Some thoughts on Technopoly

This article submitted by Peter on 10/25/97.

Topic:

Thoughts:

When Neil Postman wrote the book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he had in mind the idea of showing the faults of technology in our lives and showing us how to combat the fact that we as a society are becoming dangerously dependent on our technology. His basic idea is that the United States has become a "Technopoly," a dangerous state of affairs where our culture, our ideas, and our very lives are becoming subservient to the technology we use. Through the book, Postman intended to show the dangers of this idea, and how we could stop them.
He intended to accomplish this by first giving a history of our civilization, especially our nation, in terms of our ascendency from a tool-using culture through "technocracy" to Technopoly. After this overview, he would get to the meat of his overall theses, by discussing the world in which we live and how impossible and strange it is. Following that he attempted an analysis of the now-defunct defenses against Technopoly, such as school and religion. Then he continued by providing specific examples of how technology has worked for the worse in computers and medicine. He then made a very lengthy discussion on so-called "Invisible Technologies," the covert attempt to turn human nature into an efficient, countable machine. He raged against such things as the zero, the public opinion poll, and statistics. After a discussion of the ideas of science solving all our human nature problems (he ridiculed the so-called social scientists) he ended with a discussion of the loss of meaning through technology and finally, in a single chapter, what we as people can do to stop the spread of "Technopoly."
The ideas of Mr. Postman are very good ones, as far as he meant them to go. In the first chapter he gave a parable of Theus, who invented writing, and then went to the King Thamus to show him his great work. Thamus then pointed out to the man that his ideas that writing is not all good, but that "people will lose their memory, and...will be thought knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant." Postman states that "We may learn from [Thamus] that it is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either or but this-and-that." (Postman, 4-5). At this point Postman is quite correct; no technology is all good or all bad, but a tradeoff between the two, sometimes favoring good, sometimes bad. However, following this, he forgets that he has acknowledged the good of technology and then proceeds to attack it throughout the rest of the book. As Daniel Siff said in his review "the opinion presented is somewhat on the extremist side in terms of its negative inclination..." This is self evident. Although Postman raises some very valid points of which we must be aware, he is extremely pessimistic in his views toward technology, despite his protestations to the contrary; in fact, besides the first chapter where he makes a claim to standing in the middle, he refuses to acknowledge the good of technology. There are also a number of hypocritical aspects to the book, such as his use of statistics and social sciences to back up his point after ridiculing statistics and social sciences. Another aspect is that he speaks on topics he has no firsthand knowledge about. He also refuses the notion that humans in general can decide for themselves the worth of certain types of information. His book raises many questions that are very poignant and deep, but he is too close to the situation to declare himself an objective and non-biased source.
One major argument against this piece is that he has no background in criticizing much of what he is arguing against. His ideas about medical technology, especially are to be taken with a grain of salt because his inexperience. He is the chair of a communications department at New York University, not a medical doctor in practice at a premier place. How can he reconcile his views with the established medical practice which has really pushed for better technology. How can he say what the doctors think without he himself being a doctor? However, he does raise some good points with his statistics. We do need to raise the red flags a little bit over his disturbing information. However, his ideas on the psychology of medicine are not to be taken seriously. For instance, he asserts that with the advent of the stethoscope and other medical technology "medicine is about the disease, not the patient."(Postman, 100) He is at least partly correct; medicine is about curing diseases, and the people. However, technology is not the cause of this thinking--Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the main proponents of this thinking, was practicing very "disease-oriented" medicine before the invention of the stethoscopes. On the other side of the spectrum, even now, the way a patient feels is still one of the main tools for diagnosis. Mr. Postman, who is very qualified to write about a lot of subjects, cannot think that he can write about medicine and what doctors think.
Another point in which Mr. Postman goes to the extreme on is the theory that information will not solve problems. Postman tries to stress that we are suffering from an "information glut" and "information chaos" (Postman, 60). He claims that "there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information." (Postman, 60) But on the other hand, there are absolutely no political, social, and personal problems that can be treated with ignorance. Obviously, there is a lot of information out in the world today; more than ever, we have information about almost every single subject. However, is it so bad? His idea is that it causes confusion, because people cannot decide what information is relevant to our lives. Mr. Postman seems to believe that people ought to be told how to think, how to value information, and how to work. Should we as a world go back to the belief that the world is flat? That is the kind of thing we could do, and it would help us value information. Of course we have a lot of informational garbage which is of little use to anyone--the internet, for example. But perhaps one of those facts is exactly what people need somewhere else in the world to solve a problem. The internet facilitates that. Quicker communications make it possible. Under no circumstances could any sane man call that wrong. Some information helps make the masses more knowledgeable, wise, and able to make good decisions. We have to learn how to decide for ourselves how to prioritize information, not Mr. Postman's idea that the schools should teach a "serious student how they ought not to think." Instead, they should teach how to decide for yourself, based on your own values, how to think. How can anyone say that we ought to let anyone else tell us how to think—the most anyone ought to do is influence our values and opinions.
Mr. Postman, in fact, discusses how technology influences our opinions. One thing he discusses are public opinion polls and statistics. He rejects polling outright because they are designed to elicit yes or no responses, and also depend on how the question is phrased. He used the example that the Pope asked by two priests whether smoking during prayer is permissible.
One priest phrased the question "Is it permissible to smoke while praying?" and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one's whole attention; the other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking, and was told that it is, since it is always appropriate to pray.

Here he makes a very valid point; we must be careful to see how questions are phrased, as it will affect the response. However, in many cases it is important that for a leader to stay in touch with his people, he does occasionally know what they want. If the function of a democratic republic is to let the people rule through their representatives, it is obvious that letting our representatives know what we want is very productive in that it allows them to follow the will of the people. To rail against that because it takes away some initiative from the lawmakers attacks the foundations of a democracy, that is to not let any one person have too much power. If lawmakers were not answerable to some larger force (i.e., the people), then they would become invincible, and would better themselves at the expense of the general public.

Excuse the grammar and the incoherency; I am trying to put all my thoughts down. Comments would be appreciated. Thank you very much.

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