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(from Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology in 1992)
"You must try to be a loving resistance fighter. ... By 'loving' I mean that, in spite of the confusion, errors, and stupidities you see around you, you must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that once made the United States the hope of the world and that may yet have enough vitality to do so again. ... Which brings me to the 'resistance fighter' part of my principle.
Those who resist the American Technopoly are people
who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked, and why;
who refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations;
who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgment, or precision as a synonym for truth;
who refuse to allow psychology or any 'social science' to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense;
who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding;
who do not regard the aged as irrelevant;
who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honor, and who, when they 'reach out and touch someone,' expect that person to be in the same room;
who take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth;
who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity's sake;
who admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement.
A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology--from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer--is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control.
In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains a epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural."
In his book, "Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology" about the deification of technology by society, Neil Postman talks of what he calls "loving resistance fighters". He characterises them by listing a number of limits that such "fighters" set on modern concepts and ways of doing things. Setting limits is at the heart of countering technopoly, for the major problem with technopoly is that the use of technology continually transgresses limits and seeks to apply its logic where it is quite out of place, if not devastating. Note that the limits Postman mentions embrace a much wider thought system than that of technological considerations alone.
Keeping a distance
Postman insists that those who resist technology must keep a psychic and epistemological distance with respect to technology, such that it always seems somehow strange, never inevitable and never natural. Keeping a distance from technology is a difficult exercise as technology, seen as an extension of ourselves following MacLuhan's perception of media, asks for nothing better than to become one with us, its users. Tools are all the more efficient the less our use of them requires effort or thought. Just compare your first attempts at driving with how you drive today to discover how important our automatic reactions are. Wanting to nourish a certain strangeness in our relationship to tools is likely to diminish their efficiency. On the other hand, not keeping our distance with respect to technology, could well result in us being led astray by technology or rather by the personal agendas of purveyors of technology.
Proximity and distance
But is there necessarily a contradiction between the "proximity" required for efficient use of technology and the "distance" essential to deciding on its place in society? Is it not possible to be in direct symbiosis with technology in its use and simultaneously be able to step back when taking decisions about society? Having said that, I wonder if a person whose main aim is to promote the use of these tools is in a position to be able to take a step back and consider society without necessarily pushing technology up-stage. One of the reasons I imagine our zealot would have difficulties is the question of values. When promoting technology is a given at the outset, I suspect that taking into consideration other values becomes somewhat difficult. When the scenario begins with technology, it is likely to end with that technology taking a disproportionate place with respect to all else. One strategy then, having recognised the drive to make technology all embracing, consists of cultivating the ability to view technology as separate from us, as not human, as intrinsically somewhat strange.
- many cultural critics are satisfied with
simply posing the questions, even though they often do not bother with finding
solutions to these problems
- three different voices to answer these critics:
- gentle and eager, suggesting that the critic has simply forgotten to
include the answers
- threatening and judgemental, suggesting that the critic has no purpose
with the answers
- wishful and encouraging, suggesting that the critic has no found
answers but may eventually
Why do we allow do we allow the existence of cultural critics when all they do
is point out problems of society without offering solutions? Shouldn't we
already know about these problems or not care about them? If we are unaware of
these problems, doesn't that imply we are okay with them?
Postman's response as cultural critic to the problem of living in a Technopoly:
- individual can do things without regard to the culture
- cultural can do things without regard to the individual
Can any cultural actually do things without regard to the individual, since
culture is made up of individuals?
the "loving resistance fighter":
- "loving," pay attention to what made the United States the "hope of
the world"
- Chinese students in
Tiananmen Square
urging democratic reform made model of Statue
of Liberty, rather than symbols of other democratic nations
Tiananmen Square protests
Statue of Liberty model
- protest during the Vietnam War is probably only case where public opinion
directly forced foreign policy to be altered
- America invented the idea of public education for all citizens
Why has America moved towards indifference to society?
