Technopoly 1

In Technopoly: the Surrender of our Culture to Technology by Neil Postman, he discusses problems seen in today’s world such as technology controlling our culture and mind. Postman discusses three kinds of cultures: tool-using cultures, technocracies, technopolies. Tool-using culture employs technologies only to solve physical problems, as spears, cooking utensils, and water mills do, and to serve the symbolic world of religion, art, politics, and tradition. Postman characterizes technocracies as compelled by the “impulse to invent,” an ideology first advocated by Francis Bacon in the early 17^th Century. He believes that mankind could acquired knowledge about the natural world and uses it to improve their lifestyle. Technopoly is identified as the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.

In the first stage of Postman’s book, science was feared and misunderstood. In the second stage of Postman’s book, the technocracy people still had doubts about technologies. But as technology progresses, machines started taking over. People were replaced by machines.  In the last stage of Postman’s book, technology balances out of good and bad. A positive from technology would be information accessed by school, media, and internet. But the negative from technology would be the willingness to search for information and research.