Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

by Neil Postman

behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems pos...

Their work is a form of st...

But, like all stories, it is infused with moral prejudice and sociological theory.

I think it justifiable to say that, in the nineteenth century, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.

Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.

In the character of Sammy Glick, Budd Schulberg shows us the narcissist whose origins Christopher Lasch has tried to explain through sociological analysis.

enterprise. In the end, all of them are forms of storytelling—human attempts to account for our experience in coherent ways.

That is why social “scientists” are so often to be found on our television screens, and on our bestseller lists, and in the “self-help” sections of airport bookstands: not because they can tell us how some humans sometimes behave but because they purport to tell us how we should; not because they speak to us as fellow humans who have lived longer, or experienced more of human suffering, or thought more deeply and reasoned more carefully about some set of problems, but because they consent to maintain the illusion that it is their data, their procedures, their science, and not themselves, that speak.

With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly’s power.

is, therefore, time to ask, What

story does American education wish to tell now?