Confronting Technopoly: Charting a Course Towards Human Survival

By Phil Rose

In 1992, Neil Postman presciently coined the term 'technopoly' to refer to 'the surrender of culture to technology'. This book brings together a number of contributors from different disciplinary perspectives to analyse technopoly both as a concept and as it is seen and understood in contemporary society. Contributors present both analysis of and strategies for managing techno-social conflict, and they also open up a number of fruitful new lines of thought around emerging technological, social and even psychological forms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783206902

Book preview

Part I

Contextualization

Chapter 1

Contextualizing Technopoly

Lance Strate

As a public intellectual, Neil Postman’s books typically took the form of an extended essay addressing issues and concerns of importance to contemporary culture. Rather than contributing to the development of a coherent philosophy or theoretical framework within a larger body of work, each book was meant to stand alone as a self-contained argument about our current state of affairs, about how we are doing and where we are going. For Postman, philosophy and theory were not ends in themselves, but rather tools to be used in the service of more practical, and arguably more valuable ends. Postman’s (1988) conclusion in his essay, ‘Social Science as Moral Theology,’ sums up his view on the function of scholarship in general, and media ecology scholarship in particular:

The purpose of social research is to rediscover the truths of social life; to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people; and finally, to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Specifically, the purpose of media ecology is to tell stories about the consequences of technology; to tell how media environments create contexts that may change the way we think or organize our social life, or make us better or worse, or smarter or dumber, or freer or more enslaved. I feel sure the reader will pardon a touch of bias when I say that the stories media ecologists have to tell are rather more important than those of other academic storytellers – because the power of communication technology to give shape to people’s lives is not a matter that comes easily to the forefront of people’s consciousness, though we live in an age when our lives – whether we like it or not – have been submitted to the demanding sovereignty of new media. And so we are obliged, in the interest of a humane survival, to tell tales about what sort of paradise might be gained, and what sort lost. We will not have been the first to tell such tales. But unless our stories ring true, we may be the last.

(pp. 18–19)

Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993) tells the story of our way of life, for those of us living in North America in particular, and western societies more generally, over the course of the past two centuries. It is the story of how much we have lost in our rush to embrace innovation, and of the dangers to our survival we must deal with if we continue along the direction we have been taking. It is a very important story indeed, and Postman is an altogether exemplary storyteller. My goal in this essay is not to retell the story, although it is a story that bears repeating, nor to rewrite the story, as some might want to do, to make it one more to their liking, perhaps by reducing it into a political, economic, or sociological critique, instead of a media ecological one. Rather, my aim is to tell the story behind the story by placing Postman’s Technopoly in the context of his career and his development of media ecology as a field of enquiry.

Education, Language, and Postman’s Media Ecology

I remember when Postman finished writing Technopoly that he remarked to me that it was the first time that he felt that he had nothing more to say on the topic, that he had put everything he knew and wanted to communicate about technology into the book. I hasten to add that, as it turned out, he did in fact have more to say about the subject afterwards, but I bring this up to illustrate the fact that Technopoly took Postman further outside of his longstanding area of expertise than he had ever gone before, and arguably, further outside of his area of expertise than he ever would venture again. After all, Postman began his career as a scholar in the field of education, specializing in English education. Although his first book, Television and the Teaching of English (1961), foreshadowed his later emphasis on the criticism and analysis of the television medium from the standpoint of a media ecologist, the overriding concern was the effects of television on schooling, particularly in regard to literacy and language skills. Moreover, the series of textbooks that he co-authored for secondary school English classes focus on an understanding of language and symbols as they relate to human thought and behaviour (Postman 1966, 1967; Postman and Damon 1965a, 1965b, 1965c; Postman, Morine, and Morine 1963), based on the media ecological perspectives associated with linguistic relativism (Sapir 1921; Whorf 1956), general semantics (Hayakawa and Hayakawa 1990; Johnson 1946; Korzybski [1933] 1993), analytical philosophy (Whitehead and Russell 1925–1927; Wittgenstein 1961), the new criticism/practical criticism of I. A. Richards (1929, 1936; Ogden and Richards 1923), and the related writings of George Orwell (1946, 1949).

