September 25th, 2010
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage, 1993.
Another take-away from Technopoly is somewhat oddly-founded, as it is based on a bit of a tangent that Postman pursues as an example of technologies coming in disguise (in Chapter 8: Invisible Technologies). He discusses the idea of academic courses in the educational world.
A course is a technology for learning. I have “taught” about two hundred of them and do not know why each one lasts exactly fifteen weeks, or why each meeting lasts exactly one hour and fifty minutes. If the answer is that it is done for administrative convenience, then a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time. (138)
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September 23rd, 2010
“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely he way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant” (48).
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage, 1993.
In Technopoly, Postman discusses the role of technology in shaping society and in changing it’s general view. He considers a technopoly, America being the only one currently, to be a society that believes “the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency, that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment … and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts” (51). It is a not-all-too-positive view of tools and technologies running our lives (and for fighting back against such an occurrence), but it has a few select points I apply to my research.
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March 6th, 2008
McLuhan, Marshall. 2003 (orig. 1962 & 1964). “Two Selections by Marshall McLuhan.” In The New Media Reader.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Postman, Neil. 1992. “Invisible Technologies.” Technopoly. New York: Vintage Books.
After reading these noted articles, I had the following two questions posed: Read the rest of this entry »