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Key insights from
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology
By
Neil Postman
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What you’ll learn
Neil Postman (1931-2003) was an American author, educator,
media theorist and cultural critic. He is best known for his work in the
philosophy of technology, which he often called media ecology. Amongst the
numerous books he wrote on the subject through the second half of the 20th
century, Technopoly, is one of his best known. Postman offers a
technological perspective on history, evaluating three stages of culture,
each with its own relationship to technology. According to Postman, our
present culture—a technopoly—needs to reconsider the ways we use our tools
as well as the ways our tools use us. Originally published in 1991, many
have commented that Technopoly has not only aged well, but becomes
more relevant with every technological innovation.
Read on for key insights from Technopoly.
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1. Technologies
are neither purely good nor purely evil, but rather mixed goods.
When it comes to technology, criticism usually does not fare
well. It is often challenging to recognize the technological layers that
compose day to day life in developed countries. Technologies are often
invisible, and along with their invisibility comes an authority that seems
inviolable. To criticize seemingly harmless technologies is unnecessarily
technophobic, old fashioned, and irrelevant. Why would we not desire better
medicine, faster means of communication and transportation, better machines
for optimizing labor, and so on?
Against the overt benefits of these technologies, we must
ask if there is more to the story. Consider something as unquestionable as
writing. Writing is one of the oldest technologies in the world, and
undoubtedly has benefited human civilization in countless ways. No one
would dare to question its necessity for our livelihood, and yet, when it
was first introduced, its dangers were easily recognized. Surely it greatly
enhances communication, education, and every field of inquiry known to man.
Yet some, like Plato, also considered writing to be dangerous for mankind.
In oral cultures, one’s memory needs to be trained. It was a unique means
by which someone could treasure wisdom within their hearts as they sought
good lives. With the advent of writing, however, one need not worry about
memorizing and treasuring important knowledge, because it could be kept
safely outside of the mind in tablets. The same technology that created
literacy also damages our memory faculty.
Neither of these things can occur without the other. Using
writing has tradeoffs that must be calculated according to the individual.
Likewise, all technologies, in different ways, affect us individually and
corporately. The question is not whether technology should or shouldn’t be
allowed in society. Society is always technological in some way. The
question is rather, what are the goods of a particular technology?
Depending on its stated purpose, origin, and actual function, any
technology can disclose or obscure its various effects.
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2. All cultures
begin as tool-using cultures.
In examining the development of a culture according to its
technologies, the first stage of development is a tool-using culture. All
cultures up to the 17th century were tool-using, and this highlights how
developed countries today have leapt forward in the past 400 years. But it
is not the abundance of new devices that make a society tool-using or not.
Ancient Rome was known to have a sophisticated system of roads, sewers,
aqueducts, and other devices that furthered their political and economic
predominance. Likewise, the late Middle Ages saw an explosion in
technological capability, as indicated by men like Leonardo Da Vinci.
In a tool-using culture, technology is not autonomous, a
force of its own. Technology is integrated into a broader social or
religious system that governs technology. Though technologies change and
alter a culture, they do not set its pace. Technologies are enacted in
culture under two aims. First, they are made to solve specific practical
problems, such as the grinding of wheat, the tilling of dirt, and the
fastening of nails. For these tasks we have mills, plows, and hammers.
Second, though not entirely unrelated, technologies are made to facilitate
something in the arts, politics, or religion. The technologies of paints
and scaffolding for Renaissance frescoes, as well as quarrying stone and
staining glass for cathedrals, are also examples.
It is important to note that all of these technologies could
be conceivably made, processed, or gathered in a technological culture
developed beyond the tool-using stage. These technologies are not strictly
limited to tool-using cultures. The important aspect here is not what the
technologies are, but what position and power they exert in culture. The
introduction of better farming, building, and architectural technologies
undoubtedly affect society, but only insofar as they adhere to the social
and religious status quo.
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3. Tool-using
cultures develop into technocratic cultures.
Most of recorded human history has provided examples of
tool-using cultures. In a technocracy, technology itself becomes an
institution, a recognized force harnessed to bend culture to its own
agenda. Though technocracies were not formed until the era of modernity in
the late 18th century, the late Middle Ages indicated their arrival. In
technocracies, “tools play a central role in the thought-world of the
culture.” The clock, printing press, and telescope are examples of
technologies that not only changed society with their advent, but recalibrated
it according to new standards that exist because of the device.
Perhaps the most telling historical example we have is
Galileo and his research on the solar system. Though he was not the first
to posit the heliocentric view of the solar system, he was the first to
significantly augment his observations by means of the telescope. In openly
challenging the Church’s approved view of the cosmos, Galileo was rejecting
its authority. By depending on the telescope as a technological extension
of his empirical data, he was unknowingly positing a massive shift in
Europe’s view of knowledge.
This is probably the most notable case of the Church having
its cultural authority diminished by the advent of a new technology.
Undoubtedly, numerous other factors were at play in this historical moment,
but what cannot be said is that the telescope was merely incidental. Here
was a device which could reveal a picture of the universe that was in
direct contradiction to Church doctrine. Of course, one incident does not make
a technocracy, but as time went on and science began to focus on invention,
technology became a growing cultural force.
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4. Our culture is
fast becoming a technopoly.
