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242nd out of 1,123 books
—
1,900 voters
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
by
Neil Postman
In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it--with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.
Paperback, 240 pages
Published
March 31st 1993
by Vintage
(first published 1991)
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May 29, 2012
Ben
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Though Postman wrote this book in 1992, his ideas remain as relevant as ever in 2012. If he thought Technopoly was running rampant in '92, I can't imagine (well, I can) his disgust at technology's further rise to eminence in the past twenty years. If you're one who recognizes that facebook, iPhones, and Twitter actually have downsides, then you'll be intrigued by Postman's passionate arguments, ones that extend beyond electronic technology because, after all, the computer was in its infancy the...more
Jul 18, 2007
Dan
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
luddites, alll manner of loud mouthed anti-technology malcontents
This book is about how technology affects our society and culture. Specifically, this book is about how Technology negatively affects our society and culture. Postman is very one sided and hardly even pays lip service to any contradictory interpretations than his own.
I read this book very quickly, in one sitting, finishing the book in an afternoon. I don't remember his whole argument. However, when I finished I remember being dissatisfied with Postman's arguments, thinking he was an idiot, think...more
I read this book very quickly, in one sitting, finishing the book in an afternoon. I don't remember his whole argument. However, when I finished I remember being dissatisfied with Postman's arguments, thinking he was an idiot, think...more
There is much here to recommend to both those who are disquieted by technology and to those who wonder if we aren't losing our moral compass in our embrace of all things that distract and momentarily engage our flitting minds (minds, Postman would argue, increasingly shaped by the Technopoly we live in). As an educator, the Biggest Idea I took away from this book was the insight into the cataclysm now ravaging the public school system. Students come to us as the babes of technology culture and w...more
A technopoly is a world dominated and ruled by technological morals, like speed and efficiency. Postman says that modern America is a technopoly, and he also says that it is bad because it creates a fragmented culture. For instance, technology today gives us the ability to have massive amounts of information, but, he says, this information is unsorted and we have no way of distinguishing what is good or bad about it because what is good is that we can communicate more and faster.
Postman's critic...more
Postman's critic...more
The book is about the phylosophy of tecnology and has fresh ideas about the education program. It criticizes the trends in technology and science and warns that it may cause many harms to our world and human being. Many people believe that Postman was(he passed away)a radical critique. I think sometimes we need some radical ideas to moderate a trend and Postman successfully achieved this goal in the book.
He tries to change your mind radically an you may resist. But it is worth reading.
He tries to change your mind radically an you may resist. But it is worth reading.
There are some good ideas in this book, but only incidentally so- Postman himself delivers almost nothing of merit. Postman tends to come across as a curmudgeon in his writing, but in Amusing Ourselves to Death, he presented a reasonable, fairly robust argument that felt supported by evidence. Even when he was opining, his position was plausible. In Technopoly, he fails to develop a convincing hierarchy of technological development.
Postman never admits as much, but across his books he has a giga...more
Postman never admits as much, but across his books he has a giga...more
A large part of this is just stating what I would take to be pretty much the obvious. No ‘new technology’ is ever fully positive or fully negative. I can’t remember where I heard recently that an environment that has rabbits added to it is not, say, the Australian bush with rabbits, but actually a new environment. Technology does much the same thing with the human environment. The 1950s were not really just the 1940s with television added and the 2000s weren’t just the 1980s with the internet –...more
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This book is interesting, to say the least. Since this book was written a while ago, it is interesting to see what predictions seem to be taking place and which are utter crap. I give it such a high rating because I am a firm believer that it is important that we keep a skeptical eye raised at our new technologies, when we bring them in with enthusiasm. It is not very realistic, but it makes you think.
There are definitely some interesting questions brought up in this book, e.g.:
* Do we need symbols, and if yes, is the information overflow society really draining most of them from their meaning?
* Does information need limitation, and if, how?
* is quantification/rationalization bad?
Also, the proposed education system in the last chapter is interesting. With only a few exceptions -- notably, the introduction of a semantics course that explains the fundamental principles of language, and making h...more
* Do we need symbols, and if yes, is the information overflow society really draining most of them from their meaning?
* Does information need limitation, and if, how?
* is quantification/rationalization bad?
