Home » Technopoly » Page 2

Tag: Technopoly

Secret Sacraments (Technopoly)

When Catholic priests use wine, wafers, and incantations to embody spiritual ideas, they acknowledge the mystery and the metaphor being used. But experts of Technopoly acknowledge no such overtones or nuances when they use forms, standardized tests, polls, and other machinery to give technical reality to ideas about intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, emotional imbalance, social deviance, or political opinion. They would have us believe that technology can plainly reveal the true nature of some human condition or belief because the score, statistic, or taxonomy has given it technical form.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 90

If Technopoly is the cult of technology (the love and acceptance of technology exalted to an idolatrous/religious level), then we have to be on the lookout for its sacraments. We can take two views of the idea of what a sacrament is based on classic Reformed theology. First, in the classical sense of the word, sacramentum refers to an oath of allegiance taken by a soldier to his king and/or country. In other words, participating in the sacrament consecrates the participant to the service of the one administering the sacrament. Second, sacraments are ‘visible words.’ That is, they are visible signs pointing to invisible realities.

If you apply this understanding of the sacraments to what Postman is saying you may get the following (relating to the two points above): First, as we’ve already seen (HERE), individual technologies carry with them certain imperatives. They, in some sense, say to us, ‘Do this and live.’ If this is truly the case, and I think it is, we must be mindful of the fact that those technologies may call upon us to pledge allegiance if we are going to successfully live in this world. Second, the tangible objects of technology may in fact be visible signs of invisible realities. The physical presence of an iPhone in my pocket is a visible sign of an invisible reality about myself and the world around me.

I am not going into specific analysis here, but I want to make one particular point. We do not have answers to where our technologies will lead us, or whether they are necessarily good or bad (or a mixture of the two). We fail only when we neglect to ask questions of those technologies; and these two categories relating to sacraments propose two vital questions: where is my allegiance as I use this tool (or it uses me)? and What invisible realities (about myself, the world, and even heaven) does it point to?

Education as Economics

In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for? The answers are discouraging, and one of them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a good job. And that’s it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one. Neither of these purposes is, to say the least, grand or inspiring. The story each suggests is that the United States is not a culture but merely an economy, which is the last refuge of an exhausted philosophy of education.

-Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 174

I was not particularly fond of Postman’s solutions to the problem, but his analysis of the modern state of education is profound, especially considering that he wrote the book before the boom of the internet, laptops, tablets, iPads, and even cell phones. The more engrossed our culture becomes in the skills of technology, the more education seeks primarily to ‘equip’ students to perform technical skills. There used to be a particular type of school for that sort of thing – a technical school. We are now on the verge of all schools in some sense becoming technical schools. My own take on the new common core is that it is a leap in that direction, with everything being geared toward testing and ‘practical’ workplace applications.

Today, education is even more wrapped up with, and in, economics than it was when Postman wrote these words in the 90s. I hate the fact that I have to encourage teenagers to go to college simply for economic purposes, but that’s the sad reality. I would much rather tell them that a good liberal arts education will equip them to see the wonder of life and reality than tell them that it is simply a hoop that one must jump through to live a comfortable life.

I do not see any way of stopping this train in modern American culture. We have been headed in this direction for a long time, and the momentum is likely past the point of no return. But perhaps there is hope in the church. We can encourage our children to read simply for the sake of reading, and for the sake of good stories. We can encourage them to study creation (science), mathematics, history and the like simply for the fact that they are interesting and worthwhile, and a part of the story that God is telling, regardless of their so-called ‘practical value.’ We can continue to find roots in our tradition that will temper our need of flashy technological tools for learning. We can temper the bright light show of our culture with the deep roots and simple beauty of Christ.

Instead of flashier, we must go deeper. Instead of focusing purely on pragmatism and economics, we can encourage the goodness of education simply for the sake of knowing God and what he has created. And as we do so, perhaps, at least in the United States, we have a real opportunity to be different from the culture in a way that has not been evident for the past 100 years.

