Vintage Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

There is much to learn from this important book. Over the last two hundred years, both science & technology have rapidly & irrevocably changed the face of the earth. In the postindustrial world, we've banished infectious diseases from our midst (at least temporarily), have instituted public health & sanitation measures, and have made creature comfort a part of everyman's lifestyle. Yet, there is profound and widespread concern regarding exactly where technological innovation is taking us, what this mysterious journey will cost us in terms of a sustainable and palatable ecosystem, and exactly who (if anyone) is driving this huge and anonymous innovative juggernaut. This book deals provocatively with this issue; i.e. the promulgation of a culture in which science and technology have come to assume the pivotal role in our society. Sociologist Max Weber warned almost 100 years ago of an alarming tendency in western civilization to displace our tradition-based religious cultural ethos with a dangerously superficial "faux" rationality in which all decisions and all measures would come to be made more and more exclusively by scientific and logical means. Yet science by its very nature cannot answer questions dealing with values, advising us as to what is right, or good, or best. It can only speak to us in terms of effective and efficient means to achieve such cultural values and social ends. It is this tension between a human-oriented cultural ethos, on the one hand, and scientific progress through technological innovation not so oriented on the other that is Mr. Postman's real subject. Mr. Postman understands that science and technology are both our friends and our antagonists, and as our amigo the Unabomber has pointed out, what technical innovation introduces as "voluntary and optional" soon becomes "compulsory and obligatory", as did the introduction of automobiles and traffic regulation. In this fashion, by flooding our social, economic, and political environment with items and objects that drive the nature of society as much as enhance it (can anyone now doubt that the introduction of personal computers poses such a double-bind?), we are radically changing the nature of our society and its culture without benefit of any guiding values, precepts, or notions as to what is best for our people and our community other than to allow frenzied competition between technological rivals to see who can unlease the latest/neatest technological innovation to make our lives easier or entertain us more cleverly. Our direction in terms of progress seems to be random, at best, and Postman argues most persuasively that there are hidden dangers to our freedoms, our prosperity, and even our awareness that result from this surrender to the indifferent impulses of technological innovation. We best recognize this indifference and the dangers it poses for a free and open society. As author Sales Kirkpatrick notes in his wonderful book "Rebels Against the Future", "technology is never neutral"; it carries out its exclusively rational and logical intent to its conclusion. Yet often the fact that this conclusion is not necessarily in the public interest or consistent with the long-term goals and aspirations of our culture seems somehow irrelevant. Yet it is anything but irrelevant; it is central to the question as to how critically important decisions regarding our future and well-being are to be made, and on what basis. Will we have a society in which such decisions are made through open debate in a public forum, or one in which the decisions are made for us, based on market projections, what can be sold and distributed, researched based on its sales potential in anonymous test tubes and clinical labs, where the latest in scientific certainty is readied for pandemic public introduction? Time is growing short and we must soon decide. This is a fascinating, provocative, and important book. Read it!

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Great book, I really recommended. A technology that is not well integrated in our culture,a techonology without control and wisdom, can destroy our culture and values.

A massive critical scholarship is evident in every sentence of this book!!! A must read for younger generations just to be wary what they are upto with unmanageable technology at their disposal. Just Fabulous !!!

One of the best essays about good and bad things of techno life.