Technopoly: The Surrender Of Culture To Technology (1993) - Plot & Excerpts
Being a social critic must be a lonely job. No one wants to hear what he says, I imagine, besides those already disillusioned with the system. For those though who have a vague sense that something somewhere has gone wrong but lack the words to articular exactly what, the social critic serves an essential function. He helps diagnose the problem. Neil Postman did this in his work Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I read years ago, when he talked about the way that television has shaped public dialogue. One of the main themes in that book is that the medium is never neutral-- it shapes the message and the type of dialogue that can be conducted. Whereas print allows a certain level of dialogue and reflection, the medium of television news-- depending as it does on sensationalism and catering to the limited attention span of viewers, upon which their marketing model is sustained-- cannot. In this book, Technopoly, Postman takes his idea of the impossibility of a neutral medium deeper with his critique of the assumptions that underlie our technological world.Postman believes that the United States has become the world’s first “Technopoly.” In the first few chapters of the work, which was written in the 1990s, he sets out what this means with an overview of the history of technology that, though problematic in some respects, draws widely on many well-known historians of technology. (Indeed, the primary reason I read this book was because I wanted to get a sense for whether it would work for a history of technology unit in a history of science course I’ll be teaching in the spring, and these chapters indeed fit the bill for a general student reader.) Postman wants to chart the transition from societies in which tools are used by humans (a tool-using society) to a society in which those tools bring about radical social changes (what Postman calls a technocracy) and ultimately to the society we have today, one in which we no longer shape tools for ourselves but in which we shape ourselves for our tools (a Technopoly).There are a lot of generalizations at play here, as one would expect in a three-chapter survey of the history of technology. Postman shows how the technology of writing transformed society and created an abundance of information that required institutions to manage. Schools and universities, for instance, arose in large part to help sort, organize, evaluate, and manage the new information created by the technology of printing. In the past century, Postman argues, technologies increasing the amount and immediacy of information-- the telegraph, telephone, television, and finally computer-- have proliferated much faster than the capacity of the institutions that exist to manage that information. The result in today’s Technopoly is a flood of information that exists without content, context, or relevancy; the assumption that information is good and valuable for its own sake; and the belief that society’s ills arise from a lack of information that only more information-generating technology can solve. One of the main threads in Postman’s argument is against these last two flawed (but overwhelmingly accepted) assumptions in today’s society.Another complaint of Postman’s regarding technology’s role in society is the way humans become subordinate to technology. Postman’s claim is not simply that technology creates problems in today’s world; it’s deeper and more subtle than that. Postman wants to show the unperceived and unquestioned ways technology shapes thought. Against those who believe technological progress is always desired and inevitable, Postman argues technology is not value-neutral. It carries with it a host of assumptions that fundamentally change the way humans interact with each other and their environment and conceive of the natural and social world. He provides specific examples from the field of medical and computer technology. The primary problem, he says, is the familiar adage that to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. Machines depend for their functioning upon the reduction of things to uniformity, automated processes, and problems of efficiency. The usurpation of culture by technology, Postman argues, takes place when this becomes the lens through which all human interactions are viewed. Machines predispose us to see social interactions in these reductionist, efficiency-driven terms. In these cases, Postman says, we are no longer simply using our machines; they are shaping the way that we view the world.Postman takes this argument further by discussing “invisible” technologies-- that is, technologies we use every day but that we don’t normally think of as technologies. His big examples here are the practices of standardized testing, questionnaires, polling, and the tools of social scientists-- basically the perceived ability to objectively quantify specific traits. A standardized test is a technology, and again it’s a technology that has shaped the way we perceive the world. It allows us to believe that nebulous traits like empathy, beauty, and intelligence can be reduced to a number, and it causes us to reify things like “intelligence” that don’t really exist. Intelligence, empathy, beauty-- they’re not things; they’re complex qualities that exists in different ways in different people in different circumstances.The results of all this, Postman says, is that our culture places an inordinate faith in applying the methods of natural science-- quantification, empirical observation, testing-- to places