Also, the proposed education system in the last chapter is interesting. With only a few exceptions -- notably, the introduction of a semantics course that explains the fundamental principles of language, and making h...more
Technopoly tells us that technology has an inherent viewpoint, a 'take' on reality. That's obvious. More unsettling is that Postman argues we adopt the viewpoint of the technology we use. For example, by naively citing social science we adopt Scientism--a scarily amoral view of reality. Postman's Technopoly is a negative description of modern American society--wholly taken into technological development, wholly sapped of social mores and the traditions that uphold them. Religion and liberal educ...more
Another book about the danger of trusting too fully in technology. Postman's argument encourages us to keep those low-tech ideas and solutions that still work (better) and view technology with reason, looking for that which truly benefits us as humans, rather than embracing technology that degrades us. (For similar writing, read Wendell Berry also.)
This is my favorite Postman book so far. It was thought provoking to the point that it makes me question the use of the 5 star system on this site. I liked the scope of this book more than that of Amusing Ourselves To Death. There was more emphasis on our cultural ideologies and less on imagined historical ideals.
Broader in scope than his landmark work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly is another healthy dose of sanity in an increasingly illiterate and technophilic age. Postman demonstrates how our obsession with technology has brought about the most enthusiastic naivete regarding its actual (and possible) benefits, caused us to treat each other like machines, and brought about a wholesale decay of culture as well as of intellectual, social, and private life. Those who think that the superficial an...more
Even though it was published in the early 90's, before technology would really be past the point of no return, Technopoly remains incredibly relevant today. Although our problems are no longer just the over use of computers in classrooms, but quick Internet searches filling in where well researched papers used to be, Postman makes a number of very convincing arguments for the things we give up as we relinquish control and thought to technologies. I found his ideas resonating in mind soon after I...more
The best critique of our contemporary culture I have read. Insightful, subversive, lucid. It's a tad extreme but this only serves to make it more engaging.
Postman journeys through various histories and developments in science, thought, philosophy, technologies, etc which have brought us to where we are today. He examines bureaucracies, the medical field, the education system, and the use of statistics as examples of his argument that the machine driving our culture is something which we do not q...more
Postman journeys through various histories and developments in science, thought, philosophy, technologies, etc which have brought us to where we are today. He examines bureaucracies, the medical field, the education system, and the use of statistics as examples of his argument that the machine driving our culture is something which we do not q...more
As usual, Postman made me think, and not just while I was reading the book. I took the thinking with me right out into the world. This book was frightening, distressing, yet at times it made me snort at the idiosyncrasies of this society.
I like Postman because he pulls no punches, yet he loves this country and he knows how to find the good in the things he is criticizing. From writing, to printing, telegraphy, photography, all the way up to computers -- he writes about how we have changed from t...more
I like Postman because he pulls no punches, yet he loves this country and he knows how to find the good in the things he is criticizing. From writing, to printing, telegraphy, photography, all the way up to computers -- he writes about how we have changed from t...more
A valuable perspective but still somewhat reactionary. Postman does not adequately convince me that technology is now our master. He does show the extent to which we are isolated from the underlying dynamics, not realizing why we use technologies or questioning their merit. He also demonstrates a technological equivalent to Macluhan's "medium is the message" argument. Finally, his discussion of scientism and education introduce important points about the general status in these areas. His discus...more
How ironic it seems to me, that here I sit ignoring just about all the lessons of this book as I give Technopoly, the treatise by Neal Postman, an arbitrary rating of four or five stars. Of what use is the information in a star rating to anyone? Bloody none. What is this star rating, then? It's nonsense and noise, the same sort of nonsense and noise that we call data, or news; true or false, we have no choice but to accept it.
Postman turns a skeptic eye here to our notions of progress, observing...more
Postman turns a skeptic eye here to our notions of progress, observing...more
Will make you reassess the role that technology should play in our lives and whether or not we truly have control over it.
An excellent critique of modern culture, on the same par with Allan Bloom. It's lucid and accessible to the average reader, which is a good thing because its incredibly eye-opening. This book helped me to understand myself as a modern person, and pointed out important problems in the modern disposition. Neil Postman is apparently very learned; he includes historical examples at every turn and from every period you can imagine. There appears to be no subject he's unacquainted with. This makes his...more
Man fashions technology; technology fashions man. Required reading with tremendous explanatory power.
An extremely helpful account of how technology surreptitiously shapes the way we think, speak and act - in short, how we live.
And this is no simple screed against things that plug in. Postman reminds us at the very outset that writing itself is a technology - a technology that changed what it means to "know" something. It changed the way we learn. It changed the way we store and share information...more
An extremely helpful account of how technology surreptitiously shapes the way we think, speak and act - in short, how we live.
