Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology [Hardcover]

Neil Postman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 1992 | ISBN-10: 0394582721 | ISBN-13: 978-0394582726 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Neil Postman is one of the most level-headed analysts of education, media, and technology, and in this book he spells out the increasing dependence upon technology, numerical quantification, and misappropriation of "Scientism" to all human affairs. No simple technophobe, Postman argues insightfully and writes with a stylistic flair, profound sense of humor, and love of language increasingly rare in our hastily scribbled e-mail-saturated world. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 222 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (March 17, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394582721
• ISBN-13: 978-0394582726
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #234,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #56 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Culture > Future of Computing

More About the Author

Neil Postman was chairman of the department of communication arts at New York University. He passed away in 2003.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

122 of 126 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a Love-Hate relationship, September 4, 2002

By 

Glen Engel Cox (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Paperback)

I love technology. I tell you this, even though it must be obvious to you considering where these words are appearing. I love technology, but I'm not blind to its problems. To those who say technology has no faults, I ask you when was the last time your computer crashed or whatever happened to that grand notion of a "paperless office"? Technology is something between Pandora's box and Prometheus' gift; I would not want to live without it because I've read history, but I can also imagine an even better world.

Neil Postman may or may not love technology, but he certainly knows its failings. Postman is the author of several books on the interplay between American culture and technology, and his most recent, Technopoly, is in some ways a culmination of his previous efforts. Postman is an educator who is distressed by the state of American education. Instead of simply decrying the fact that schools are changing and moaning for a return to the "good ol' days," Postman took the time to understand the nature of the beast, dissect it, and present his conservation strategy. As he states, his idea of getting "back to the basics" is not quite the same as that typically bandied about by politicians and policy makers.

First, the argument. Postman describes what he calls the three stages of how a culture deals with technology: 1) tool-using, 2) technocracy, 3) technopoly. In a tool-using culture, technical improvements are limited to the uses at hand. This differs from the technocracy, where the tools "play a central role in the thought world of the culture." In the technopoly, tools become the culture. Astute readers may sense a possible linkage here with Alvin Toffler's three waves of culture detailed in The Third Wave. Toffler views each wave as having a trough and crest, with monumental social impact happening as each wave breaks upon the shore of human culture. Toffler says the reason for the breakdown in our traditional structures today is that we are in the break between the second and third wave. Toffler predicts a time of stability in the future, in which this new wave of culture and technology will have enhanced all of our lives. Postman and Toffler are not exactly foes in their views of the waves of culture, but differ on how we are to approach this change. Toffler implies that it will sort itself out -- a type of laissez-faire view of societal change that makes it easier to understand Toffler's ties to Newt Gingrich. Postman feels we must address the change, or it will destroy us.

To that end, Postman writes a history of the growth of technology in American society. His history centers on the impact of technology on the medical profession -- how it saw the progression of each technological stage to the detriment of both doctors and patients. As damning as this evaluation is, he follows it with an even better one from our standpoint: the impact of computers on American culture. As I said before, I love technology, and computer technology most of all, but it was impossible not to follow Postman's clear and reasoned analysis of the computer's impact on society.

Had Postman ended here, having formulated his theory and verified it with examples, the book would have been simply interesting, but Postman follows it with a suggested course of action. It is unsurprising that, as an educator, his solutions center on this area of society, but he states that his suggestions could never be implemented without being supported in the political and legal arenas, to name two. Postman proposes a goal for American education -- no longer, he says, can we simply train people for employment (the current state of education), but we must instill in people a purpose. His proposed goal is the betterment of humanity. To achieve this goal, he suggests that we get back to the basics in our schools, but by this he means the study of the underlying assumptions of our culture rather than just basic skills. That is, he posits a curriculum that includes the history of every subject as part of that subject, including the history (or ideology) of history itself. Only by understanding how we came to be in the place we stand now, will we be able to move forward.

Only a few days before I finished reading Technopoly, Microsoft and MCI announced an initiative to get every public school a presence on the Internet. While it is a generous offer, we should examine the purpose of it all. How exactly will this aid our educational goals? I love technology and I'm bullish on the prospect of the interactive properties of the Internet to help bring about a new form of thinking, critical Americans (especially as opposed to the last mass media technology that came about, television), but that does not mean that the implementation of the technology does not need to be evaluated. And this, in a nutshell, is what Postman is about. I've probably done a major disservice to Postman in summarizing so much of his treatise here, but I hope that it has been sufficiently intriguing that it actually got you to thinking. I suggest as a follow-up that you try the text itself or some of the works listed in the bibliography. It is what I'll be doing.

