Social Elisions in Technopoly

This article submitted by Kathleen on 6/18/02.

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It is interesting to note to what extent the logic of Postman's argument rests upon ignoring "positive" social transformations brought about by technological "advances" in the twentieth century. Domestic labor has become less tiresome, less time-consuming, and less gendered with the advent of modern domestic technologies such as the vacuum and the dishwasher (we still have a long way to go!). The disabled have gained more mobility and inclusion through the use of assistive technologies such as wheelchairs and hearing aids (again, this is only a starting point). Reproductive technologies assist women with preventing unwanted pregnancy and facilitating wanted pregnancies in the face of medical challenges to fertility (if only insurance companies would agree!). Information and media technologies have helped to further civil rights and galvanize groups of people working for social change (still more must and is being done to gain social equity for all). In choosing to ignore these substantial benefits of technology to hitherto disenfranchised groups, Postman betrays an ableist, theocratic, misogynistic, and racist view of the world. Following his logic to its inevitable conclusion, one is asked to see humans as having no agency, subservient to tools and their ideological biases. In his view, the world is negatively transformed to such an extent that pre-Galilean European medievalism is celebrated as a time when the world was more comprehensible, safe, and meaningful. Maybe for those who enjoyed the privilege of social power such as monarchs, landowners, and the socially advantaged! The "information chaos" theory Postman forwards also deprives humans of agency by asserting that we are unable to make sense of the vast quantities of information available to us; presumably, a time before the printing press or Internet when illiteracy was (and still is!)used as a tool of social control by church and monarchy(in keeping with Postman's Eurocentric treatment of this issue) is not seen as an ideologically packed tool in and of itself. Discourses, ideologies, and agendas are conveyed with more than just "tools." The pre-Industrial world Postman romanticizes was shot through with ideologically fraught tools of social control and technologies that deprived people of autonomic agency, social equity, and epistemological meaning much in the way he claims scientific technologies have: the distribution of wealth was (and still is!) utterly imbalanced, and technologies of that age (the wheel, the mill, armor, the horse) were used to leverage social power against those who had little ability to resist or defy (the poor, women, anyone perceived as "different," anyone maligned by theology such as Galileo). The world Postman describes when he uses the anecdote of the comfort rendered by a priest's explanation of death to a believer is a world which could only be a comfort to white, able, privileged men. In fact, Postman's argument thinly veils a misogynistic plea to return to a world where social authority was vested in theocratic social structures which benefited an elite few. If Postman had done a fair assessment of the benefits and dangers of technology, his argument would have been more defensible. Many feminist and post-colonial theorists discuss the losses and dangers of overadherence to technologically reliant modes of existence while weighing out the gains of those who have achieved social recognition and improved lived experience through the uses of technology. Postman is not simply arguing that technology has transformed our way of being and thinking: he is positing a cosmological, teleological view of a world governed by the Great Chain of Being. What is dangerous about this view is its seductiveness for ecologically/environmentally concerned people, Luddites, those who disdain the sovereignty of State apparati, and technological abuse. It is tempting to think Postman is simply arguing for a skeptical, critical approach to how we use technology and allow it to inflect in our social institutions and modes of living. Perhaps if Postman had linked his critique of "technopolization" to structures such as globalism, which hegemonically encroaches upon "tool using," non-capitalistic cultures, or capitalism, which exploitatively forces overadherence to technology for the aim of increasing profitability, productivity, and market share, his argument might have been more compelling and less "technophobic" to some and, to me, less logically problematic.

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