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Book: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Quotes of Book: Technopoly: The Surrender of
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  1. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    ...computer technology functions more as a new mode of transportation than as a new means of substantive communication. It moves information-lots of it, fast, and mostly in a calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment of Descartes' dream of the mathematization of the world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful {as when the process reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed}, it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs.
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  2. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.
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  3. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate.
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  4. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.
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  5. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question "What problem does the information solve?" the answer is usually "How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before." This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to "access" information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences {61}."
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  6. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.
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  7. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.
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  8. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.
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  9. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.
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  10. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.
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  11. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief."
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  12. Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of

    I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words "The computer shows …" or "The computer has determined …" It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is God's will," and the effect is roughly the same.
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