Human and Technology

March 2013 Technopoly Neil Postman’s 1992 book, entitled Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, is one that explores the fear of the growing realization that we have become a society dominated by technology. Although many people in todays day and age would say that technology and the large array of technological advances of the past decade or so, are both a friend and an enemy, in that they have both benefits and downfalls, Postman’s book arrives at the topic with a pessimistic view of what the dangers of technology is doing to our culture.

Postman opens up his book with a story of the fictional character named Thamus. Retelling the story of Thamus is key in that it opens the door to the notion that we should fear large shifts in where we place our trust of language and it’s understanding. The story of Thamus describes the reluctance to evolve out of oral tradition into writing essay writer prank. The point Thamus makes is that writing will ultimately hinder people because it will no longer require them to exercise their memory, thus they’d become very forgetful with the things they learn.

Technopoly does a great job of putting the reader in the position to stop thinking about all the “great” things that technology and its advances will do for us, and encourages us to take a look into what these technologies will undo for us as a nation. Telegraphy is a topic that is discussed in the book. Neil Postman’s believes that the telegraph changed communication forever. Prior to Samuel Morse’s 1843 invention, information could only travel from one place to another as fast as a train could travel. Which around the time of the invention of the telegraph was about 35 mph.

This invention thus removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information. Telegraphy also changed the communication from a process of understanding into solving a particular problem. Rather than seeing communication as a learning process needed to develop understanding, this quick and easily accessible “information” became context-free information, thus in a way making information a commodity. Telegraphy indefinitely drastically changed the history of communication by essentially instigating the next stage of the “information revolution”. In Postman’s book, Technopoly is this culture that has deified technology.

Although telegraphy is believed to have been what started it, Postman looks at today’s culture and what it has become as a result of our infatuation with technology. It has progressed to the point that we have basically developed something that can think better than we can, and are now finding that individuals and society as a whole is indeed seeking out and finding purpose and direction from technology. We, as a nation, used to be controlled by religious and social traditions, but now the sad reality is that human life has been reduced to finding meaning in machines.

So in attempting to answer the question of whether or not we are a society dominated by technology, Technopoly makes a pretty convincing argument that we in fact are. Looking at how technology has changed how we operate in areas like science, medicine, language, and education, is where we will be able to see the significant shift that has taken place in the past few decades. In regards to the medical industry, one example of the effects of technology has been the shift in trust from man to machine.

Doctors actually trust blindly what machines and tests have to say about the well being of a patient. Granted there are hundreds of pros that come with these medical advances, but the cons are in fact doctors losing their bedside manner, or their weighing of the patients verbal complaints. Another negative effect technology has had on the medical industry is that dehumanization of the patients have become more and more prevalent. Problems are being fixed, rather than patients being cured. In regards to language and science, technology has also had society altering effects.

Our language and how we communicate has become digitalized. No long are communities coming together for block parties, but rather they are all “friend requesting” their neighborhood’s Facebook Page. With science, or the industry side of our nation, humans are being replaced with more efficient machines. They cost less to operate and maintain and can be perhaps 1,000 times as productive in a 24 hour period than a human being could be. One last area, in which Technopoly discusses the negative effects that technology is responsible for, is the area of education in our nation.

The book states that, “knowledge is not a fixed thing but a stage in human development, with a past and future. ” (Postman 190) This idea then infers the question of, what should technology’s role be in education? Education how it was intended to be instills not only knowledge but also a sense of meaning and purpose in a child. Postman’s book then argues that computers, a key symbol in Technopoly, undermine this old idea of school. They do so by eliminating a dependency on an educational environment that values group learning, cooperation, and social responsibility.

In conclusion, it would be foolish of us to denounce the reality that technology and its advances have brought a world of good into our way of life. Having been aware of this though, we need to also become aware of the fact that as much of a friend as technology has been and always will be to us, it can also be our worst enemy that very well might lead us into a future filled with ignorance. Works Cited Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender Of Culture To Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.