technology
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Neil PostmanCollection of essays on different topics from education, childhood, politics, technology, television etc. Postman, as always, provides insights into our culture (mostly American) and suggests some practical ideas how to prevent negative ongoing trends. As always he uses wisdom of sages, thinkers, writers, and philosophers from the past to help us understand current social issues.
His essays and observations draw a picture of quite sad future. A lot of this predications are already fulfilled, so Postman is unfortunately was very accurate in them which he poses as warnings for us.
However, what I liked about this book is that he tries to stay optimistic. He reminds us that civilized society is very vulnerable and we should pay attention to dangers. And he tries to provide us with a mindset how to do just that.
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Neil PostmanOutstanding analysis of American culture of 1980s dominated by entertainment.
Makes a lot of sense to me since I witnessed myself similar changes to the culture growing up in Ukraine during the 1990s and 2000s.
This book is even more actual now in the age of Internet, mobile phones, social networks, instant deliveries etc.
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For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?
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“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.
Neil Postman -
It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. To take another example: We may find it convenient to send a condolence card to a bereaved friend, but we delude ourselves if we believe that our card conveys the same meaning as our broken and whispered words when we are present. The card not only changes the words but eliminates the context from which the words take their meaning. Similarly, we delude ourselves if we believe that most everything a teacher normally does can be replicated with greater efficiency by a micro-computer. Perhaps some things can, but there is always the question, What is lost in the translation? The answer may even be: Everything that is significant about education.
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But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
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We need technology to live, as we need food to live. But, of course, if we eat too much food, or eat food that has no nutritional value, or eat food that is infected with disease, we turn a means of survival into its opposite. The same may be said of our technology. Not a single philosopher would dispute that technology may be life-enhancing or life-diminishing. Common sense commands us to ask, Which is it?
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“In Defense of Poetry”, he (Editor: Perry Shelley) made the arguments that explained why Reason itself was insufficient to produce humane progress. Indeed, when science and technology claim to provide ethical imperatives, we are lead into moral catastrophe… It is only through love, tenderness, and beauty, he wrote, that the mind is made receptive to the moral decency, and poetry is the means by which love, tenderness, and beat are best cultivated. It is the poetic imagination, not scientific accomplishment, that is the engine of moral progress… Thus, the “heaven city” that the eighteenth-century rationalists dreamed of is not reachable through reason alone… Progress is the business of the heart, not the intellect.
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I find it useful to ask of any technology that is marketed as indispensable, What problem does it solve for me? Will it advantages outweigh its disadvantages? Will it alter my habits and language, and if so, for better or worse? … I will use technology when I judge it to be in my favor to do so. I resist being used by it. In some cases I may have moral objections. But in most instances, my objection is practical, and reason tells me to measure the results from that point of view.
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For all of the Twain’s enthusiasm for the giantism of American industry, the totality of his work is an affirmation of the pre-technological values. Personal loyalty, regional tradition, the continuity of family life, the relevance of the tales and wisdom of the elderly, are the soul of his books.
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Everyone will know how to use computers. But what they will not know, as none of us did about everything from automobiles to movies to television, is what are the psychological, social, and political effects of new technologies. And that is a subject that ought to be central in schools… If we are going to make technology education part of the curriculum, its goal must be to teach students to use technology rather than to be used by it. And that means that they must know how a technology’s use affects the society in which they live, as well as their own personal lives. This is something we didn’t do with television, and, I fear, we are now not doing with computer technology.
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“Mythinformation” is an almost religious conviction that at the root of our difficulties - social, political, ecological, psychological - it the fact that we do not have enough information. This, in spite of everyone’s having access to books, newspapers, magazines, radios, television, movies, photographs, videos, CDs, billboards, telephones, junk mail, and, recently, the Internet.
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Nicholas Negroponte envisions a time when we may speak to a doorknob or a toaster and predicts that, when we do, we will find the experience no more uncomfortable than talking to a telephone answering machine. He has nothing to say about how we may become different by talking to doorknob (and he has no clue about how talking to an answering machine s is far from comfortable). He is concerned only that we adapt to our technological future. He nowhere addresses the psychic or social meaning of adaptation. People are quite capable of adapting to all sorts of changes - soldiers adapt themselves to killing, children adapt themselves to being fatherless, women can adapt themselves to being abused. I have not doubt we can adapt ourselves to talking much more to machines than to people. But that is not an answer to anything.
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I believe we are living just now in a special moment in time, at one of those darkening moments when all around us is change and we cannot yet see which way to go. Our old ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves are not large enough to accommodate a world made paradoxically small by our technologies, yet larger than we can grasp. We cannot go back to simpler times and simpler tales - tales made by clans and tribes and nations when the world was large enough for each to pursue its separate evolution. There are no island continents in the world of electronic technologies, no places left to hide or withdraw from the communities of women or men. We cannot make the world accept one tale - and tat one our own - by chanting it louder than the rest or silencing those who are singing a different song. We must take to heart the sage remark of Niels Bohr, one of our century’s greatest scientist. He said, “The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.” … We can only make the human tale larger by making ourselves little smaller - by seeing that the vision each of us is granted is but a tiny fragment of a much greater Truth not given to mortals to know.
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I do not go as far back as the introduction of the radio and the Victoria, but I am old enough to remember when 16-millimeter film was to be the sure cure, the closed-circuit television, then 8-millimeter film, then teacherproof textbooks. Now computers. I know a false god when I see one.
Neil Postman