Because of its extraordinary resources, wealth, and
innovation, the United States’ development has led it to the point where
technology shapes everything. In technopoly, our terms and institutions are
reconstructed on the basis of technology. Art, religion, family, truth, intelligence,
politics and more are all being redefined according to the constraints of
our technological society. Though it is hard to pin down a precise moment
when the US became a technopoly, Ford’s assembly line in the early 20th
century clearly reflected the values of the emerging technopoly.
Efficiency became a—if not the—primary cultural value. Under
this value, nothing is more efficient than machines. Thus humanity began to
envision their technology eclipsing them in every area of importance. Fears
of automation lurking in cultural memory of the industrial age only
amplified this sense that now technology was a self-sufficient force,
ultimately beyond human power to restrain it. But these fears are
subordinated to our awe concerning the gifts that technology has brought to
all. Technology made life longer, cleaner, safer, and more comfortable. It
could solve seemingly every practical problem, and even solved some yet
unheard of.
Any other kinds of problems were removed from our notice.
Religion, politics, the arts, all take a backseat to technological
advancement for its own sake. Innovation has unquestionable authority. Why
would we not produce more goods for less cost or new devices when designed?
Why would we hold back on optimizing not only business, but religion,
family life, and political discourse for expediency? The fact is, in our
society these questions are rhetorical, not actual. This is a novelty in
human history. Never before has a culture prized its technological
development so highly without question. Thus in a technopoly, technology
assumes an unquestionable, fundamental relevance in all spheres of life.
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5. Technopoly
likens men to machines.
In a technopoly, cultural values are determined by the
overarching systems of technology. For the United States, this is defined
largely by the computer. At the apex of modern technological revolutions,
the computer has commodified information, transformed communication, and
developed economic infrastructure like no other device. Moreover, the computer
has become the dominant metaphor of society. It redefines work, power,
nature, and information itself. Ultimately, it “redefines humans as
‘information processors’ and nature itself as information to be processed.”
To be human is to be more like a machine.
Praise for the efficiency, infallibility, and complexity of
computers is paradigmatic in contemporary society. Affirmation of the
computer as the most powerful technological device known to man has led to
its personalization. We think of computers not as machines that process
information, but entities that can think better than us. We attribute the
active voice to our computers, enforcing a perception of the computer as an
agent that thinks, believes, and has moods. While this was once science
fiction, the contemporary quest for artificial intelligence has been
motivated by a mechanistic view of human beings, and a personalistic view
of computers. This collapse between two kinds of being—human and
machine—has led to the belief that humans are machines, just inferior in
operation.
Even where these assumptions are not explicit, they still
reflect a new set of anthropological claims regarding human nature and a
new philosophy of knowledge. It is not uncommon to use the language of
programming and deprogramming with regard to a person. We speak of our
wires getting crossed, of having a switch get flipped, or having a
light-bulb moment when coming to realizations. All of these terms suggest
that at bottom humans are just complex mechanisms, systems that have evolved
to perform various functions with more or less accuracy.
Alongside this assumption is another: that computers contain
knowledge and are the main authority to which users must defer. What
computers possess, however, is not knowledge but information. Computers are
tools, not agents. They do not know, they give data outputs. Computers are
calculation devices which may be designed to act consciously, but in
reality they just carry out complex functions. Though these seem to be
obvious remarks when stated, they are not reflected in society. When it
comes to our assumptions concerning knowledge, computers “know more”
because they contain more. Knowledge has become a term synonymous with
information. Because computers can contain and process information on a
much larger scale than the average person, they seem to be more intelligent
than people. But information acquisition is a questionable definition of
intelligence and a foolhardy one for knowledge and wisdom.
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6. In a
technopoly, all traditions become trivial.
Technopoly operates for the sake of technological progress,
with efficiency as its chief value. In its wake, all other authorities are
displaced and left irrelevant. Its conquest was a bloodless revolution,
resulting in a totalizing rule of technologies as their own ends. As the
20th century unfolded, the reduction of all other symbolic institutions to
trivialities was assured by advertising.
“The adoration of technology pre-empts the adoration of
everything else.” Put differently, there is no longer any distinction
between sacred and profane. Due to the development of modern advertising,
every tradition and its symbols—be they political, religious, or other—are
drained of their potency. Before images were readily produced and could
displace print, an image held power in its rarity. Our environment was not
plastered with pictures and depictions, and as such, symbols were tied more
directly to their contexts. For example, if one was looking for an image of
Jesus or Mary, he or she was most likely to find it in a Catholic Church,
where it was explicitly tied to its tradition. Increasingly over the 20th
century, and especially since the advent of the internet, considering a
worldview or entering a church are not necessary to see depictions of
Christianity.
The problem here is not that a tradition’s symbols may be
seen as disconnected from it, but that they are emptied out and employed in
other contexts for different purposes. Harp music and rays of sunlight,
which once were imagery of the Judeo-Christian afterlife, may now be
connected via advertisement to anything from a bag of chips to an
automobile. The implicit message in these images is “Now this is
heaven!” without any serious reflection on heaven required.
The jumble of symbols that compose modern advertising is
banal and not to be taken seriously. And this is precisely the problem.
Nothing is to be taken seriously beyond the whims of technological
development. The traditions that provide coherent stories and possible
answers to fundamental questions are but symbolic resources for our
acculturation to technopoly. This is chiefly shown in advertising, which
funnels everything from the cross to the flag and the arts into abrupt
contexts that serve the acquisition of new devices. “How” is the operative
word in technopoly, never “why.” It is never serious but silly, never
blasphemous but trivial, and never more dangerous than when it is thought
to be absolutely normal.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of
Technopoly here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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