Saihanjula, Book Review of Neil Postman for English 5011 (Spring 1999)

"Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the
uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our
humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines
certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth
living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy." (xii)

1. The Judgement of Thamus
2. From Tools to technocracy
3. From Technocracy to Technopoly
4. The Improbable World
5. The Broken Defenses
6. The Ideology of Machines: Medical Technology
7. The Ideology of Machines: Computer Technology
8. Invisible Technologies
9. Scientism
10. The Great Symbol Drain
11. The Loving Resistance Fighter

From a broad social and cultural point of view, Postman gives us a descriptive account of how technologies have influenced the ways humans think and behave. He claims that new technologies compete with old ones for the dominance of people's world-view, since one significant technology can change everything. Postman says that in technocracy, the technological world-view and the traditional (the social and symbolic) world-view, co-existed with each other. However, in technopoly, the impact of which can be best exemplified by computers, "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology" has taken place. He argues against the idea that humans are machines and machines are humans, as it is undeniable that mind is a biological phenomenon. He is more on the skeptical side of technophobics, blaming that what computer benefits human life only in terms of processing. According to Postman, computer can assist us speeding up our lives and storing unprecedented large amount of information, but our problem cannot be solved merely replying this improved process.

Postman borrowed the fable of Plato's Phaedrus to express his point of view, saying that what technophobics concerned about is that people will write rather than what people will write. I think by emphasizing the processing function of computers, Postman makes the same mistake: He is troubled by the fact that people use computers too frequently, instead of what people will do with the help of computers, especially in an era when Internet provides us information that used to be inaccessible. However, I find his idea persuasive that he thinks technologies are prone to converting abstract ideas into things, and measure them by statistics. That, I believe, is the major drawback of technopoly.