opencopy.org

- Teich, Ch. 2 -

Neil Postman is a well-known critic of technology and a person who believes that technology is particularly dangerous because it has become independent of conscious human decision-making. In fact, Postman argues that technology has become deified (i.e. turned into a god). As our new religious symbol, technology wipes out traditional spiritual and moral beliefs, creating a new type of society - a Technopoly.

One of the claims that resides at the heart of modern Technopoly is that it is creating a society based on knowledge. In fact, technopolies continually assume that the ability of modern technology to produce and communicate information represents progress in knowledge. A further implicit assumption is that information is a good thing and that a greater supply of information is liberating both for the individual and society.

Like Leo Marx, Postman wants to claim that both technology and information can only be liberating if they serve a clear social purpose. What makes Postman so interesting is that he suggests that the dissemination of information needs to be controlled

1. Unless information is controlled, argues Postman, it becomes unusable. There is simply too much of it to be processed.
2. 2. Unless information is given a weight and value by those in authority, argues Postman, it has no real legitimacy. Everything is as important as everything else, which results in chaos.
3. 3. Unless information is limited in its ability to flow into social systems it is personally and socially destabilizing. There needs to be a constant balance between the “old and the new, between novelty and tradition” or there will be disorder in minds and social institutions.

Of course, control is something of a dirty word. We’ve all witnessed the disadvantages of the control of information by political regimes, religious cults or self-interested corporations to know that outside information needs to flow into the system. But Postman suggests that this issue of control will always be a problem in any society and he argues that the technological alternative is the loss of cultural literacy and even intellectual meaning.

Postman uses the example of universities. Universities are social institutions that filter and deliver information. University faculties and academic disciplines decide what should be considered valuable or relevant and what should not. That there are problems with this, no one would doubt. For many centuries, Western universities adopted a canon of literary works that excluded many writers of non-Western cultures. Women writers and feminist issues were missing from the curriculum. The university curriculum clearly needs to be reformed from time to time. But that does not mean that anything goes. The alternative to a system that tends to fossilize is an information glut that is chaotic.

Consider, for example, what would happen if departments of science in our universities gave equal time to astrology, dianetics and creationism. Certainly, this is what the defenders of those systems would like to see. The result would be catastrophic. There would be no common framework for doing science. Students would not have any guidance as to what was reliable information and what was not. That is precisely the kind of situation that an uncritical divination of the “information society” implies.

In the humanities and social sciences, of course, a wider variety of theories exists. There are liberal democratic, theological and even critical Marxist perspectives. But the number of meta-theories is not huge. The big theories take a long time to achieve respectability and they are subject to decline - something that has happened to Marxism in recent years. Moreover, while they have power, they provide their adherents with clear guidelines on ways “to weight information and therefore understand events.” As theoretical frameworks decline, believers usually have ample time (i.e. over generations0 to build or adopt new and more relevant frameworks.

What is significant about most of these theories is that they have ethical implications in addition to being a body of social knowledge. Marxists, for example, believes in fairness and equality; the early Marx condemned the injustices of a series of dominant classes. Liberal democrats always valued freedom and independence of thought. Conservatives believe in paternalistic values and the preservation of traditional meanings. All of these theories are “infused with moral content”. Morality allows us to humanize our world.

What the uncritical acceptance of a new “information society” does is to normalize chaos, trivialize knowledge, and problematize ethics. It creates a post modern society wherein information can be processed in any way that the individual wants. Communication between individuals in post-modern societies becomes difficult, if not impossible, because there are few common points of reference. Culture, as a way of processing information, and attaching ethical or spiritual values to information, loses most of its organizing ability.

Technopoly and the information society are dangerous, not only because they remove the social filters through which we evaluate knowledge, but also because they obscure the pernicious tendencies of a technological society. Consider, for example, the belief that knowledge liberates us. The fundamental tendency of a technological society is to elevate efficiency above anything else. If there is a principle at the heart of technology it is efficiency. Efficiency is not about freedom; quite the reverse. Efficiency implies an increase in centralization and the bureaucratization of our lives.

Information can never proliferate totally or the result will be chaos. Our modern, technologically-mediated, information society will need to provide some mechanism for processing knowledge, some mechanism for rationalizing the flow of information. But instead of the cultural or intellectual values that once filtered knowledge, the new guideline will be to ignore, and even eliminate, “all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency.” The obvious result will be an increase in bureaucratic controls.

Of course, there have been many traditional bureaucracies, and ancient China boasted one of the largest and most effective. What differentiates modern from earlier bureaucracies is that the latter were designed to “serve social institutions” and values. Modern bureaucracies are becoming “an autonomous meta-institution that largely serves itself.” If we feel that we are being forced to conform to modern bureaucracies, that bureaucracy is our master rather than our servant, our fear is a genuine one. The modern definition of the bureaucrat is frightening - it means “a person who by training, commitment and even temperament is indifferent to both the content and the totality of a human problem.” In other words, modern bureaucrats are statistical number crunchers, or processors of information through forms. They deal with the technical problems of moving information around, not the human issues that may be involved.

Does this sound too harsh? After all, bureaucrats are people too and share a common interest in going what is socially beneficial. While this may be the case, the fact is that most bureaucrats are specialized experts in a particular field. They tend to be ignorant of anything that is not directly related to that field. Certainly, they often lack the credentials to evaluate the ethical, social or cultural implications of their work. Consider, however, that these experts have enormous power over our lives and that the implications of what they do, and only they understand, is often quite profound. Now consider also that these experts operate in a world where, while bureaucracy is increasing, traditional social institutions and values are declining. Finally, consider that the decline in traditional values is being speeded up by the production of “a torrent of information” (often produced by the bureaucrats themselves) that makes it impossible “for anyone to possess more than a tiny fraction of the sum total of human knowledge.”

Postman has painted a disturbing picture of technology and the information society where there is nothing between us and chaos but a bureaucracy bent on efficiency. But he doesn’t stop there. He also points out the dangers inherent in bureaucratic specialization. Bureaucracy means the specialization of functions and the creation of experts. We can see just how bureaucratized our modern world has become by the number of supposed experts who are running it. We used to have experts in only a few specialized scientific or technical fields. Now we have experts in education, law, family life and personal maladjustment. We even have experts “in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making.”

Everything is becoming technologized for the sake of efficiency, even where standardization and bureaucracy are patently non-sensical, such as the measurement of a person’s IQ. As if something as complex as an individual’s intelligence can be measured by a score on a test. But that is precisely what Technopoly does. It re-invents and measures everything in its own image. As I said in an earlier lecture, that image is not human. As Postman puts it:

Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil (i.e. human ethical and social values) disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise…Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

Postman wants us all to consider whether a Technopoly is really the kind of society that we want to live in. For him, knowledge is hardly liberating when it is processed by experts in the interest of a non-human efficiency. He wants to return to a time when human history was driving technology and not the other way around.

The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/