where they never belonged in the first place, the realm of human interaction and society. Postman has a long screed against social scientists, who he believes misuse the tools of scientific practice and have contributed nothing to the actual understanding of the human mind or human interactions. I find this generalization to be a bit dangerous, especially the division he makes between studying the processes of nature (allowable via the scientific method) and human practices (not allowable, because humans are too complex). What would Postman make of the burgeoning field of neuroscience, for instance, which combines aspects of the social sciences with biology and psychology? The divisions here are, I think, more tenuous than Postman allows.As a critique of a society that unquestioningly embraces technology and all the reductionist assumptions it entails, this book-- published over twenty years ago-- still seems incredibly relevant. No technology is value-neutral-- for good or ill, using it has radical effects on human relationships (and this is where one can’t help but wonder what Postman would make of the internet today and the efflorescence of social media). Deeper than that though, Postman believes technology shapes the way we view the world. Computers, for instance, don’t simply process data for us; they give us an entirely new language. They cause us to re-conceptualize our problems in mechanistic terms, even when this is inappropriate. In some cases we start treating computers like people, and in many cases we start treating people like computers. His conclusion-- the “what can we do about it”-- chapter of the book warms the heart of a historian of science. Postman says that the only place the problems of Technolopy can be address are in the schools (which are themselves a form of technology). The key, Postman claims, to helping people see the problematic assumptions of Technopoly is teaching the history of every discipline, especially the history and philosophy of science. It’s only by seeing the way in which what we know-- or think we know-- has changed over time that we can teach students to see and question the assumptions that today’s culture rests upon. As much as I agree with the call to historicizing knowledge (and Postman is right-- this is the only way for knowledge to become more than a consumer product), the grand narrative of human progress that Postman thinks teaching should be structured around smacks of the very technological determinism that he is trying to avoid.Most of society focuses on what we gain with technology; Postman wants to make us consider what we lose, but more than that he wants to warn against the standards of Technopoly-- efficiency, information, standardization, immediacy-- becoming the standards of culture. This is a warning that is just as poignant now, if not more so, than it was when the book was first written.
A large part of this is just stating what I would take to be pretty much the obvious. No ‘new technology’ is ever fully positive or fully negative. I can’t remember where I heard recently that an environment that has rabbits added to it is not, say, the Australian bush with rabbits, but actually a new environment. Technology does much the same thing with the human environment. The 1950s were not really just the 1940s with television added and the 2000s weren’t just the 1980s with the internet – new technologies create a new environment and that new environment has both benefits and disadvantages when compared with what came before.Except, of course, we live in a world where we don’t like to talk about the disadvantages. Technology, in Mr Postman’s opinion, leads to Technopoly and Technopoly is a kind of society that is obsessed with the benefits of technology to the point where everything needs to be measure and assessed on the basis of how ‘efficient’ it is. This is a book that challenges this cult of efficiency and that looks at some of the disadvantages technologies (particularly computer technologies) have brought to our world. This book was written in the early 1990s, i.e. well before the internet as we know it now. As you know, there have been quite a few books in the meanwhile talking about the negative impacts of the internet – particularly on quality journalism (if that is not an oxymoron).It wouldn’t be fair to call Postman a Luddite – his criticism is both careful and intelligent. He points out that we have become obsessed with the scientific method – a method that we think is about measuring everything and about coming up with strict laws that the world is to conform to and that this is the aim of the ‘social sciences’ as well. There is a lovely part where he says that the nineteenth century created images of people that were presented to us by novelists, so Dickens might create a Uriah Heep and we might then use this character as a basis for categorising or understanding a certain type of person. Today we would be much less likely to do that, today we tend to base out character types on the work of social scientists, such as Freud, Erik Erikson, Marx and so on. This is an interesting change and an interesting observation. Postman says science is only properly applicable to processes, but the proper sphere for social ‘sciences’ is ‘practices’. The difference being that processes (such as water boiling) are measurable and conform to universal laws that are discoverable and describable. Practices, such as drinking tea (as strange as this may sound) are not universal and actually depend on a particular culture. When the tools of science are applied to practices, rather