Technopoly: Part Two

In the second half of Technopoly, Neil Postman discusses medical technology, computer technology, “invisible” technology, and scientism among various other things. What I found to be most interesting was the medical technology. Postman seemed to blame medical technology on a lot of our current medical problems. He sights America as being the most “aggressive” when it comes to medicine. This meaning that our country is overly cautious by x-raying, surgeries and giving out antibiotics, where in a lot of circumstances, these things are not necessarily needed. Many cancers are caused by medical radiation, which in turn makes you wonder if these kinds of things can be prevented. He revealed an alarming statistic from a study in 1974 saying, “American doctors had performed 2.4 million unnecessary operations, causing 11,000 deaths and costing about 3.9 billion dollars.” (p.105) Postman raises an interesting theory where in this day and age, doctors are being used by technology and how this affects their work. That is why there is such a high demand for medical malpractice insurance because of these faulty technologies that our doctors have become so reliant on.

            Another section that I enjoyed reading about was the computer technology chapter. Postman compares technology to religion in the sense that people will most likely believe something if it comes from a computer. He states that this “obedience” is the equivalence of “God’s will.” (p.115) I can really understand what he is talking about because people put so much trust into computers and technology that they do not realize that computers are capable of errors due to the humans who input the information.

            Overall, I would say that Technopoly was definitely a better read than the first book. There were a lot of interesting themes brought up and I actually did not mind reading this too much.