Let me put it this way: rather than seeking education as primarily a means of competing and gaining currency, we must seek it (1) as a means of reminding ourselves that we are small and (2) gaining currency for our souls.

The Difference Between a Blink and a Wink

…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 extent unknowable meanings and, in any case, quite impossible to explain or predict in terms of causal relations.

-Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 148

If you think science can explain a blink, fine. But if you think it can explain a wink, you have entered into the world of Scientism. As my French teacher used to say before our exams, ‘Bonne chance’ with that.

The Cure Becomes the Disease

…Until bureaucracy became, to borrow again Karl Kraus’s comment on psychoanalysis, the disease for which it purported to be the cure…

Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 86

Postman makes this point about the prevalence of bureaucracy in our culture: it exists to support and organize but ends up lording it over those it was to support and itself being a big disorganized mess.

The idea of the cure becoming the disease is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ common refrain that ‘when you make something into a god it becomes a demon’ and Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ point that every institution tends to produce its opposite. But I am interested in how it applies to modern technology.

One point that comes to mind is that internet access should be the cure of all boredom; but, listening to the teenagers I talk to, they sound more bored than I ever remember feeling as a teenager. Another is that the internet gives us access to an enormous amount of information, which, one would think, could help us to become more intelligent. But, instead, it has often serves to make us only more superficial – breadth with no depth.

Do you have any examples of the cure becoming the disease in modern culture?

Subverting Technological Imperatives (Technopoly)

…Technology creates its own imperatives and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives.

-Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 105

Michael Polanyi makes a similar point in Personal Knowlege:

All technology is equivalent to a conditional command, for it is not possible to define a technology without acknowledging, at least at second hand, the advantages which technical operations might reasonably pursue…A technology must…declare itself in favour of a definite set of advantages, and tell people what to do in order to secure them (p. 176).

When Postman and Polanyi come together, I listen intently.

We need to be asking ourselves what our technologies are asking of us. By ‘asking of us,’ I mean what are they compelling us to do and what are they asking us to give up? The next logical question is, What are the benefits of obedience? In summary, then, every device is telling me to do something, asking me to give up something, and offering me something in return for obedience.

If we want to subvert the imperatives of technology, if we want to throw off its sovereignty, a good starting point may be to ask what we will gain if we disobey, and if that disobedience may lead to better results than simply yielding to what is offered to us. Another starting point, and a distinctly Christian one, is to ask how we can submit technological imperatives, or technological sovereignty, to the imperatives and sovereignty of God. That is, rather than being a tool of our tools, can we use those tools to follow a different sovereign. Can we see them as His tools?

One sure way of knowing who’s sovereignty we are under, and whose commands we are obeying, is whether our use of those tools look just the same as someone who has no love for Jesus Christ. Do you surf the internet the same as the godless? Do you text the same? Do you take the same kinds of pictures? Do you post the same status updates and photos?

This is all stream-of-consciousness. I have not worked out a definite position here. I only want to provoke thought. But the main point I think I want to make as I post about technology (and Technopoly) is that my idea is that we must be aiming at a loving subversion against the spirit of the age. Subversion is not necessarily rebellion. But it always asks questions and it always proposes possible alternatives.

The Essence of Media Ecology (Technopoly)

Here is Neil Postman’s simple description of media ecology:

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.

-Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 18

I have heard a pharmacist say, ‘When we added computers to the pharmacy it changed the pharmacy.’ It wasn’t that the old pharmacy stayed virtually the same with the addition of computers: it became a new pharmacy; the pharmacist’s job acquired a new job description entirely. I’ve also heard church folk say the same about adding big screens in the sanctuary. It isn’t the old environment with the addition of plasma: it’s a new environment. The same goes for the boardroom, the classroom, the living room, the bedroom, and anywhere else.

This is not to say that change will always be bad. A new environment may cause the inhabitants to flourish. But we need to count the cost before making the change. We need to thoughtfully consider whether a total change in the environment is wanted or needed.