Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology Part 1&2 Revised

In his book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman talks about how new technologies alter our understanding what is real. This book was fantastic and interesting. Postman's ideas are so subversive and it related to a lot of the things I've been thinking about lately. In this book, Postman writes about how technology negatively effects our society and culture. He believes that technology is both a "burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that" (Postman 5). His arguments are very one sided and there are no gray areas in this book. It was actually quite liberating to read his opinions on technology because I took this book as a call for society to be critical and detached from technology.

Postman fears that as cultures begin to embrace technology more and more readily, they would lose something of themselves. In an era that Postman coincidently calls "Technopoly," people will begin to depend on technology for everything. Basically, Postman says that problems will be created to be fixed with technology. Our society is progressively becoming lazy and more reliant on new technology. Think about this, how many of us spend x amount of minutes searching for the remote when we could easily go up to the TV and manually channel surf?

Throughout the book, Postman shares his opinions on how technology leads to Technopoly which is a kind of society that is obsessed with the benefits of technology to the point where everything needs to be measured and assessed on the basis of how 'efficient' it is. Postman mentions something called the "control systems" to manage information like statistics, opinion surveys, SAT and IQ tests which can be scientifically measured and stored. And because these information could be measured, our society becomes prone to believe that our IQ score is our intelligence and that opinion surveys are what people believe in. I interpreted this idea with the concept of SAT scores. SAT score is ultimately only a number and for some reason it has such a huge impact in education. Why though? There are clear evidences that the most brilliant people out there didn't even graduate from college, let alone even go to one.  I think it's ridiculous that the scores of a standardized test could determine the destiny of a student's success.

I think the main idea to take away from this book is that despite our obsession with information, more information and the desire to obtain more will not fix any of the real problems that we are facing today. For example, poverty will not be solved by more information, nor will war or global warming. It may be a contributing factor to help solve the problem, but in the end more information won't fix these worldly issues.