than processes, it is remarkable how often we are left with banalities masquerading as profundities. Postman quotes a study that found that most humans are afraid of death… I guess scientists may one day even have the technology to be able to prove that people like food and quite enjoy sex.He makes the interesting point that we are a society obsessed with information, but that we have lost an overarching belief system that would allow us to filter that information and thereby make sense of it. Let me give you a case in point. The other night I received an email from someone I love very much that said that next month Mars would be closer to the Earth than it had for thousands of years and that it would appear to be about the size of the full moon in the night sky. It turns out that this is one of those bizarre hoaxes (I’ve never quite understood the joy people must get from spreading this stuff) – but Postman’s point is that we are so swamped today with useless and effectively meaningless information that we have become quite credulous. And why shouldn’t we be? We are confronted with an enormous ocean of information and most of it bombards us piecemeal as unconnected factoids. There was a time when religion provided the overarching framework to judge the worth of information – but religion has lost its ability to play that role. However, we do need a way to separate the meal from the dross. Interestingly, he says that one of the few ways left in the US is the legal system. Courts have rules around what constitutes evidence and president and as such courts are one of the few remaining ‘arbiters of truth’ left in society – which Postman uses as a possible explanation for Americans' tendency to be quite so litigious. He ends his book by talking about how to fix things. I tend to agree with him, but I can also see that many people would find this quite an unsatisfying part of the book. He points out that we should become loving freedom-fighters. This is from a part of the book that ought to make Americans feel very proud. It explains how the US has stood as an example to the rest of the world in its ongoing experiment in democracy. He also talks of the need to change the way we teach children – first that they need to become aware of the fact that what is worthwhile requires effort and second that they need to understand subjects have a history. In fact, he reiterates Marx’s view that all subjects are essentially history. That it is impossible to understand electricity without understanding the history of the concept, you know, from Maxwell on. I think this is wonderful advice – it does seem to be something the publishing world has jumped on recently, with lots of books published about say the potato or nutmeg or the number zero and the impact these have had through time. There are nice things in this book about technologies and many things I didn’t know. I knew it was a huge innovation that zero was introduced into our numbering system, and that our placement system of numerals (0-9) made things infinitely easier for mathematics than Roman numerals. Imagine multiplying MCVI by CLXVII – except, as Postman points out, no one ever really did. Roman numerals were for writing numbers, not really for manipulation – arithmetic manipulation was done on counting machines like abacuses.There is probably a little too much reliance on Popper’s views of science theory in the book – it is hard to imagine, but Popper’s theory of refutation isn’t the only theory in the history of the philosophy of science. Nevertheless, he does make a strong case for why science is really about limiting imagination and reducing, as much as possible, the number of hypothesises in any given subject. He gets this idea from The Ascent of Man. This is not meant as a criticism of science, but rather as a statement of nearly banal fact.I think the main idea to take away from this book, though, is that despite our obsession with information it is probably not the case that what we need to fix any of the real problems facing us today is more information. Global poverty, for example, will not be solved by more information, nor will war or global warming. He makes the impressive rhetorical point that if computers had been invented before the atom bomb was developed that people would have said that we could not have invented the atom bomb without the computer. The fact that we did invent it without the computer does seem remarkable – and the fact it does seem remarkable says much about the culture we live in.And the last thing I want to refer to before ending this review is that he has a very interesting take on the Milgram Experiment (the one where people administer electric shocks to people they cannot see up to the point where the people they cannot see appear to die, the test of authority and empathy). He points out that it is hard to know what this experiment really tells us. His view is that it tells us what people do in the very bizarre and unnatural setting of a psychology lab – and tells us remarkably little about what people are like in the real world. As he points out, how would we fit the Danes into this experiment, the ones who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi death camps? Should we say the Danes contradicted Milgram’s experiment? Although I still find the Milgram Experiments deeply troubling, I do think he has a point that studying people in highly artificial environments should give us pause before accepting uncritically the conclusions from such studies.Postman’s books are always thought-provoking – I enjoyed this one very much.