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Social science as story-telling, August 12, 2000

By 

B. Freeman (poughkeepsie NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Paperback)

I heard Neil Postman on a radio interview for this book, several years before I read "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which I consider a better book. I went back and read Technopoly, because it is (for better or for worse) in many respects a classic in the field. After reading "Disappearance" and "Objections," I've found that Postman does a good job maintaining a basic premise or thesis throughout all of his books.

In technopoly, Postman offers an interesting perspective on those who would "gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved," known as technophiles, and those who are on the other end of the spectrum, I'll call them technocritics. This is a book that clearly defines the potential problems that we may incur if we blindly allow technology to answer society's most pressing questions.

As a quantitative researcher, who recognizes that a qualitative approach is sometimes necessary to tease out the richness of data (perhaps later to be empirically tested), I really enjoyed Postman's perspectives in the chapter titled "Scientism." In this chapter, and throughout the whole book, Postman included wonderful little vignettes: "Freud once sent a copy of one of his books to Einstein, asking for his evaluation of it. Einstein replied that he thought the book was exemplary but was not qualified to judge its scientific merit."

I see there are several other reviews, and so as not to make mine too long, let me end with this summation: Postman is a good writer and he's got lots of interesting threads of reasoning in this book. Not all of his arguments have a tremendous amount of backing, but you will gain valuable persepectives that you may not have thought of/about previously. From that standpoint, and the fact that his paperbacks aren't extremely expensive, I recommend adding it to your shopping basket.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a Provocative, Informative, and Disturbing Book!, June 10, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Paperback)

There is much to learn from this important book. Over the last two hundred years, both science & technology have rapidly & irrevocably changed the face of the earth. In the postindustrial world, we've banished infectious diseases from our midst (at least temporarily), have instituted public health & sanitation measures, and have made creature comfort a part of everyman's lifestyle. Yet, there is profound and widespread concern regarding exactly where technological innovation is taking us, what this mysterious journey will cost us in terms of a sustainable and palatable ecosystem, and exactly who (if anyone) is driving this huge and anonymous innovative juggernaut. This book deals provocatively with this issue; i.e. the promulgation of a culture in which science and technology have come to assume the pivotal role in our society.

Sociologist Max Weber warned almost 100 years ago of an alarming tendency in western civilization to displace our tradition-based religious cultural ethos with a dangerously superficial "faux" rationality in which all decisions and all measures would come to be made more and more exclusively by scientific and logical means. Yet science by its very nature cannot answer questions dealing with values, advising us as to what is right, or good, or best. It can only speak to us in terms of effective and efficient means to achieve such cultural values and social ends. It is this tension between a human-oriented cultural ethos, on the one hand, and scientific progress through technological innovation not so oriented on the other that is Mr. Postman's real subject.

Mr. Postman understands that science and technology are both our friends and our antagonists, and as our amigo the Unabomber has pointed out, what technical innovation introduces as "voluntary and optional" soon becomes "compulsory and obligatory", as did the introduction of automobiles and traffic regulation. In this fashion, by flooding our social, economic, and political environment with items and objects that drive the nature of society as much as enhance it (can anyone now doubt that the introduction of personal computers poses such a double-bind?), we are radically changing the nature of our society and its culture without benefit of any guiding values, precepts, or notions as to what is best for our people and our community other than to allow frenzied competition between technological rivals to see who can unlease the latest/neatest technological innovation to make our lives easier or entertain us more cleverly. Our direction in terms of progress seems to be random, at best, and Postman argues most persuasively that there are hidden dangers to our freedoms, our prosperity, and even our awareness that result from this surrender to the indifferent impulses of technological innovation. We best recognize this indifference and the dangers it poses for a free and open society.

As author Sales Kirkpatrick notes in his wonderful book "Rebels Against the Future", "technology is never neutral"; it carries out its exclusively rational and logical intent to its conclusion. Yet often the fact that this conclusion is not necessarily in the public interest or consistent with the long-term goals and aspirations of our culture seems somehow irrelevant. Yet it is anything but irrelevant; it is central to the question as to how critically important decisions regarding our future and well-being are to be made, and on what basis. Will we have a society in which such decisions are made through open debate in a public forum, or one in which the decisions are made for us, based on market projections, what can be sold and distributed, researched based on its sales potential in anonymous test tubes and clinical labs, where the latest in scientific certainty is readied for pandemic public introduction? Time is growing short and we must soon decide. This is a fascinating, provocative, and important book. Read it!