The first of a series of books he co-authored with Charles Weingartner, Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching (Postman and Weingartner 1966), shared this stress, as did an anthology they edited together with Terence P. Moran, Language in America (Postman, Weingartner, and Moran 1969), as well as Postman’s first solo-authored book, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (1976), where he drew on general semantics, symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1959), and the relational approach derived from systems theory (Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson 1967; Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch 1974). Moreover, Postman assumed the role of editor of the journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics the following year, 1977, a position he held for a decade. Postman’s other collaborations with Weingartner addressed the topic of education more generally, in conjunction with the educational reform movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, notably the highly popular Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969), and the two books that followed, The Soft Revolution (1971) and The School Book (1973). Not surprisingly, Postman’s approach to educational reform highlighted the fostering of critical awareness of language use and misuse, and how symbols and symbol systems shape and influence human thought and behaviour, and built on the understanding that language is the basis of education.

Postman followed McLuhan’s (1962, 1964) lead in expanding the scope of his concern from language and symbols to communication and culture, and to media and technology, and this is reflected in his formal introduction of media ecology as a field and a curriculum (Postman 1968, 1970; Postman and Weingartner 1971). As the study of media as environments, media ecology applies the key term medium to a broad range of phenomena, much broader than in other fields, so that it can refer to any form of technology, and not just tools and machines but also techniques and methods, and any code or mode of communication, any kind of symbolic, semiotic, or aesthetic form, along with any situation, context, system, or, naturally enough, environment (McLuhan 1964; Postman 2000, 2006; Strate 2006, 2011, 2014). Each medium is understood to have an inherent bias towards being used in certain ways, rather than being neutral and completely guided by human choice and agency, and the bias of a medium in turn tends to lead to certain kinds of effects; the effects are understood to occur not via efficient causality but rather through formal causality (McLuhan and McLuhan 2011), that is, not in the manner of mechanistic cause-and-effect relations, but in the ecological sense in which new phenomena emerge out of the complex interactions occurring within systems and environments (Strate 2011, 2014). As Postman (2000) explained it:

our first thinking about the subject was guided by a biological metaphor. You will remember from the time when you first became acquainted with a Petri dish, that a medium was defined as a substance within which a culture grows. If you replace the word ‘substance’ with the word ‘technology,’ the definition would stand as a fundamental principle of media ecology: A medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture’s politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking. Beginning with that idea, we invoked still another biological metaphor, that of ecology. […] We put the word ‘media’ in front of the word ‘ecology’ to suggest that we were not simply interested in media, but in the ways in which the interaction between media and human beings gives a culture its character and, one might say, helps a culture to maintain symbolic balance.

(pp. 10–11)

Postman’s understanding of media ecology as a field of enquiry incorporated the study of technology, its nature and impact on society, and this was reflected in the curriculum he developed for his graduate programme in media ecology, so that, for example, our required reading included books such as Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), Lynn White, Jr.’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964). The emphasis on technology was secondary for Postman, however, as language and symbolic communication remained his primary focus, understood to be the basis of human culture (hence the reference above to ‘symbolic balance’). Language also was understood, in the discipline of general semantics, to be the basis of time-binding (Korzybski [1921] 1950, [1933] 1993), which refers to the human capacity to accumulate and refine knowledge, pass it down from one generation to the next, and thereby make progress over time, progress that is especially apparent in science and technology. Moreover, Postman followed the lead of Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964) and Edmund Carpenter (1960) in understanding languages as media, and media as forms of language; and by extending the linguistic relativism associated with Edward Sapir (1921) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) to include the idea that different media, along with different languages, are associated with different ways of viewing, thinking about, and understanding our environment. Thus, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Postman and Weingartner (1969) called for a curriculum based on the ‘Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein-Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan-et al. hypothesis […] that language is not merely a vehicle of expression, it is also the driver; and that what we perceive, and therefore can learn, is a function of our languaging processes’ (p. 101). And Postman would go on to argue that media ecology could be understood as ‘general semantics writ large’ (Postman 1974: 76), a comment made in an attempt to convince general semantics enthusiasts to embrace media ecology as an extension of their own discipline. Still, Postman’s explanation is worth revisiting:

Media Ecology is General Semantics writ large. It starts with the assumption that people do their thinking and feeling not only in and through language but in and through all those media which extend, amplify and transform our senses. Further, Media Ecology assumes that what is important in understanding these processes is not so much the content of media but the ways in which they structure our transactions with them. Media ecologists want to know what kind of environment we enter when we talk on the telephone or watch television or read a book. We want to know the answers to such questions as, at what level of abstraction does a medium operate? What aspects of reality does it isolate and amplify? What aspects of reality does it exclude? What is the nature of the information it gives? What are its spatial biases? Its temporal biases? What does a particular medium require us to do with our bodies and our senses? In what directions does it encourage us to think? And how do such biases determine our relations with others and with ourselves?

