Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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76 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a Love-Hate relationship, September 4, 2002
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.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Social science as story-telling, August 12, 2000
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.
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86 of 101 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profoundly important and often disturbing book, June 16, 2000
This is one of those books that make you think the only reason it isn't permanently on the New York Times Bestseller List (or the top 100 of the Amazon.com list) is because the general public is either too afraid to read it after seeing the subtitle, or people in power have been doing everything they can to render it unattractive. With every new innovation and social argument today, from birth control and feminism to the media and privacy, we all find ourselves suspiciously willing to turn over every intellectual rock and make hamburger out of every sacred cow in the search for enemies, heroes, reasons and justifications for our beliefs and actions. Yet with fear and trembling we all ignore this one- which Neil Postman makes all too clear may be the only one we should be discussing: the surrendering of all of our true sense of freedom, independence, responsibility and community to the wrathful, jealous god of Technology. In the opening to the book he quotes a philosopher who sums up his entire point with an idea that puts our entire cultural period into a disturbing perspective: regardless of its basis in scientific innovation and theory, technology "is a branch of moral philosophy, not science." The mere thought that our entire world and the daily transformations taking place in it may be in the wrong hands- at our request- and that THAT is the explanation for the incredible degree of unquestioned, unexamined change, is enough to make you afraid of your computer. And remember, this book was published years before Dolly the cloned sheep came to town, or we were anywhere near as close to charting the entire human genome. (Like the relationship of Einstein's theories to the Manhattan Project, with that alone we have no idea what world we are in store for or what war in the twenty-first century will be like; yet we go blindly onward, giving our scientific leaders and CEOs of industry carte blanche, without questioning if we have a choice.) Postman simply makes it clear that the people who are taking us where we are headed don't really know what they're doing anymore than we do in terms of the implications for our culture- or any culture's- future, and really don't care. Because they have sold their souls to the idea of progress and markets- falling in line with the dictates of the cult of technology. Many countries around the world see Globalization as little more than the Americanization of the world, like Rome around the time of Christ. Postman's TECHNOPOLY makes it clear that that force may have malevolent implications because it could actually be built upon the transformation of American democracy and culture into that of technological fascism. With every chapter, some almost hilarious in the little absudities we live by made clear, some scary in their implications and explanations of the seemingly unrelated ills of our world, Neil Postman creates one of the greatest and most important diagnoses of the Achilles heel of modern Western Society ever written. TECHNOPOLY is prophetic, and like every prophet, what he has to say will only be apocalyptic to our world if we choose to ignore it.
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