Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Mixing provocative insights and cliched criticisms, Postman defines the U.S. as a society in which technology is deified to a near-totalitarian degree. (Apr.)
Library Journal
Postman continues his plea to analyze physical culture in our society which he discussed in earlier books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death (Viking, 1985). He claims that our social institutions have, in effect, become dominated by the technologies that permeate our society. People, including researchers in science and social science, have allowed the use of technology to substitute for their own thinking. Earlier societies in history were tool-using but retained a sense of wholeness and a center of morality that is missing from our society. Postman asserts that there is a technological determinism pervading America that can be restrained, for example, by giving courses in the history and philosophy of technology and in comparative religion. However, his evidence for this critique is narrowly selected, and his discussion is often anecdotal. An optional purchase.-- Christopher R. Jocius, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., Aurora
Kirkus Reviews
Postman (Conscientious Objections, 1988, etc.) once more cuts across the grain as an important critic of our national culture, this time arguing that America has become the world's first "totalitarian technocracy"—otherwise known as a "Technopoly." Postman starts out from the long view, showing that while every human culture becomes "tool-using," the use of those tools doesn't necessarily change that culture's beliefs, ideology, or world view. In "technocracy," however (for us, this stage began to burgeon in the industrial 19th century), there's a change: tools (they're now called "technology") begin to alter the culture instead of just being used by it: "tools...attack the culture. They bid to become the culture." And technocracy becomes Technopoly when tools win the battle for dominance and become the sole determiners of a culture's purpose and meaning, and in fact of its very way of knowing and thinking—or of not thinking. The tools, in other words, come not only to use us but to define what we are—which is "why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose of meaning, no cultural coherence." So desolate a view of generalized inversion and ideological collapse fails to subdue either Postman's humane and faithful energy or his unflagging quickness of mind as he travels from Copernicus, Descartes, and Francis Bacon on through discussions of modern bureaucracy, concepts of worker "management," the intellectual hollowness of social "science" and its monster-children of poll- taking and IQ testing—these and others (schools, TV, the computer "culture") all being "technologies" that in fact are "without a moral center," yet ones that weinsistently revere and haplessly measure ourselves by, because "we have become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies." Amusing, learned, and prickling with intelligence, Postman easily outclasses the Allan Bloomians in the grave work of showing how it is that we've now stumbled our way into 1984—and offers, at end, some modest suggestions as to what to do about it.