(Postman 1974: 76–77)

Postman favoured McLuhan’s (1964) tendency to equate media with technology (as opposed to organizations, industries, or institutions). Although in some instances he did try to distinguish between a medium and a technology, for example by way of an analogy with the mind and the brain, respectively (Postman 1985), he never settled on a definitive definition of the two terms; indeed, any distinction that he made between the two was mostly done to mollify critics who always seemed ready to raise the straw argument concerning technological determinism, and not to further his own arguments or analysis. Significantly, to the extent that the two terms are used interchangeably in the media ecology literature, so that any technology can be understood as a type of medium, it is certainly clear that Postman’s interest was almost entirely devoted to the technologies, techniques, and methods of communication, to media as modes of communication, whether the medium in question was television, the English language, a situational context such as a classroom or lecture hall, or a relationship such as that between student and teacher, or authority figure and subordinate. And Postman also regarded media as modes of education, so that his first major critique of the television medium in Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979) centres on the argument that television constitutes a curriculum in its own right, one that directly competes with the curriculum of traditional schooling, and that has become more popular and more powerful than our traditional mode of education. As a mode of communication, the school is based on the literate media of the written and printed word, and shares similar biases. Therefore, in effect, the contrast that he set up was between print and the electronic media, similar to McLuhan’s contrast between print and mechanical technologies and electronics (1962, 1964). But in this work Postman broke with McLuhan and with his own previous stance, as expressed in Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Postman and Weingartner 1969), where he had argued that schools need to change and adapt themselves to the emerging electronic media environment. In a famous reversal, Postman (1979) instead argued that schools need to hold firm to the biases of typographic media, to serve as a counterweight to the prevailing biases of electronic technology, and to preserve as much of print culture as possible.

From Television to Technology

In Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), Postman argued that the television medium is attention-centred rather than content-centred, its bias being directed towards content that is most likely to attract and hold audiences, rather than content that is clearly and logically organized, coherent, and enlightening. This characteristic is intimately related to the fact that television is a visual medium, a medium that viewers watch, a medium that is image-centred, whereas schools and print media are word-centred, and therefore idea-centred, language being relatively abstract in contrast to images, and written language all the more so. Postman further elaborated on his argument concerning the contrast between word and image as competing symbol systems in his next book, The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), building on philosopher Susanne Langer’s (1957) distinction between presentational and discursive symbolic form; there he argued that the accessibility of images as opposed to writing, the fact that you don’t have to go to school for years to be able to decipher television content, has undermined the extended concept of childhood that had evolved out of modern print culture and the sequestering of children in schools, and otherwise blurred the distinction between childhood and adulthood. Postman delivered his most far-reaching critique in the third book in this series, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), drawing in part on the arguments made by Daniel Boorstin in The Image (1978), and arguing that television’s emphasis on images and immediacy makes it a medium biased towards entertaining content, and therefore content that trivializes serious subject matter, i.e., news, politics, religion, and education (see also Strate 2014). Significantly, Postman identified his main concern as discourse, specifically public discourse, again making language his central concern. Although Amusing Ourselves to Death was the last of his major works on television, similar critiques were included among the essays collected in Conscientious Objections (Postman 1988), while his specific arguments concerning television news were expanded upon in How to Watch TV News, co-authored by Postman’s former student and local New York City newscaster Steve Powers, and published the same year as Technopoly (1993).

Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) turned out to be Postman’s most popular and influential work, and it is impossible to fully understand Technopoly (1993) outside of the context of Postman’s previous publications. Certainly, Amusing Ourselves to Death was a hard act to follow, and after three books on television, Postman was interested in tackling a new topic. Additionally, while many agreed with his analysis of television, some argued that what Postman had identified were the symptoms, not the underlying cause. His critics argued that the root cause of the problem was capitalism, and more specifically the economic and political system in which television functioned as a social institution, and an industry made up of professional organizations, businesses owned by mass media corporations. While Postman did not deny that these were factors in shaping television as a medium, and at times tried to incorporate these ideas in the service of his critique, he maintained the position that the true agent of change was technology, and capitalism was a secondary factor; its main significance is the fact that under capitalism, the use and development and implementation of media and technology tend to be given free reign, whereas other systems place more restraints on their innovation, adoption, and utilization. Technopoly, then, served as a response to critics of Amusing Ourselves to Death, explaining that it was American society’s complete surrender to the technological imperative that accounted for the effects of television he had described, that our devotion to technology was why we, more than any other culture, had let television be television, that is, had allowed the content of television to fully conform to the biases of the medium.

