40 pages • 1 hour read
Neil PostmanTechnopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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BetaChapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Improbable World”
Chapter 4 describes the set of conditions in America that allowed Technopoly to flourish once it was established. Postman states that traditional, tool-using cultures had a coherent, comprehensive worldview in which everything could be explained. He compares this to a new deck of cards that come in a given order; once you begin to examine each card, you notice the pattern and can accurately guess what the next card will be. On the other hand, a Technopoly is like a deck of cards that has been shuffled many times; each card dealt is random.
Information has the same effect, the author argues. Technocracies replaced traditional cultures by also offering a coherent narrative based on science. For a time, this worked, but soon a glut of information caused the system to backfire; conflicting scientific findings caused information chaos. He shows how this happened after the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century. As the quantity of information grew, so did the need for methods of control. One such method was vastly increasing the number of schools. Likewise, the curriculum was devised in order to limit and organize information. The printing press played a strong role in the Scientific Revolution, Protestantism, and the founding of the United States. Then, Postman writes, little happened for nearly a century.
The next explosion of information occurred with the invention of the telegraph in the mid-19th century. For the first time, communication was decoupled from transportation, as information could spread quickly without regard to distance. This also made information free from context—so it need not have a purpose and instead acted as a commodity. This was accomplished in conjunction with newspapers, which now focused on the amount and speed of information they delivered. Photography was invented around the same time, and images changed the content and definition of information, in some respects replacing language.
This grew exponentially in the 20th century, when broadcasting and computers would each cause their own information explosion. By the end of the century, there was so much information removed from any specific function that it “[had] become a form of garbage” (69). The purpose of information had ceased to be the progress of humanity and had instead become the furthering of technology itself.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Broken Defenses”
Technopoly occurs when technology takes over every aspect of culture through a glut of information. This chapter describes how this happens. Information can no longer be controlled, and the culture attempts to use technology itself to control information, which leads to a vicious cycle. Postman compares institutions to an immune system, working to “destroy” (exclude) some information as a way of preventing an overdose of it. Examples include courts, schools, religion, and family. They protect their members or users by effectively controlling information. In a Technopoly, these control mechanisms break down.
The technical methods devised to deal with the information glut are bureaucracy, expertise, and technical machinery. Bureaucracies predate Technopolies but are used by them. An example of how they exclude information is the standardized form, which leaves no room for nuance of any kind. The main goal of a bureaucracy is efficiency, but it “has no intellectual, political, or moral theory” (85) so it deals poorly when used for human problems. Likewise, expertise tends to focus on a single problem to look for a technical solution. When a problem requires more than technical approaches and when efficiency is not really an issue, expertise fails. Examples of this are education and anything relying on human relationships. Technical machinery, which is used by the first two, refers to such things as SATs, IQ tests, and various kinds of classification. These too are inadequate measures of nuanced human conditions.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
These chapters explore in more depth how Technopoly works in a society, as well as some of the special conditions that made the United States especially receptive to this stage of technological development. Postman continues his theme of the effect of technology on culture, but he also introduces a second theme: how information is used. Much of the latter involves how a society controls information. The author begins with the invention of the printing press, showing how the explosion of information that followed required new forms of information control, such as more schools and a defined curriculum. This began the first stage of the information revolution.
The United States, he argues, was “the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print” (66). All of its major documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, etc.—were used to disseminate information in an attempt to increase its access to people. This worked fine for the time, as “[t]here is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it” (67). In other words, the culture made use of technology but was not overwhelmed by it, so information could still be managed.
This changed with the second stage of the information revolution with the invention of the telegraph in the mid-19th century. Coupled with the penny press and the rise of photography, this caused information to explode in a third stage of the revolution. The fourth and fifth stages, brought on by broadcasting and computers, respectively, occurred in the 20th century. Information could no longer be controlled, even with a host of techniques and institutions employed to do so, and its lack of context led to what Postman calls “a peek-a-boo world,” where unrelated factoids pop into view and then disappear.
He spends a good part of Chapter 5 describing how traditional institutions become unable to sufficiently cope with the amount of information in a Technopoly. He discusses schools, courts, family, religion, political parties, government, and even ideologies like Marxism. Such a culture loses a much of its meaning and the people end up with a sense of emptiness as things that give their lives value and moral guidance fall by the wayside. When institutions like these fail to keep up and technology itself is used to control information, Technopoly has become dominant, with only one goal: the creation of more technology.
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