What do You think about Technopoly: The Surrender Of Culture To Technology (1993)?
This book exceeded my expectations. I found it far more persuasive and relevant than Amusing Ourselves to Death, the other Postman book I have read. Amusing Ourselves to Death was a critique of a specific technology—television—which has already fallen out of fashion in the internet age and is not the culture-shaping force that Postman saw it as. Even though Technopoly is also old for a book on technology and modern culture (it was published in 1992), it has aged well and its points are still very relevant to our modern society, because Postman is not critiquing a specific technology, but a worldview—one that has only grown stronger since the time of his writing. Also, while Amusing Ourselves to Death takes a stance that is essentially against television in all ways and forms because the medium itself is destroying the world, Technopoly, from page 1, stresses the point that all technologies have both positive and negative effects. While Amusing Ourselves is a apologetic for print as much as a critique of television, Technopoly begins by observing the downsides of print, such as the way that it degrades memory by causing people to rely on written records. Overall, Technopoly presents a far more interesting and nuanced argument than its predecessor.Merely comparing this book to another of Postman's would be a rather poor-excuse for a review. And while I am not above posting poor excuses for reviews, I feel that I also ought to explain more generally what I appreciated about this book.Postman's main thesis is roughly that all technologies have both positive and negative effects inherent to their nature, and that a careful consideration of the effects of a given technology on our culture should precede society's adoption of new technologies. Postman convincingly argues that new technology does not always improve the world and that innovation is not the same as progress. While acknowledging that technology has brought many wonderful benefits to society, he warns about the problems caused by overgeneralizing the benefits of a successful technology. He describes for instance, the way that technologies from numeric grades to the computer have created a culture of numbers where great efforts are made to treat every part of our world as "data" that can be numerically measured, without concern for the impossibility of representing the complexities of human character with simple statistics. He also relates how the success of medical technologies, from stethoscopes to antibiotics, has led to their overuse in American medicine, to the point where thousands of Americans die every year from unnecessary surgeries. Postman effectively argues that we must view our technologies as tools, items that we control, rather than being controlled by. Instead of trying to adapt to problems of our world to fit our technologies, we should accept the limitations of technology, and place a greater value on intangible human attributes that machines cannot replicate.Though I came into this book with a hearty distrust for new technologies, Postman significantly broadened and deepened the way I think about technology, and has helped me to be more thoughtful in my own use of technology. This is a book I would recommend to anyone who interacts with 21st century American culture.