Others who agreed with Postman both on the symptoms and the cause of our culture’s television-induced maladies argued that another new medium and technology would be the cure we needed: the computer. The period during which Postman wrote his television trilogy exactly coincided with the rise of the microcomputer, otherwise known as the home computer or personal computer. A number of Postman’s students, along with colleagues and friends such as Alan Kay, inventor of the Graphical User Interface, extolled the virtues of text-based digital communications, word processing, desktop publishing, hypertext, and increased access to information, as reinforcing the biases of typography and literacy, and balancing out the negative effects of television, although some, like his student Paul Levinson (1988, 1997, 1999), took a more benign view of the television medium as well. In contrast to television, a medium that Postman was well acquainted with, as a viewer and as someone who had appeared on television numerous times, including serving as an instructor on the CBS early morning programme Sunrise Semester during 1976–1977 (Postman 1979), computers represented a form of technology that he had only limited experience with. He correctly understood, however, that the new media emerging at this time were new forms of electronic media, members of the same category as television, radio, telephone, and telegraph, and sharing similar biases as other forms of electronic technology; Postman had followed McLuhan in basing his analysis of the television medium on the fact that it was a form of electronic technology, which suggested that that same analysis could be extended to computer media as well (see Strate 2012a). Postman’s crap detector, to use the phrase that he and Weingartner had put forth as a major goal of education in Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969), was further set off by the kind of discourse that appeared in advertisements and articles extolling the virtues of information technology, and in the arguments and apologetics he heard from students and colleagues. Additionally, he was familiar with informed critical discussions of computer technology such as Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason (1976).

Postman incorporated his first significant critique of computer technology into Technopoly, along with more general criticisms regarding the relationship between technology and information, which for the first time were not overshadowed by his powerful arguments concerning the negative effects of image culture. As noted, images provide information in a relatively accessible form, one that does not require years of schooling to decipher, in contrast to written and print media, but there is more to the contemporary information environment than the fact that it is image-centred (Strate 2012b). As Postman (1979) explained:

Every society is held together by certain modes and patterns of communication which control the kind of society it is. One may call them information systems, codes, message networks, or media of communication. Taken together they set and maintain the parameters of thought and learning within a culture. Just as the physical environment determines what the source of food and exertions of labor shall be, the information environment gives specific direction to the kinds of ideas, social attitudes, definitions of knowledge, and intellectual capacities that will emerge.

(p. 29)

And as he further elaborated:

Media ecology is the study of information environments. It is concerned to understand how technologies and techniques of communication control the form, quantity, speed, distribution, and direction of information; and how, in turn, such information configurations or biases affect people’s perceptions, values, and attitudes. Thus, media ecology transcends several subjects of wider acceptance, including, for example, psychology and sociology, since it assumes that the psychology of people and their methods of social organization are, in large measure, a product of a culture’s characteristic information patterns […] such information forms as the alphabet, the printed word, and the television image are not mere instruments which make things easier for us. They are environments – like language itself, symbolic environments – within which we discover, fashion, and express our humanity in particular ways.

(p. 186)

In addition to images, television, as a form of broadcasting along with radio, makes extensive use of the spoken word, another form of communication with few barriers to access. Moreover, all forms of electronic communication, by virtue of their ability to transmit information over distances instantaneously, increase the accessibility of information by increasing its reach, speed of dissemination, and the overall volume of information present at any given time (further extended by various forms of electronic storage, e.g., magnetic tape, optical discs, computer data banks, etc.). Increased access to information, the breaking down of barriers, and the bypassing and undermining of the processes of gatekeeping and methods of evaluation are the basis of Postman’s (1982) argument concerning the disappearance of childhood and the blurring of the distinction between childhood and adulthood, as well as his critique of information technologies in Technopoly (1993), notably in the chapter entitled ‘The Broken Defenses.’ In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman is particularly concerned with information overload, and the fact that the deluge of information transmitted by the electronic media is largely irrelevant to our everyday lives. He further notes that the information we are inundated with is presented in an incoherent manner, due in part to the fact that images are arranged according to aesthetic and attention-centred criteria, rather than the linear sequence and logical organization associated with literate forms, and also due to the fact that the speed of electronic transmission favours rapid turnover of information rather than in-depth analysis and explanation. Postman concludes that the irrelevance and incoherence of the information glut we are exposed to leaves us with a feeling of impotence, insofar as there is no adequate way to respond to the information that we receive.

