Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology - Hardcover

Postman, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394582721 ISBN 13: 9780394582726

Publisher: Knopf, 1992

Synopsis

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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

y, 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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Reviews

Mixing provocative insights and oft-heard criticism, cultural critic Postman ( Conscientious Objections ) defines the U.S. as an emerging "technopoly," a society in which machines and technology are deified to a near-totalitarian degree. Technopoly elevates experts to "priestly" status, whether in economics or in child-rearing; it maintains a bureaucracy to control the flow of information; it likens human beings to computers in reductionist fashion, misapplies statistics in IQ tests and public opinion polls, and uses advertising to "devour the psyches of consumers" through symbolic manipulation. In medicine, technopoly is evident in doctors who aggressively overuse machines and X-rays. Postman's arguments are sometimes strained (the Bible is an "information control mechanism") and he offers almost no solutions, yet his erudite jeremiad presents a stark, often terrifying vision of a soulless society beholden to machines. He is most original when discussing the social scientist as one who constructs stories using archetypes and metaphors. BOMC alternate; QPB selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Postman (Conscientious Objections, 1988, etc.) once more cuts across the grain as an important critic of our national culture, this time arguing that America has become the world's first ``totalitarian technocracy''--otherwise known as a ``Technopoly.'' Postman starts out from the long view, showing that while every human culture becomes ``tool-using,'' the use of those tools doesn't necessarily change that culture's beliefs, ideology, or world view. In ``technocracy,'' however (for us, this stage began to burgeon in the industrial 19th century), there's a change: tools (they're now called ``technology'') begin to alter the culture instead of just being used by it: ``tools...attack the culture. They bid to become the culture.'' And technocracy becomes Technopoly when tools win the battle for dominance and become the sole determiners of a culture's purpose and meaning, and in fact of its very way of knowing and thinking--or of not thinking. The tools, in other words, come not only to use us but to define what we are--which is ``why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose of meaning, no cultural coherence.'' So desolate a view of generalized inversion and ideological collapse fails to subdue either Postman's humane and faithful energy or his unflagging quickness of mind as he travels from Copernicus, Descartes, and Francis Bacon on through discussions of modern bureaucracy, concepts of worker ``management,'' the intellectual hollowness of social ``science'' and its monster-children of poll- taking and IQ testing--these and others (schools, TV, the computer ``culture'') all being ``technologies'' that in fact are ``without a moral center,'' yet ones that we insistently revere and haplessly measure ourselves by, because ``we have become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies.'' Amusing, learned, and prickling with intelligence, Postman easily outclasses the Allan Bloomians in the grave work of showing how it is that we've now stumbled our way into 1984--and offers, at end, some modest suggestions as to what to do about it. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Postman continues his plea to analyze physical culture in our society which he discussed in earlier books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death (Viking, 1985). He claims that our social institutions have, in effect, become dominated by the technologies that permeate our society. People, including researchers in science and social science, have allowed the use of technology to substitute for their own thinking. Earlier societies in history were tool-using but retained a sense of wholeness and a center of morality that is missing from our society. Postman asserts that there is a technological determinism pervading America that can be restrained, for example, by giving courses in the history and philosophy of technology and in comparative religion. However, his evidence for this critique is narrowly selected, and his discussion is often anecdotal. An optional purchase.
- Christopher R. Jocius, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., Aurora
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0394582721
• ISBN 13: 9780394582726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222