America is a series of three experiments
- greatest degree of political and religious freedom versus sense of
identity and purpose
- immigration from many countries versus sense of cohesion and community
- preservation of history, humanity, and originality versus submission
to technology (Technopoly)
Postman's principles for the "loving resistance fighter":
- not paying attention to polls unless questions and reasons are
significant
- refusal to accept efficiency
as the most important goal of humanity
- freedom from numbers (do not blindly
trust calculation and measurement as truth)
- refusal to put social sciences such as psychology before common sense
in judgement
- suspicious of what is considered progress, without confusing
understanding and information
- not regarding aged people as irrelevant
- high value of family loyalty and honor, focus on close communication
- placing value on religion and recognition that science is not the only
system of truth
- knowledge of the difference between sacred and profane
- admiration of technological ingenuity with recognition that it is not
highest achievement of humanity
- "loving resistance fighters" must believe that technology should not be
allowed to fit into nature order of things
- technologies are products of political and economic contexts that have agendas
and philisophies
people do somewhat recognize the dangers of Technopoly, evident in:
- the environmental movement
- legal restrictions on computer technology
- increasing distrust of medical technology
- other efforts to "restore a sense of community cohesion"
If we recgonize the dangers of this Technopoly, then are we really under the
control of technology?
- Postman believes that education is the most useful tool for education people
about dangers of Technopoly
- this is because education is constantly being criticized, and this criticism
helps modification of educatoin
- students should be taught so that there is greater cohesion and
interconnectedness of studies
- Postman believes that curriculum is not a course of study, but a "meaningless
hodgepodge of subjects"
- the technocrat's ideal person is one without commitent and opinion but with
marketable capabilities
- some people believe that stressing love of country should be important
aspect of education
- Postman believes that this would have been resemblant of Soviet or
Chinese education
- others with the
Rogerian or
Maslovian
perspective want "emotional health" to have more importance
- Carl Rogers believes that because the self is important, then
curriculum would be irrelevant
- in
The Ascent of Man, Jacob
Bronowski believes that the destiny of humanity is the discovery of knowledge,
and believes that this can be obtained through science as well as through the
arts and humanities
- Postman calls this the "ascent of humanity"
- he believes that curriculum should be a "celebration" of human knowledge and
originality, not simply a compilation of "meaningless" requirements
- he believes that students should be aware of creative and intellectual
processes which are used to discover new knowledge
- Robert Maynard Hutchins called this
"The Great Conversation"
Postman believes that education should stress:
- history
- the scientific method of thought
- the disciplined use of language
- broader knowledge of the arts and religion
- the "continuity of the human enterprise"
Is it possible to have a system of education where
all this is stressed and maintain the
knowledge needed for specific occupations?
Wouldn't ths revert us back to when we had no trained specialists:
doctors, engineers, etc.?
Technopoly education in contrast is:
- antihistorical
- bogged down with information
- focused on importance of technology
- Cicero said "To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born
is to remain a child"
- Postman believes that all subjects should be taught as histories because all
subjects have a history
- Cicero's end of earlier statement : "What is a human life worth unless it is
incorporated into the lieves of one's ancestors and set in an historical
context?"
- teaching subjects as histories of those subjects would teach connections
- Postman does acknowledge the difficulties that this method would face in
implementation
- there is no such thing as "the history" because historians write histories in
order to condemn or glorify the present with respect to the past
- teaching subjects as lists of indisputable fragments of factual information is
the bias of Technopoly
Cicero
Although history is of
great importance, (noting that teaching history prevents recreating its great
mistakes) how would this educate against Technopoly, because Technopoly is much
more of a current rather a historical problem?
- some people believe that historical events such as the
Holocaust or the
trail of Indian tears should be taught
- this brings up questions as to why it is taught:
- is this used to teach the "maniac" theory of history?
- is this used to demonstrate the "banality of evil" or "law of
survival"?
- is this used to demonstrate the universal force of economic greed?
- is this used to show examples of the "workings of human nature"?
- over 50% of high schools do not offer any courses in physics
- Postman believes 90% of chemistry courses are taught as though students were
going into chemical engineering
- Postman poses some questions about the quality of education:
- how many students know what induction, the scientific model, or the
scientific method are?
- how many students know proper conditions for experimentation or
question what scientific truth is?
- Bronowski : "This is the paradox of imagination in science, that it
has for its aim the impoverishment of imagination"
Postman believes that schools should offer courses in philisophy of science,
which would stess:
- the language of science
- the nature of science proof
- source of scientific hypotheses
- role of imagination in science
- conditions for experimentation
- special focus on value of disproof and error
How would philosophy of science help to educate
students against Technopolistic ideals?