This begins with the introduction of the telegraph in the early nineteenth century, the medium that signalled the start of the communications revolution that ultimately transforms our media environment, especially when coupled with photography, introduced roughly around the same time, as the two technologies are ultimately combined in the form of television. In Technopoly (1993), Postman points to contemporary technology in general as the source of information overload and a breakdown of coherence in American culture, at the same time critiquing the fact that technologies, especially those associated with media and computing, are celebrated and marketed for making information more accessible, a fact that exacerbates our social malaise, rather than making things better. The continuity between Postman’s arguments concerning information overload in Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly become even more apparent via the missing link of an address he gave at a meeting of the German Informatics Society in 1990 entitled ‘Informing Ourselves to Death’ (ironically never published in print form, but made widely available via the internet). In this address, he made the following point about computer technology and information:

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better – best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.

The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people – perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger. (no pagination)

Multiple Goals and Purposes

In placing Technopoly (1993) in the context of Postman’s larger body of work, it becomes clear that while there is a main theme summarized by the book’s subtitle, The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the book actually combines multiple goals and purposes, much more so than his previous works such as Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). The first chapter, ‘The Judgment of Thamus,’ stands as an excellent introduction to Postman’s media ecology approach regarding the critical analysis of technology, as he argues that, ‘technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological,’ and that ‘how the ecology of media works’ is that a ‘new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything’ (p. 18). Characterizing every innovation as a Faustian bargain, one in which every benefit unavoidably comes with a price, he notes that we tend to only focus on the positive effects or benefits of any given new technology, and ignore the negative effects or costs that will inevitably accompany them. Postman also relates the story from Plato’s Phaedrus about the Egyptian god Theuth and King Thamus, in which Thamus explains that inventors are not good at predicting the positive and negative consequences of their inventions. In fact, the effects of any innovation are impossible to fully anticipate. This chapter stands alone in its focus on the impact of individual innovations, as opposed to the overriding concern in the rest of the book regarding technology in general, and our devotion to it as a society. Analysing the effects of individual media and technologies is one of the main concerns within the field of media ecology, but one that differs from the broader criticism that Mumford (1934, 1967, 1970) directed at machine ideology, for example, or that Ellul (1964, 1980, 1990) aimed at the technological society and the technological imperative. That the two concerns share a similar sensibility is intuitively obvious to media ecology scholars, but it is also helpful to spell out the fact that they inform each other, insofar as every innovation will inevitably have some negative effects that are difficult if not impossible to predict, and that the blind acceptance of every new technology that is introduced means that we are subjecting ourselves to a constant stream of unexpected costs and curses, some of which might turn out to be altogether disastrous for us, possibly even fatal.

The concept of technopoly itself represents the heart of the book, and Postman presents it as one of three types of cultures, the other two being technocracy and tool-using culture. This typology, which also constitutes an attempt at historical periodization, reflects the influence of Lewis Mumford, whom Postman deeply admired for his social and political activism as well as his groundbreaking insights concerning technology (Postman also appreciated the fact that Mumford was from Flushing, the neighbourhood in Queens where Postman resided for most of his adult life). Mumford (1934), who was also a significant influence on the media ecology scholarship of McLuhan (1964) and Harold Innis (1951), wrote about three phases of technological development, the eotechnic, paleotechnic, and neotechnic. These essentially correspond to Postman’s three cultures, although Mumford (1934) had initially viewed them somewhat differently. The eotechnic (tool-using) period was one in which an organic ideology reigned according to Mumford, an ecological world-view that is the natural world-view for human populations. Further arguing that the paleotechnic (technocratic) era was the period in which machine ideology had replaced the organic ideology that comes naturally to human life, he was cautiously optimistic that the eotechnic phase would be marked by a restoration of organic ideology (rather than the extension of the mechanical in the