Technopoly

A critique of a culture in which technology moves from being a tool we use, into becoming an authority we increasingly defer to

Published in 1992, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology extends many of the questions Postman explored in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Where the earlier book examined how a particular medium could reshape public discourse, Technopoly considers what happens when technological thinking becomes deeply embedded in the organisation and values of an entire culture.

Postman distinguishes between a society that uses technology as a tool and one in which technology begins to define the problems a society considers important, the solutions it considers legitimate, and even the kinds of knowledge it considers valuable. In a Technopoly, technological progress can become an end in itself, while the cultural, ethical, and human questions surrounding that progress receive less attention.

The book examines the relationship between technology, information, education, politics, and culture, asking what happens when societies produce more information than they can meaningfully interpret. The problem is not simply having too much information. It is the possibility that information itself becomes mistaken for knowledge, and technological efficiency becomes mistaken for wisdom.

This makes Technopoly particularly relevant to DCRU. Much of the contemporary technological world is built around the assumption that if something can be measured, optimised, automated, connected, or made more efficient, it should be.

Postman asks us to stop and examine that assumption.

What happens when the tools we create begin to shape the question we ask? What happens when technological solutions become the default response to problems that may not be technological problems at all? And what happens to human judgement when we increasingly defer to systems simply because they appear more efficient, more objective, or more technically sophisticated?

The technologies Postman examined have continued to evolve. The questions have become harder to ignore.

Technopoly is included in the DCRU library because ti gives us a vocabulary for examining what happens when technology stops being merely something a culture uses and begins to become something a culture trusts.