And this is no simple screed against things that plug in. Postman reminds us at the very outset that writing itself is a technology - a technology that changed what it means to "know" something. It changed the way we learn. It changed the way we store and share information...more
The late Neil Postman's book, Technopoly, is a sobering assessment of a technologically obsessed American culture. The fact that the book was presciently published in 1992, long before the Internet became ubiquitous, is alarming. Don't be fooled though, Postman isn't a pure Luddite and this isn't a book that is anti-technology. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that Postman harbors a sense of digital ambivalence. Like Postman, I don't necessarily condemn the technologies themselves per se, a...more
Neil Postman was, apparently, a big deal. Upon starting his 1992 book Technopoly I learned that he had died in 2003, which makes the negative parts of this review feel vaguely like I'm speaking ill of the dead. Sorry, Mr. Postman.
Anyway, Technopoly takes the idea behind Aldous Huxley's dystopic novel Brave New World very seriously. Unlike 1984, Huxley's novel imagined a world where we are ruined by what we love, not what we fear. (This idea crops up again in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies to so...more
Anyway, Technopoly takes the idea behind Aldous Huxley's dystopic novel Brave New World very seriously. Unlike 1984, Huxley's novel imagined a world where we are ruined by what we love, not what we fear. (This idea crops up again in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies to so...more
A great read for those that hate technology or at least are suspicious of it. However the conclusions in the last chapter are weak.
Technopoly is totalitarian Technocracy. Technology remains powerful whilst all other ideologies have weakened. Invisible technology is a powerful and subversive force with an ideological bias that does not necessarily have humanity as its priority. Technology is the main cultural force. Ideas are embedded in computers (within the medium).
Science and technology are...more
Technopoly is totalitarian Technocracy. Technology remains powerful whilst all other ideologies have weakened. Invisible technology is a powerful and subversive force with an ideological bias that does not necessarily have humanity as its priority. Technology is the main cultural force. Ideas are embedded in computers (within the medium).
Science and technology are...more
Somewhat of a reiteration of the points raised in Postman's classic Amusing Ourselves To Death, Technopoly goes so far as to quote its earlier version line-for-line in places. Still, there's an interesting expansion on some themes here, as well as Postman's intriguing suggestions for a curriculum intended to combat the culture's decontextualization of information. A solid read, but not the classic its predecessor was.
An academic read from a 20th Century pioneer of Media and Communications Theory. Approach it as an academic effort and then apply to your own particular discipline. Worth perseverance (I'm only half way through)
A favorite idea from the book is that new media or channels are rarely just additive in nature. They are more like evolutionary events that leave an ecosystem forever changed, just as with the natural ecosystems.
A favorite idea from the book is that new media or channels are rarely just additive in nature. They are more like evolutionary events that leave an ecosystem forever changed, just as with the natural ecosystems.
I found this book on my shelf and realized I had only read half of it about 15 year ago, and, obsessive/compulsive person that I am, felt the need to read the whole thing again. It was written in 93, I think, before the internet really exploded, and it is a critique of our unthinking subservience to technology. I can tell from my notes in the margins that I was really excited about this book in 1993 but this time I found it kind of irrationally nostalgic in a lot of places. I mostly agree with t...more
This is an extremely interesting view of how our past and current technology has and is affecting our culture, countries, and world. The author starts at the printing press and continues to the current global media and describes the affects, good and bad, that technology has had upon us. Whether you agree with his views or not, this is a fasinating look at how our perceptions and attitudes have changed with our advances.
One of the five most influential books I have ever read. The overarching lesson I learned is that every technology has a bias. The difficulty lies in determining what that bias might be, and what the consequences of that bias are. When I first read it, the internet did not exist. Even so, it is more relevant today.
Postman is a bit of a Luddite, but this book makes us consider what we give up for what we get in this world. His first chapter on the embrace of the written word and what we lost by doing it is thought-provoking. Those who wish to read The Disappearance of Childhood should start with this book.
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Neil Postman, an important American educator, media theorist and cultural critic was probably best known for his popular 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than four decades he was associated with New York University, where he created and led the Media Ecology program.
He is the author of more than thirty significant books on education, media criticism, and cultural change including Te...more
More about Neil Postman...
He is the author of more than thirty significant books on education, media criticism, and cultural change including Te...more
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