Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
By:
Neil Postman
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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Description:
In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it--with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.
Description:
Neil Postman is one of the most level-headed analysts of education, media, and technology, and in this book he spells out the increasing dependence upon technology, numerical quantification, and misappropriation of "Scientism" to all human affairs. No simple technophobe, Postman argues insightfully and writes with a stylistic flair, profound sense of humor, and love of language increasingly rare in our hastily scribbled e-mail-saturated world.
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1993-03-31
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Wonderful Book, a wake up to our reallity -
Well, I recommend the reading of this book. Wonderful, it's a prediction about how technology can be used or not.
For me, it was a trip to a great mind.
Unforgettable. I appreciate this book.
Excuse, but I had dreamed with it.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Neil Postman: Prophet of the 2d Enlightenment - Neil Postman is the prophet of the Second Enlightenment, the one that "builds a bridge" to
the First Enlightenment of the 18th century. The former chair of the department of communications arts and sciences at New York University has a thing about technology and language. Reading any of his books--and I did review his Building a Bridge to the 18th Century--gives one the pure joy of seeing a first-class literary mind wrestling conceptually with the neverending stimulus-response "stuff" coming at humankind through the unchecked machinery of wretched excess.
What's to blame that technology seems out of control, or that technology becomes overwhelming?
Well, Dr. Postman would be the first to admit it's a messy process coming to grips with the new, with "change," especially today when the rate of change is hurtling at us exponentially. Kurzweil, in the Singularity is Near, makes the point that most of us in the Baby Boomer generation and earlier--Postman was born in 1931, so technically he's part of the the Tom Brokaw so-called Greatest Generation--think of the world changing in a linear fashion or the graphic on the left below. If only that were true!
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For my complete review of this book and for other book and movie
reviews, please visit my site [...]
Brian Wright
Copyright 2010
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Technopoly: Very thought provoking - Took about a month to get my book but that was the snail-mail factor probably. This book is very thought provoking. I never would have
made the ironic link between Gutenburg's press and the rise of Protestantism.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Thought provoking - This is definitely one of the most important books that I have read. The author tries to explain how some things that are taken for granted have a huge impact on our lives. The author raises some really interesting, and disturbing, questions. Science is being treated like a God (people used to argue that certain things were right because God said so, now we argue that things are right because science has proved so) and computers are being treated like human beings (a computer is "infected" by a "virus" that is "contagious" and should be "treated" or even "quarantined"). The worst thing is that humans are being stripped of their humanity. We rank people, we assign numbers to their beauty, their intelligence, and many other things. Social sciences are being treated like physics although the former is concerned with humans that have feelings, that react and that think while physics is concerned with objects. The book doesn't ask if technology is good or bad, it just asks what role technology should be confined to. Recommended for everyone.
Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Boring ... nothing special - This book is unoriginal, shallow, poorly organized, and overly wordy (he sounds like he is just rambling on, trying to sound "learned", but saying nothing of substance most of the time). I had to force myself to finish this one.
There are several better books on the topics that are covered in "Technopoly" -- I would especially recommend "Autonomous Technology" (Winner) and "Technological Society" (Ellul), "Cult of Information" (Roszak), and "The Arrogance of Humanism" (Ehrenfield). These are much more in-depth, better written, and interesting.
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