Technology is ruining our lives! I don’t really believe that (at least not entirely), but that’s the thought the keeps popping into my head as I continue to read through the book Technopoly, by Neil Postman. Basically Neil Postman makes a strong effort through this book to enlighten his readers about the imperfections of the new age technology everyone has come to adore so much. Advertisements and magazines and television commercials paint a very one sided picture about technology and in Technopoly Neil Postman just tries to give the readers a good high resolution view of the other side of the picture. In the beginning of the book, Neil Postman tells a fairly historical depiction of the effects of new technology, telling about Plato’s story Phaedrus and moving on to scientists such as Kepler and Copernicus. It seems to me that he does this as a way to convey that the effects of new technology is really nothing new and that it has been happening over and over again even since the time of ancient Egypt. Grand new technologies continue to be invented, and every time there is a great disruption in culture and world views that come with them. At least that is the message that I feel Neil Postman conveys. As I read through this book, it is hard not to feel that Neil Postman seems to have some sort of chip on his shoulder when it comes to technology and even though he tries to defend himself and say he is unbiased, I can’t help but feel that he is paints a rather dark picture on the effects of technology. But, as I said before, the media paints such a perfectly light picture of technology that I feel its good to have someone like Neil Postman tell a darker side of the story so that a person can truly see the two sides of the coin and properly come up with their own personal views on technology.
Although his depiction of technology is a bit one sided, Neil Postman does make extremely valid points and arguments in his accession of the effects of new technology on the world. One of his arguments in particular that caught my attention quite a bit was when he spoke about the war between new and old technologies and their users. Every time a great new technology comes out that could replace some older, but widely accepted, technology, a battle between ideologies takes place. The people who accept, use, and even profit from the older technology will strive to keep it from being replace, because if it is replaced then those people will not have the technological power any more. In Technopoly, Neil Postman communicates this quite well when he says “those who have control over the workings of a particular technology accumulate power and inevitably form a kind of conspiracy against those who have no access to the specialized knowledge made available by this technology.”(pg. 9) This argument I find extremely true, and it is a rather negative effect of technology. What Neil Postman argues here is also well supported in the previous book I read, Computers: The Life Story of a Technology. Reading through that book, it was very surprising how often power shifted to new user groups and how often these technological wars started and ended. Just reading about the software explosion alone; so many companies would be started with some new sort of technology, whether it is a new type of operating system or just some sort of business calculation program. These companies would come out with this technology, make a very large amount of profit from their product and become very well known and powerful, but then be out of business within a couple years. So many companies were coming out with new technologies so fast that very few companies, such as Microsoft and Apple, were actually able to keep up the pace of inventing and improving technologies in order to maintain power. Furthermore, when these new technologies are invented, it is most often the cultures centered around the old technologies that lose the battles and end up forced to learn how to use the new technologies or suffer the consequences. Such consequences could be something minuscule like not being up to date with you peers, or something very important like not getting a job position. It seems that the rapid growth of technology has made the world, and particular America, a very cutthroat place where one must force themselves to keep up or else they will be left behind.
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