Hello, I’m Sebastian Lowe, writing this blog from Four Rivers Charter Public School in Massachusetts. It is a blog about a book called Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, written by the now deceased Neil Postman. My aim is to expose some of the concepts discussed within Technopoly that are highly relevant to a modern, technologically advanced society.
If Neil Postman wished to present his ideas in a style accessible to a large audience, then he went astray. This is not so much due to his linguistic style - his sentences are usually understandable - but due to his relentlessly angry tone, explicit bias, and consistent "more informed than thou" arrogance. Yet for all of his idiosyncrasies, he has succeeded, in the very least, in drawing my attention toward the potentially dark side of technology and the corrupting aura that may surround it. His ideas are challenging, and will likely provoke much disagreement. This is, of course, a good thing; his probing analysis will exercise the acumen of modern people the world over.
As a critic of science and technology, Postman's view is similar, in certain ways, to that which John Gray exhibits in his Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (a somewhat depressing book that is insightful for all of its doom). But unlike John Gray, Postman totally embraces a perspective of humanity and its culture as unique, meaningful, and to some degree unnatural.
Many of his statements casually answer questions that humanity has thought about for centuries. Consider one of these bold assertions:
"…Writing or reading this book or forming a new government or conversing at dinner or falling in love. These events are a function of human intelligence interacting with environment, and although there is surly a measure of regularity in human affairs, such affairs are not determined by natural laws, immutable or otherwise.”
He says more:
“… There is an irrevocable difference between a blink and a wink. A blink can be classified as a process; it has physiological causes which can be understood and explained within the context of established postulates and theories. But a wink must be classified as a practice, filled with personal and to some extend unknowable meanings and, in any case, quite impossible to explain in terms of causal relations (pg 148).”
“The Environment” and “Intelligence” are not self-evidently two different things. They might be the same thing, or they might influence one another. It is too simple to suggest that intelligence breaks all the natural patterns. Moreover, this statement is said from a standpoint of certainty, and this is certainly a topic where nobody can claim to be absolutely correct. Moreover, humans are species, and are part of nature. If nature includes the animal Kingdom, then we are part of it. We are also part of nature in an ontological sense – merely by existing, we conform to, or perhaps are identical with, the architecture of the universe.
Postman makes these statements in order to construct a context for his critique of social science - which, he argues, is not a science at all. His reasoning essentially follows from the (perhaps unsound) premise that people cannot be analyzed in the same way that physical objects can. Postman weaves philosophy into his arguments without considering alternative possibilities about the world. It is, therefore, incomplete, and most emphatically a single opinion.
Leaving these massive statements aside, consider this observation:
“…It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power.”
Here, flourish can mean any number of things: wealth, mortality, quality of life, wisdom and knowledge. Postman does not say which one. What is more brazen, though, is his lack of reasoning for this conclusion. Indeed, he does argue that religion and metaphysics can lead to the perception of a fulfilling life with the of inherent meaning, but this may or may not be the true state of things! Under some circumstances, religion can make us feel good about ourselves – but surly, there is more to “flourishing” than that!
Here is another strange idea:
“If I am not mistaken, many people still believe that what makes a statement scientific is that is can be verified. In fact, exactly the opposite is the case: what separates scientific statements from nonscientific statements is that the former can be subjected to the test of falsifiability. What makes science possible is not our ability to recognize “truth” but our ability to recognize falsehood.”
Neil Postman, you are arguing semantics. A statement is scientific if it can be verified as true or false; one is the negation of the other. If makes no difference whether we discover if a statement is true or if it is true: if it is false, then it is not true, and if it is true, then it is not false.
What really makes a statement non-scientific is its inability to be either proven or refuted. Saying that God exists is not a scientific statement because there is no way to verify it as true or as false. However, saying that “When a bowling ball is dropped, it falls to the ground” is a scientific statement: we can prove that it is true or false by experimenting and seeing what happens when we drop bowling balls under different circumstances. It is a testable statement, and therefore scientific.
“…Writing lucid, economical, stylish prose, which has nothing to do with word-processors.”
I disagree. The computer can help to physically enable writing. It cannot, though, provide the means to generate sentences in a person’s mind.
Themes in Technopoly
The causes of behavior are not always measurable.
Science is driven by potentially refutable empirical evidence (this is not the whole story though).
“Unlike science, social science never discovers anything” (pg. 157).
“In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity becomes profoundly unacceptable. Diversity, complexity, and ambiguity of human judgment are enemies of technique” (pg. 158).
Science ≠ Social Science ≠ Imaginative Literature like the Novel
All three are forms of storytelling.
As an authority, science has replaced religion and deleted the moral clarity that religion offered. Science offers no moral guidance of its own.
The causes of behavior are not always measurable.
Science is driven by potentially refutable empirical evidence (this is not the whole story though).
“Unlike science, social science never discovers anything” (pg. 157).
“In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity becomes profoundly unacceptable. Diversity, complexity, and ambiguity of human judgment are enemies of technique” (pg. 158).
Taking information (from a source) vs. find your own wisdom and doing something your own way
Computers cannot solve or prevent every problem
(It is not true that) Information = Knowledge = Power / Wisdom
Stuff getting done directly by us vs. stuff getting done indirectly because of us.
Examples: Doing math vs. getting a computer (made by someone) to do it for us
Mowing the lawn vs. doing it ourselves by hand [How are “direct” and “indirect” related?]
Skill vs. technology
Personal Know-how vs. using something else that knows how
Meta-technology: Technologies that create technologies
On Medical Practice: Technology should follow from observation
(“I have observed that your bone is broken, so let us use an x-ray to see exactly how”)
Technology: help that is created, not given (a hand or a mind is not technology, because it is a given, but a nest made of sticks is, because it is not a given).
No comments:
Post a Comment