Technopoly pt. 1

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology... Judging by the severity of the title, I expected the author of this book to have a very one-sided approach to how technology has influenced society. I have heard the arguments about how technology, while as its own entity is progressing rapidly, is causing its users to be less self-reliant and more focused on doing things the easy way. My opinion on this matter stands that everyone in this world thinks differently and if someone wants to use technology as an outlet for their laziness than so be it. I'm not usually one to judge, however, to say that technology is making all (or even most) people lazy, I feel is a misguided statement. Plenty of people are using technology to be productive in their own ways. I was really hoping that this book wasn't going to be a 230 page claim that culture in society is suffering at the hands technology and I was actually pretty relieved after reading the first few pages to discover that it was not, or at least not exactly.

Neil Postman provides an objective look at the evolution of technology claiming that every technology has its pros, as well as its cons and how one technology has a direct effect another. He actually uses the analogy of a technological ecosystem to support his claims which is an interesting a unique way to do it. Thinking about this concept for a second makes understanding how we have arrived at this point in technology a little easier to stomach.

So onto the technopoly, which I think is a word that Neil Postman made up to convey his point of view in this book. Postman talks about three cultural standpoints of technology; tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. Tool-using cultures are the utilitarians here. They had physical needs that needed to be satisfied so they built tools to help them along the way. So much was able to be done with these tools that they found there way to be a staple in the culture. When this culture started to becoming overwhelming, someone came up with the thought of technocracy.

Technocracy is all about how too much importance was put on tools or technology and the ideas traditions and politics were getting lost. People during this time period thought they could build something that would drastically change the world in a second. They were inventing things just to claim that progress was being made. Postman describes the term technopoly as 'totalitarian technocracy'. Technopoly essentially is all culture consumed by technology. Postman declares the personal computer as the ultimately device of technopoly. It was an invention so good that it has defined an entire generation.