www.ibiblio.org/cmc/mag/1995/mar/hyper/npcontexts_119.html
Computer-Mediated
Communication Magazine / Volume 2, Number 3 /
What Neil Postman has to say ...
by Nancy Kaplan
On this page, you will find extensive
passages from Postman's recent book, Technopoly:
The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I have
chosen these excerpts because they provide the context for ideas and quotations
to which my essay, "E-literacies: Politexts,
Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print,"
refers. Thus, I attempt to allow Professor Postman to speak for himself, to
represent his own views in his own way. Some of the links in the text will take
you to the bibliography while others will take you to some portion of my essay.
Postman,
Neil. Technopoly: The
Surrender of Culture to Technology,
I find
it necessary, for the purpose of clarifying our present situation and
indicating what dangers lie ahead, to create still another
taxonomy. Cultures may be classed into three types: tool-using cultures,
technocracies, and technopolies. At the present time,
each type may be found somewhere on the planet, although the first is rapidly
disappearing: we must travel to exotic places to find a too-using culture. If
we do, it is well to go armed with the knowledge that, until the seventeenth
century, all cultures were tool-users. There was, of course, considerable
variation from one culture to another in the tools that were available. Some
had only spears and cooking utensils. Some had water mills and coal- and
horsepower. But the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that
their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and
urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills,
and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic
world of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of
castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either
case, tools did not attack (or , more precisely, were
not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which
they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from
believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their
methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization....
[A]fter one acknowledges that no taxonomy ever neatly fits the
realities of a situation, and that in particular the definition of a tool-using
culture lacks precision, it is still both possible and useful to distinguish a
tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central
role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some
degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become
increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not
integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. The bid
to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores,
myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives....
And so two opposing world-views -- the technological
and the traditional -- coexisted in uneasy tension. The
technological was the stronger, of course, but the traditional was there --
still functional, still exerting influence, still too much alive to ignore.
This is what we find documented not only in Mark Twain but in the poetry of
Walt Whitman, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, the prose of Thoreau, the
philosophy of Emerson, the novels of Hawthorne and Melville, and, most vividly
of all, in Alexis de Tocqueville's monumental Democracy
in America. In a word, two distinct thought-worlds were rubbing against
each other in nineteenth-century
With the
rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds
disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to
itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in
Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them
immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and
therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by
art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence,
so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly,
in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.
Postman,
Neil. Technopoly: The
Surrender of Culture to Technology,
Technopoly is a state of
culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deificaiton
of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology,
finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.
This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity
leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional
beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly
are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's superhuman
achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be
solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which
through its continued and uncontrolled
production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and
peace of mind. The fact that information does none of these things -- but quite
the opposite -- seems to change few opinions, for unwavering beliefs are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly
flourishes when the defenses against information
break down.
The relationship between information and the
mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases
the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control
mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with
new information. When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical,
they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of
information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic
tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses,
people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity
to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
One way of defining Technopoly,
then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses
against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when
institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is
what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology,
tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and
humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it is sometimes
possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are
fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check. My
purpose here is to describe the defenses that in
principle are available and to suggest how they have become dysfunctional.
Postman,
Neil. Technopoly: The
Surrender of Culture to Technology,
Because
of what computers commonly do, they place an inordinate emphasis on the
technical processes of communications and offer very little in the way of
substance. With the exception of the electric light, there never has been a
technology that better exemplifies Marshall McLuhan's
aphorism "The medium is the message." The computer is almost all
process. There are, for example, no "great computerers,"
as there are great writers, painters, or musicians. [I can't resist
interjecting here: there are no great "pencilers"
or "brushers" either. What is this guy thinking?] There are
"great programs" and "great programmers," but their
greatness lies in their ingenuity either in simulating a human function or in
creating new possibilities of calculation, speed, and volume. Of course, if J.
David Bolter is right, it is possible that in the future computers will
emerge as a new kind of book, expanding and enriching the tradition of writing
technologies. Since printing created new forms of literature when it replaced
the handwritten manuscript, it is possible that electronic writing will do the
same. But for the moment, computer technology functions more as a new mode of
transportation than a as new means of substantive
communication. It moves information -- lots of it, fast, and mostly in
calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment
of Descartes' dream of the mathematization of the
world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate
problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the process
reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed), it is diversionary and
dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs. So is the computer's
emphasis on speed and especially its capacity to generate and store
unprecedented quantities of information. In specialized contexts, the value of
calculation, speed, and voluminous information may go uncontested. But the
"message" of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering.
The computer argues, to put it baldly, that the most serious problems
confronting us at both personal and professional levels require technical
solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. I would
argue that this is, on the face of it, nonsense. Our most serious problems are
not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information. If a nuclear
catastrophe occurs, it shall not be because of inadequate information. Where
people are dying of starvation, it does not occur because of inadequate
information. If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a
city, education is impotent, it does not happen
because of inadequate information. Mathematical equations, instantaneous
communication, and vast quantities of information have nothing whatever to do
with any of these problems. And the computer is useless in addressing them.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly:
The Surrender of Culture to Technology,
We can
imagine that Thamus would also have pointed out to
Gutenberg, as he did to Theuth, that the new
invention would create a vast population of readers who "will receive a
quantity of information without proper instruction...[who
will be filled] will the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom"; that
reading, in other words, will compete with older forms of learning. This is yet
another principle of technological change we may infer from the judgment of Thamus: new technologies compete with old ones -- for time,
for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their
world-view. This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that the medium
contains an ideological bias. And it is a fierce competition, as only
ideological competitions can be. It is not merely a matter of tool against tool
-- the alphabet attacking ideographic writing, the printing press attacking the
illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking the art of painting,
television attacking the printed word. When media make war against each other,
it is a case of world-views in collision.
In the
To take
another example: In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we
shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and
openness fostered by orality and the introspection
and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality
stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility....
Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy.
Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore
achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so
that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes
the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual
problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat
once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise
egocentrism to the status of a virtue?
These
are the kinds of questions that technological change brings to mind when one
grasps ... that technological competition ignites total war, which means it is
not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of
human activity....
What we
need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a
teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning,
and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school.
This
page is part of the article, "E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts
and Other Cultural Formations in th
e Late Age of Print."