Author: Postman, Neil
Genre: Theology - Postmodern
Tags: Culture / Worldview, Modernism / Postmodernism, Thinking / Reading
Series:
Rick Shrader‘s Review:
Technopoly is a condition that exists when technology begins to control too many areas of human life. But, of course, that is a ‘‘catch 22’’ situation. We need and usually desire to have technological advantages but we often hate what they do to our lives. The clock was invented to regulate the prayer time of twelfth century Benedictine monks but has become the means for selfish men to make money.
Postman defines technopoly as ‘‘what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it is sometimes possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check. My purpose here is to describe the defenses that in principle are available and to suggest how they have become dysfunctional.’’
If you decide to skip this book and go straight to the polls and market studies, you will prove his thesis correct.