Review by Choice Review
Postman presents a view found in literature from Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948) through the writings of Jacques Ellul. One might trace back to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee. . . (1889). That technology and the rest of culture are integrated has been recognized for decades. Postman's proposition is that technology has provided an informational overload, making the recipient almost a voyeur and unable to discriminate among data. The apotheosis of indiscriminate accumulation is the game of Trivial Pursuit. The result, he says, is the unquestioning acceptance of technological offerings to the point that technology "takes command." To which observation he adds the deification of "science" (and technology), trivialization of symbols, and loss of morals and values. People, through growing dependence on technology, have lost autonomy, replacing inner-directedness with other- (techno-) directedness. The author balances his criticisms with recommendations: study history of technology to understand its underlying assumptions and study comparative religion to gain a view of morals and values that are being overridden or ignored in the present world. For a literate general readership. R. F. G. Spier; University of MissouriDSColumbia
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
/*STARRED REVIEW*/ A summary masterwork by one of our best social critics, though not a summary of his particular themes so much as of themes that have been in the air for at least a half-century. To wit: Every technological change alters the culture that adopts it. The contemporary predicament is that we are controlled by rather than control our technologies. Technology induces us to see ourselves as expressions of it, as in our speaking of the brain as a bunch of "hard-wiring" that can be "programmed," from which we "retrieve data," etc. Our technologized, statistics-mad social sciences are a sham, neither scientific nor socially relevant. Our infatuation with technologically enabled material progress has led us to trivialize our religious, philosophical, and artistic heritages. These are arguments familiar at least since the 1950s, when the likes of Paul Goodman--whose maxim, "technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science," Postman uses as this book's epigraph--voiced them. What Postman has done that is distinctive is to characterize the cumulated effects those arguments critique as a cultural gestalt he dubs "Technopoly" and to state them all more elegantly, wittily, and aptly than they've ever been stated. And finally, in the manner of Goodman, who felt obliged to append practical proposals to his carpings, Postman suggests what to do to ameliorate the damage technologized society has done. He suggests we become "loving resistance fighters" who keep "epistemological and psychic distance from any technology" and that we place history--not dates and names and events, but the development of knowledge in all areas--at the center of education. (Reviewed Dec. 1, 1991)0394582721Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mixing provocative insights and cliched criticisms, Postman defines the U.S. as a society in which technology is deified to a near-totalitarian degree. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Postman continues his plea to analyze physical culture in our society which he discussed in earlier books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death (Viking, 1985). He claims that our social institutions have, in effect, become dominated by the technologies that permeate our society. People, including researchers in science and social science, have allowed the use of technology to substitute for their own thinking. Earlier societies in history were tool-using but retained a sense of wholeness and a center of morality that is missing from our society. Postman asserts that there is a technological determinism pervading America that can be restrained, for example, by giving courses in the history and philosophy of technology and in comparative religion. However, his evidence for this critique is narrowly selected, and his discussion is often anecdotal. An optional purchase.-- Christopher R. Jocius, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., Aurora (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Postman (Conscientious Objections, 1988, etc.) once more cuts across the grain as an important critic of our national culture, this time arguing that America has become the world's first ``totalitarian technocracy''--otherwise known as a ``Technopoly.'' Postman starts out from the long view, showing that while every human culture becomes ``tool-using,'' the use of those tools doesn't necessarily change that culture's beliefs, ideology, or world view. In ``technocracy,'' however (for us, this stage began to burgeon in the industrial 19th century), there's a change: tools (they're now called ``technology'') begin to alter the culture instead of just being used by it: ``tools...attack the culture. They bid to become the culture.'' And technocracy becomes Technopoly when tools win the battle for dominance and become the sole determiners of a culture's purpose and meaning, and in fact of its very way of knowing and thinking--or of not thinking. The tools, in other words, come not only to use us but to define what we are--which is ``why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose of meaning, no cultural coherence.'' So desolate a view of generalized inversion and ideological collapse fails to subdue either Postman's humane and faithful energy or his unflagging quickness of mind as he travels from Copernicus, Descartes, and Francis Bacon on through discussions of modern bureaucracy, concepts of worker ``management,'' the intellectual hollowness of social ``science'' and its monster-children of poll- taking and IQ testing--these and others (schools, TV, the computer ``culture'') all being ``technologies'' that in fact are ``without a moral center,'' yet ones that we insistently revere and haplessly measure ourselves by, because ``we have become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies.'' Amusing, learned, and prickling with intelligence, Postman easily outclasses the Allan Bloomians in the grave work of showing how it is that we've now stumbled our way into 1984--and offers, at end, some modest suggestions as to what to do about it.
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
