Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

Abstract

714 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and the problems of watch manufacture are here treated as purely technological. In that sense the appeal is limited to the enthusiast and specialist. The catalog also includes a number of beautifully reproduced advertisements from the 19th and early 20th centuries, along with illustrations of watch making. These are presented with minimal comment, and again the relationship between technology and culture would have been better served by some analysis of the content of these representations. For example, on page 80 an 1882 illustration from Century magazine depicts a woman operating a lathe at the Waterbury Watch Company factory. The caption notes the “upright gauge” visible on the bench but ignores the fact that the woman herself looks miserable. Given the specialized nature of the catalog, however, such an approach may have been unavoidable. Those without a specific interest in timepieces would be better served by Hoke’s Ingenious Yankees (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). But readers interested in American watch manufactur­ ing will find this a very useful, if limited, account of this vital industry. Michael O’Malley Dr. O’Malley teaches in the Department of History at Vassar College. Technopoly: The Surrender ofCulture to Technology. By Neil Postman. New York: Knopf, 1992. Pp. xii + 222; notes, bibliography, index. $21.00. The popular image of books on tape usually evokes thoughts of the latest Stephen King opus read with gusto or Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time read slowly on a cassette while we wait for the exit ramp to clear. Neil Postman’s new book elicits another image, that of the putative pundit sitting in his easy chair, dictating into a cassette. This breezily conceived, yet trenchant, almost splenetic volume has all of the problems one might fear from a dictated book: uncongealed ideas, self-contradicting arguments, poor citation practices, and a tone more appropriate to a Larry King interview than a printed text. Postman serves up, yet again, a dystopic vision of a creeping—one might say, lumbering—techno-monster that is about to devour culture. The latter term, never really defined by Postman, presumably in­ cludes everything from Renoir and the New York Yankees to parlia­ mentary democracy. Langdon Winner has written about the dangers of technopornography in the hands of the gee-whizzing technologyas -savior mavens, but Postman offers, as it were, antitechnoporn. Like his ostensible nemesis, Alvin Toffler, Postman sees technology as an autonomous force, separated from social, political, economic, and cultural life, that in the hands of its murkily defined promulgators promises to transform the world. In Postman’s prose, the locomotive TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 715 of technological progress becomes a Mad Max machine impelling us all to Hell. One senses that Postman is rather uncomfortable with what some authors such as Jean Baudrillard might call the postmodern condi­ tion, where coherent chains of meaning, of cause and effect, are broken, rendering society adrift in a decontextualized “information chaos” that produces “a culture somewhat like [a] shuffled deck of cards” (p. 60). His solution to all of this, professed progressive that he is, does not entail a return to “traditional family values,” but seeks to empower those who distrust scientific truth, “who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty,” “who take the great narratives of religion seriously,” and “who know the difference between the sacred and the profane” (p. 184). If this is the sort of savior from technopoly we are looking for, we are in little danger, for leadership in our epic struggle for genuineness can come from almost anyone—few of our contemporary compatriots hold personal values very far from those Postman seeks. There is a large gap in the literature on technology that could well be filled by a synthetic, popular work that would address broad issues and appreciate the complicated interactions among technology, cul­ ture, and power. Such an effort would necessarily entail a subtle analysis—perhaps a deconstruction—of technological culture, tradi­ tional culture, and the process of technological change. When describ­ ing the process of change, it would be attentive to the positions, mixed loyalties, and perspectives of the relevant actors. Such a book would be conversant with...