Home » Technopoly » Page 3

Tag: Technopoly

Technology: To A Man With A…. (Technopoly)

I want to start off my thoughts on Technopoly with a little bit of fun.

…To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Without being too literal, we may extend the truism: To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number.

-Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 14

Postman published this book (in 1992) before the spread of the internet or the mass popularity of cell phones, but much of his wisdom could easily apply to either. I wonder what he would add to this list today. Here are a few possibilities: to a man with an Instagram, everything looks like a photo op. To a man with a Twitter, everything looks like a hashtag. To a man with Google, everything looks like data waiting to be searched. To a man with an iPhone, everything looks like a text message, photo op, app, etc.

Those are terrible examples. Feel free to add your own.

Blogging Through Technopoly

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

For the next several weeks, I will be blogging through Neil Postman’s book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

This is only my second foray into Postman’s writing. I have read  Amusing Ourselves to Death a couple of times and benefited from it quite a bit. I read the first chapter of Technopoly a couple of nights ago and was absolutely floored. It was worth the price of the book for that one chapter. I couldn’t go on to the second immediately because I had to go back through chapter 1 to digest all of the notes I made in the margins. I look forward to writing about it.

It’s really a shame that the book was written before the internet boom, but I hope that we can make some wise applications to the things that Postman might not have foreseen.