought provokingSep 28, 2009
Took about a month to get my book but that was the snail-mail factor probably. This book is very thought provoking. I never would have
made the ironic link between Gutenburg's press and the rise of Protestantism.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Thought provokingSep 09, 2009
This is definitely one of the most important books that I have read. The author tries to explain how some things that are taken for granted have a huge impact on our lives. The author raises some really interesting, and disturbing, questions. Science is being treated like a God (people used to argue that certain things were right because God said so, now we argue that things are right because science has proved so) and computers are being treated like human beings (a computer is "infected" by a "virus" that is "contagious" and should be "treated" or even "quarantined"). The worst thing is that humans are being stripped of their humanity. We rank people, we assign numbers to their beauty, their intelligence, and many other things. Social sciences are being treated like physics although the former is concerned with humans that have feelings, that react and that think while physics is concerned with objects. The book doesn't ask if technology is good or bad, it just asks what role technology should be confined to. Recommended for everyone.
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Boring ... nothing specialMay 30, 2009
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.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 TechnopolyMar 13, 2009
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.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
America as the first-ever technology-worshipping cultureJan 29, 2009
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.
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