Technopoly
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology is a book by Neil Postman published in 1992 that describes the development and characteristics of a "technopoly". He defines a technopoly as a society in which technology is deified, meaning “the culture seeks its authorisation in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology”. It is characterised by a surplus of information generated by technology, which technological tools are in turn employed to cope with, in order to provide direction and purpose for society and individuals.
Postman considers technopoly to be the most recent of three kinds of cultures distinguished by shifts in their attitude towards technology – tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. Each, he says, is produced by the emergence of new technologies that "compete with old ones…mostly for dominance of their worldviews".
Tool-using culture
According to Postman, a 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, as tools used to construct cathedrals do. He claims that all such cultures are either theocratic or "unified by some metaphysical theory", which forced tools to operate within the bounds of a controlling ideology and made it "almost impossible for technics to subordinate people to its own needs".Technocracy
In a technocracy, rather than existing in harmony with a theocratic world-view, tools are central to the "thought-world" of the culture. Postman claims that tools "attack culture… bid to become culture", subordinating existing traditions, politics, and religions. Postman cites the example of the telescope destroying the Judeo-Christian belief that the Earth is the centre of the solar system, bringing about a "collapse…of the moral centre of gravity in the West".Postman characterises a technocracy as compelled by the "impulse to invent", an ideology first advocated by Francis Bacon in the early 17th Century. He believed that human beings could acquire knowledge about the natural world and use it to "improve the lot of mankind", which led to the idea of invention for its own sake and the idea of progress. According to Postman, this thinking became widespread in Europe from the late 18th Century.
However, a technocratic society remains loosely controlled by social and religious traditions, he clarifies. For instance, he states that the United States remained bound to notions of "holy men and sin, grandmothers and families, regional loyalties and two-thousand-year-old traditions" at the time of its founding.
Postman defines technopoly as a "totalitarian technocracy", which demands the "submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology". Echoing Ellul's 1964 conceptualisation of technology as autonomous, "self-determinative" independently of human action, and undirected in its growth, technology in a time of Technopoly actively eliminates all other ‘thought-worlds’. Thus, it reduces human life to finding meaning in machines and technique.
This is exemplified, in Postman's view, by the computer, the "quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect" technology for a technopoly. It establishes sovereignty over all areas of human experience based on the claim that it "'thinks' better than we can".
Values of "technological theology"
A technopoly is founded on the belief that technique is superior to lax, ambiguous and complex human thinking and judgement, in keeping with one of Frederick W. Taylor’s ‘Principles of scientific management’. It values efficiency, precision, and objectivity.It also relies upon the "elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity". The idea of progress is overcome by the goal of obtaining information for its own sake. Therefore, a technopoly is characterised by a lack of a cultural coherence or a "transcendent sense of purpose or meaning".
Postman attributes the origins of technopoly to ‘scientism’, the belief held by early social scientists including Auguste Comte that the practices of natural and social science would reveal the truth of human behaviour and provide "an empirical source of moral authority".
Consequences of technopoly
Postman refers to Harold Innis’ concept of "knowledge monopolies" to explain the manner in which technology usurps power in a technopoly. New technologies transform those who can create and use them into an "elite group", a knowledge monopoly, which is granted "undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence". Subsequently, Postman claims, those outside of this monopoly are led to believe in the false "wisdom" offered by the new technology, which has little relevance to the average person.Telegraphy and photography, he states, redefined information from something that sought out to solve particular problems to a commodity that is potentially irrelevant to the receiver. Thus, in technopoly, "information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose".
In the U.S. technopoly, excessive faith and trust in technology and quantification has led to absurdities such as an excess of medical tests in lieu of a doctor's judgment, treatment-induced illnesses, scoring in beauty contests, an emphasis on exact scheduling in academic courses, and the interpretation of individuals through "invisible technologies" like IQ tests, opinion polls, and academic grading, which leave out meaning or nuance. If bureaucracies implement their rules in computers, it can happen that the computer's output is decisive, the original social objective is treated as irrelevant, and the prior decisions about what the computer system says are not questioned in practice when they should be. The author criticizes the use of metaphors that characterize people as information-processing machines or vice versa—e.g. that people are "programmed" or "de-programmed" or "hard-wired", or "the computer believes..."; these metaphors are "reductionist".
A technopoly also trivialises significant cultural and religious symbols through their endless reproduction. Postman echoes Jean Baudrillard in this view, who theorises that "technique as a medium quashes … the ‘message’ of the product ", since a symbol's "social finality gets lost in seriality".
Criticism of ''Technopoly''
Technological determinism
Postman's argument stems from the premise that the uses of a technology are determined by its characteristics – "its functions follow from its form". This draws on Marshall McLuhan's theory that "the medium is the message" because it controls the scale and form of human interaction. Hence, Postman claims that once introduced, each technology "plays out its hand", leaving its users to be, in Thoreau's words, "tools of our tools".According to Tiles and Oberdiek, this pessimistic understanding of pervasive technology renders individuals "strangely impotent". David Croteau and William Hoynes criticise such technologically deterministic arguments for underestimating the agency of a technology's users. Russell Neuman suggests that ordinary people skilfully organise, filter, and skim information, and actively “seek out” information rather than feeling overwhelmed by it.
It has also been argued that technologies are shaped by social factors more so than by their inherent properties. Star suggests that Postman neglects to account for the "actual development, adaptation and regulation of technology".