—Calvin
The resistance fighters against Technopoly are those who:-Pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked, and why;-Refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations;-Have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgement, or precision as a synonym for truth.-Refuse to allow psychology or any 'social science' to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense.-Are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding.-Do not regard the aged as irrelevant-Take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honour, and who, when they 'reach out and touch someone', expect that person to be in the same room.-Take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth.-Know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity's sake.-Admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement.New technologies compete with old ones - for time, for attention, for money. This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that a medium contains a ideological bias. This is apparent in schools, as we have on one hand the world of the printed word with its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment and discipline. On the other, the world of television, with its emphasis on imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, intimacy, immediate gratification and quick emotional response. Children come to school having been deeply conditioned by the biases of television. There they encounter the world of the printed word, and a sort of psychic battle takes place.New technologies alter the structure of our interests: The things we think about.They alter the character of our symbols, the things we think with.They alter the nature of community, the arena in which thoughts develop.In tool-using cultures, technology was subordinate to culture, invented to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, or serve the symbolic world of art, politics, myth and religion.Three medieval European technologies: The clock, providing a new conception of time, the printing press, attacking the epistemology of the oral tradition, and the telescope, attacking the fundamental propositions of the Judeo-Christian theology. Each of these was significant in creating a new relation between tools and culture.The school can be thought of as a necessary response to the anxieties and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The invention of was is called a curriculum was a logical step toward organising, limiting and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy's first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimising some parts of the flow of information and discrediting other parts. Schools were, in short, a means of governing the ecology of information.Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose it serves.Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information.In principle a bureaucracy is a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing. They were originally designed to only process technical information, they are now commonly employed to address problems of a moral, social, and political nature. Technopoly's bureaucracy claims sovereignty over all of society's affairs. It prizes efficiency above anything else, most especially the messy and unreliable human element.What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, it evokes a sense of wonder, rather than understanding. Similarly machines would have us believe that intelligence can be reduced to being defined by a number, leaving out all the complexity and nuance.There are no longer methods of treating illness, there is only one - technological one. And technology creates its own imperatives, and simultaneously creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives.The dangers of abusing statisticsThe problem of reification: converting an abstract idea into a thing (e.g. the notion of intelligence, which is an abstraction of the highest order, has become something that can be measured and ranked.The problem of ranking, which requires a criterion for assigning individuals to their place in the series.The problem of formulating the question in a restricted and biased way. Yet the mystique of science proclaims the inherent objectivity of numbers. Its fundamental subjectivity will recede from our consciousness.The problem with public opinion polls (or surveys, for that matter) is that the results and the method through which they were obtained (especially question phrasing) are inseparable, but we forget that.In American technopoly, public opinion is a 'yes' or 'no' to an unexamined question. It also ignores subject matter knowledge of the polled, and expects everyone to have an answer, whether they know what they are talking about or not.One characteristic of those in a technopoly is that they are unaware of both the origins and effects of their technologies.The principles of calculability and grammatocentricism are the foundations of modern systems of management. The former led to ideas such as detailed accounting systems, inventory control and productivity norms. The latter promotes the idea that the best way to run a business is through reports of those lower down the line. One manages by numbers and by being removed from the everyday realities of production.When a method of doing things becomes so deeply associated with an institution that we no longer know which came first - the method or the institution - then it is difficult to change the institution or even imagine alternative methods for achieving its purpose.At best, social scientists use quantification to give some precision to their ideas. But they is nothing especially scientific about that.Science deals with processes, fixed ways in which nature works. Social science deals with practices, the ways humans behave and interact, which are quite impossible to predict in terms of causal relations. Scientific propositions are scientific because of the possibility of disproving them. If a theory cannot be falsified, it is not a scientific theory.Blasphemy is among the highest tributes that can be paid to a symbol, as the blasphemer takes the symbol as seriously as the idolater. The modern commercial is rarely about the character of the product, but about the character of the consumer. And so the balance of business expenditure shifts from product research to market research, from making products of value to making consumers feel valuable.Only by knowing something of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reasons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world.To be educated means to become aware of origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate, even as a listener, in the Great Conversation, which is merely a different metaphor for what is meant by the ascent of humanity.The history of subjects teaches connections, it teaches that the world is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else's shoulders.
—Sean Goh
As usual, Postman made me think, and not just while I was reading the book. I took the thinking with me right out into the world. This book was frightening, distressing, yet at times it made me snort at the idiosyncrasies of this society.I like Postman because he pulls no punches, yet he loves this country and he knows how to find the good in the things he is criticizing. From writing, to printing, telegraphy, photography, all the way up to computers -- he writes about how we have changed from tool-users to a society used by its tools. A "technopoly". And I think he's right. We are ruled by our technologies and it is healthy to be somewhat suspicious of that.His hypothesis in that our salvation from Technopoly lies in a new way of educating the young was provocative and hopeful -- yet so unlikely that much of the time I felt quite desolate. Yet it was important to read it.
—Kerith
