Technopoly: Part One

In the first half of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman, it discussed the evolution of technology through culture. It was broken down into three cultures: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. Each culture was broken down to its beginnings. The tool-using cultures represented the primitive cultures where tools were used to “solve specific and urgent problems of physical life” (p.23) or to “serve the symbolic world of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion.” (p.23) Most importantly, “tools did not attack the dignity and integrity of the culture.” (p.23) This last line really struck a chord in me because our modern tools today do the exact opposite. Maybe not intentionally, but technology has allowed itself to be a vessel through which many horrible things can be done to people. Case and point: the recent suicide at Rutgers University. I will elaborate more on this topic in another blog I am planning on writing, but in this most recent case and in other cases of cyber-bullying, technology was the major catalyst in these instances. It was used to attack people’s dignities and integrities, which is a testament to how people are using technology today.

The second culture was technocracy and this culture is “a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent.” (p.41) It was the late 1700s, where we began to see a rise in industrialism and humans were becoming more reliant on machines for many aspects of their life. We were seeing the widespread sale of books due to the printing press, as well as cotton spinning machines which were creating the mass production of textiles. At this time there was an upheaval against machinery, known as the Luddite Movement. They destructed machines due to their unhappiness with wage cuts, child labor, and unprotected skilled workers. I found this interesting because today many people do not revolt against machinery, they embrace it. Instead people revolt against other people, placing the blame on someone that could actually be held accountable.

In the third culture it is the development of the Technopoly. Through the rise of this culture there is a constant tension between two world views: traditional values and technology. It is about the rapid development of technology and all other things falling to the way side. It redefines people’s ideas of religion, family, politics, history, truth, privacy, and intelligence. (p.48) Postman describes this as “totalitarian technocracy.” People lost confidence in their belief systems, but found that technology was a constant and could not be shook. I found this to be really amazing that people, not even that long ago, put so much into their beliefs that something like technology could shatter every part of it. I knew technology had a huge impact on the entire human race, but it is somewhat hard to think that something that many people take advantage of today was something that many people were against not too long ago. It make you wonder what the correlation of this could be in the future.