Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

by Neil Postman

the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.

And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological.

A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

“As individuals express their life, so they are,”

Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance.

There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.

We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process.

Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe.

history is not merely one subject among many that may be taught; every subject has a history, including biology, physics, mathematics, literature, music, and art.

I would recommend that every subject be taught as history. In this way, children, even in the earliest grades, can begin to understand, as they now do not, that knowledge is not a fixed thing but a stage in human development, with a past and a future.

the history of subjects teaches connections; it teaches that the world is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else’s shoulders.

our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.

a curriculum in which all subjects are presented as a stage in humanity’s historical development; in which the philosophies of science, of history, of language, of technology, and of religion are taught; and in which there is a strong emphasis on classical forms of artistic expression.