Review: Technopoly by Neil Postman

Introduction

Neil Postman has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of technology, over the period of past few years (Scott London, 1994). The writer argues in his book “Technopoly” that the world has surrendered its ethics and moral values to technology (Postman, 1992). He defined Technopoly as a society which finds its satisfaction in technology and information generated by it. Particularly, the United States have been converted to a Technopoly, where technical efficiency of a person is given far more importance, as compared to his sense of human judgment. This paper evaluates the arguments offered by Postman in the context of the historical material and in the context of world around us.

United States as a Technopoly

Over the past few decades, technology has been embedded to nearly every area of our lives. As we look around, we find the technology everywhere. Our daily life is highly impacted by the advance technologies, whether at school, home, offices or industries (Longford, 2006). Various advanced home appliances make use of the information in a way, which were not even thought of some years before. Mostly, people and scholars consider various advantages the technology brings for us, for example easier labor, quick actions, efficient communication, etc). However, no one really attempts to find out the long term results of using technology at such a large extent. The book Technopoly sheds light on how technology can be a dangerous weapon for destroying the moral values of society, in the long run.

As the book begins, the writer explains that what the historians think about the history of relationship between the culture and technology. It becomes clear that initially, technology has been evolved to help the people in performing various tasks, but eventually technology started superseding the moral and cultural values of the people. This is particularly true for the technologically advanced countries such as United States of America. The writer divides cultures into three categories based on their use of technology; first category is of tool-using culture, in which use of technology is limited by some social or religious values and use of technology not at all changes the cultural values; second category is of technocracy, where the society is loosely bound by the social or religious values and the technology is used as an impulse to invent, thus the technology starts impacting the cultural values. Finally, the Technopoly is a culture where the sovereignty of technology and technique is accepted to the largest extent; in such society, technology dominates all the aspects of cultural and moral values.

The writer continues to criticize the dependence of technology, and the associated natural culture of America. Information is now generated and managed by the technology systems, such as IQ and SAT tests, opinion polls and Statistics (Scott London, 1994). The use of advanced information systems is mainly based on the fallacy that information can be stored and measured scientifically. The results of these information processing tasks are considered to reveal the accurate results, for example ...