Postman believes that courses should also be offered in semantics:
- usage of semantics in reading and writing to help students improve
these skills
- understanding of semantics in fundamental to any subject
- would emphasize correction of semantic errors, including:
- use of either-or categories
- misunderstanding of levels of abstraction
- "sloganeering" and self-reflexiveness
- this would help students become "crap-detectors"
- Postman believes that semantics and the arts and humanities should be
stressed for the "ascent of humanity"
- Postman believes that shools should focus as much as possible on old works as
opposed to contemporary
Wouldn't this prevent people from understanding the culture and opinions of
their own day?
- Postman also believes that more emphasis should be placed on art,
noting that painting is more than 3 times as old as writing
- Postman believes that implementation of his educational plan is "tedious and
even painful"
Postman believes that two additional subjects are necessary :
- the history of technology
- this would allow students to recognize connections between
technology and society & culture
- comparative religion :
- this would allow students to recognize the view points of
different people in different times
- to texts such as the Koran, the Torah, the Bhagavad-Gita, and
the New Testament, Postman wishes to add the
Communist Manifesto
- Postman believes that teaching subjects as histories would education students
against the dangers of Technopoly while at the same time opposing the
information-based ideals of Technopoly
If Postman's educational curriculum is ideal, would it ever actually be able to
be implemented in education, because the educational establishment would resist
dramatic changes?
written by Anton Sova and Derek Johnson
Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology may start some harmless talk at academic parties among those who remember his collaboration, Teaching As A Subversive Activity. There is no subversion here, only politic handwringing. The absence of Toffleresque hysteria is commendable. But his fairness strips his writing of anything which might wake his readers up. The book's useful ideas might be condensed into a volume a third of its already small size. But the book's worst flaw from the perspective of this journal is the apparent ignorance of McLuhan. Postman justly mentions Harold Innis as "the father of communication studies." But of McLuhan, who extended Innis's metaphor of sense economy to all forms of utterance in language and technology, he mentions nothing later than Understanding Media, and the reference does not indicate more than a cursory familiarity with that work. Even on his terms Postman's argument does not bear much examination. Postman talks about machines and electronics without discussing the different sensibilities of print, radio, TV, and computer. His sense of media is content-centred: "If the telescope was the eye that gave access to a world of new facts and new methods of obtaining them, then the printing press was the larynx."
The choice of larynx as a metaphor for describing the spread of information through print does not distinguish between the book and newspaper as different media, and, most unfortunately, does not acknowledge print as the technology most responsible for the spread of private, silent reading and the subjugation of oral sensibility. The discussion which follows this clumsy metaphor outlines the historical development of print without describing the subjective process of becoming a reader, or how the culture is changed by the new way of experiencing the world as literacy approaches consensus. He describes nineteenth-century America as suspended between "two opposing world views—technology and the traditional." But he does not recognize that the traditional America of that time was more literate than oral, nor that his "technology" does not distinguish between mechanical sequence and electric simultaneity, a contrast already apparent in the telegraph lines running alongside the railway.
Postman is also unable to diagnose America's present cultural problem. He attributes our current cultural disorientation to Scientism's conquest of traditional symbols. He's not wrong, merely superficial. He tells the reader nothing about why Americans no longer find meaning in their symbols. We are disoriented because the rapidly increasing orality enforced by electric media has junked a two-hundred-year-tradition of science-dominated literacy. Unlike nations such as Britain, whose history threads through oral and literate eras, our oral tradition is not deep enough to provide the signposts, or metaphors, for our new orality. Postman nods toward this when he tries to describe how "technology" changes language, but his examples only underscore the weakness of his thought: "The old words still look the same, are still used in the same kinds of sentences. But they do not have the same meanings; in some cases they have the opposite meanings."
Postman's examples are hollow. Three words come to this McLuhan- trained mind immediately. Literate, which from meaning lettered, able to read and write, has degenerated into a vague species of competence, particularly computer-literate, without acknowledging the immense change in user sensibility from print to program. Private, which once meant "out of the public eye," has come to denote a personal decision enacted publicly as an expression of lifestyle. All these "private" choices enacted publicly create a new sense of consensus which calls into question another sacred word, democracy. All the world applauds the Soviet Union's and the Third World's moves toward democratic forms of government without recognizing the danger that consensus presents predominantly oral societies. Democracy can become totalitarian, enforced from below in what Karl Popper, following Plato, called a closed society. In the present, the phrase "politically correct" describes the dialogue-denying consensus which surrounds such topics as homosexuality, contraception, abortion, religion and feminism. Either Postman does not see these shifts in meaning or he thinks avoiding them to be good politics.
