Technopoly, by Neil Postman, Chapters 1-6

In a sense, the beginning of this book is much like Computers, aside from the fact that there is a heavy moralistic and ethical spin on the content of Technopoly. Postman goes into great detail when describing the history of human innovation. He also questions each stride that man has made technologically which has brought us to our current advanced state.

One of the larger question that the content of this book leads me to ask is: Is this author an ideal candidate to write this book? He presented a fascinating history and really engaged the reader with thought-provoking content, but I feel that he may not be of a member of the proper age group to present a fair and balanced view of technology. Now, let me begin by saying that I will be generalizing quite grossly. I am drawing upon my own experience when I say this, but it does seem that older generations, let us say the fifty-plus group, tend to have a rather gaping lack of understanding of technology. This is not to say that he did not make some extremely valid points: "[Technology] undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. Technology... is both friend and enemy." (p. xii) And this is a true statement. It does tend to dumb down meaningful human interaction. Instead of catching up with a friend via a warm telephone conversation, or a face-to-face lunch, we are reduced to, "Hi wut u doin miss u <3" via text message. Yet Postman comes off as such an alarmist, that it is hard to really evaluate what harm is truly being wrought by technologies. It is even hard to agree with him at times because he does not always support his arguments clearly. In one section, he describes the dangers of the overflow of information. It seems like a reasonable argument until he closes the paragraph by stating that one of the drawbacks of such a deluge of information is that people will "have difficulty imagining reasonable futures." (p.72) I will forgive for the moment his use of the ambiguous term "people," but the is such a vague and seemingly unprovable thing to say. Is there data to back this claim up? Why would it lead to this? What sort of future would they imagine?

So far, this book is hard to take completely seriously due to the nature of the author's complete technophobia. That is not to say that the topic should have necessarily been broached by someone of my generation, as the bias may have been too pro-technology. This book is excellent for opening up a dialog on the ethical and moral implications of a technologically-saturated society, but the author is certainly not presenting an even-handed argument himself.