Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

“Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy.” 

Here in the Introduction, Postman presents the book’s main theme: the potentially harmful effects of unrestrained technology. It should be noted that he is not saying all technology is bad. His emphasis is on its “uncontrolled growth.” Without controls to provide the appropriate balance, technology destroys a culture and replaces it with one meant only to serve itself. 

“To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.” 

This passage is part of the author’s explanation of how every technique and technology has an inherent ideology. The first sentence sounds perfectly natural to a modern reader, but he explains how such number and letter valuations were unheard of in the past and would have seemed quite foreign. With each technological tool that we adopt, our worldview shifts a little to accommodate it—and such tools give credence to one view or value over another. Postman argues we need to recognize this in order to properly analyze the effects of technology. 

“This is serious business, which is why we learn nothing when educators ask, Will students learn mathematics better by computers than by textbooks? Or when businessmen ask, Through which medium can we sell more products? Or when preachers ask, Can we reach more people through television than through radio? Or when politicians ask, How effective are messages sent through different media? Such questions have an immediate, practical value to those who ask them, but they are diversionary. They direct our attention away from the serious social, intellectual, and institutional crises that new media foster.” 

This quotation is meant to show that we accept new technology too readily, without any thought. Postman argues that new technology attacks old technology, which puts our institutions at risk. When this happens, we need to ask more than how to use the new technology but whether to use it at all.