Postman's solutions are also too tactful. His "loving resistance fighter" seems to make the right noises: A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control. In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural. It is a noble-sounding call to arms, but tells the reader nothing about how to achieve its distance. He cannot even tell his readers the most obvious steps: read more, particularly literature and poetry, write more, and junk the TV. All he offers is a curriculum of pluralistic "histories" as a substitute for the integral tradition lost with declining literacy. This is just content, facts; and it is not enough. His ignorance of McLuhan leaves him blind.
Postman cannot offer his reader a technique for every medium which discovers changes in sensibility like McLuhan's tetrad of enhancement, retrieval, reversal, and obsolescence. He cannot see that every technology changes the sensibility of its users in specific ways, and they in turn change their language to reflect the new way of experiencing the world. He cannot see technologies as forms of metaphoric utterance, as words themselves, acts that change the cultures in which they are used. He cannot see that language, as traditionally examined in Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic, is the most useful tool for dissecting changes in sensibility brought by technological innovation, and the best weapon against technopoly. The fight in our time to save culture from technopoly was engaged forty years ago by Marshall McLuhan. Postman's Technopoly is a safe, ivory tower strategy far from the front lines, where two generations of media scholars conduct the real war.
from .... Howard Wetzel. "Reviews"
What Is to Be Done?
"You must try to be a loving resistance fighter."
-Neil Postman (Technopoly)
"Because there'll be no safety in numbers When the Right One walks out of the door" -Publius/TDB "I told you I could only show you the door, you have to walk through it." -Morpheus, 'The Matrix' "You've got to have heart to be a guerrilla warrior,..." "It takes heart to be a guerrilla warrior because you're on your own." "You've got to control your own,... you need to control yours." -Malcolm X, 'The Ballot or the Bullet'
...The solution involves total revolution, human emancipation, self-actualization, and nothing less: a new equilibrium, a new transparency, a rethinking of priorities, as sad as that might be, and I'm not talking about financial crises. If you don't see it yet, then maybe you will. "Madness is rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule." -Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil) The final song has been sung. You'll have to travel. The solution might be seen as a type of coming back to Life, the lightning out of the dark cloud. There is no room for compromise, when it comes to l-i-v-i-n; gettin yours. The message is resistance. The name of the game is insurgency--revolt--self-control. Are you ready to be unplugged? Smash the Control Machine. Wise up the marks. What is your purpose? What is your goal? Which side are you on? Are you down with the resistance, or are you with the program? The day of decision is near. A singular prize still awaits, your freedom, but are you willing and able to face it?
"A long road lies ahead; begin to chart its course..." -Publius
"Like the wolf pack, although let us hope to a lesser extent,
the State is stupider than most of its components."
-Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
"Now I go alone, my disciples, You, too, go now, alone."
"There where the state ceaseth - pray look thither, my brethren!
Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the...
Thus Spake Zarathustra."
"It matters little whether the
military band to which one has pledged oneself be that of Ignatius Loyola or
that of Lenin, so long as he considers it more important that his beliefs should
be on the right side than that he should maintain his freedom and even his
professional naivete."
-Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics and Society
"So we can say 'forget it' to Publius?"
"Absolutely." (Gilmour to Guitar World)
"O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!...
An if we live, we live to tread on kings."
-Shakespeare, Henry IV
"Was that life? Well! Once more!"
``FAREWELL! A LONG FAREWELL TO ALL MY GREATNESS.''
"C'est un beau rêve, Gare au Reveil!" -Marat
It might be A Great Day for Freedom.
A Farewell to Kings.
A new beginning.
Listen again
Look again
Read
Think
Communicate
TFYQA
¡YA BASTA!
Shipmates!
It's time.
Lights OFF
GAME OVER
HAL is Dead.
SYSTEM FAILURE
TIS TIME TO PART
RIPE PROGRAM INACCESSIBLE
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