Critique
of our faith in material things
Critique
of our faith in material things
Technopoly arises from a desire to control at a distance.
"What you can't see, can hurt you!"
p. 123.
"We must understand where our techniques come from & what they are good for...."
p. 143.
"I mean the world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us."
p. 58.
"George Whistler… having become the chief engineer of the Western Railroad, developed a mangerial system in 1839…, [that ] organized the railroad along hierarchical lines beginning with a central staff office, descending to regional managers and then
local managers. He employed to great effect the grammatocentric principle, . . . . [becoming] the foundations of modern systems management."
Is the eclipse of technocracy in America over into technopoly a machine oriented or an organizational oriented schemes?
pp. 140-141.
Detaled facts | People's stories | How did it happen? | Comments | Full critique | related ideas
What is Neil Postman's thesis?
Facts:
First, as suggested by Galbraith, management, like the zero, statistics, IQ measurement, grading papers, or polling, functions as does any technology. It is not made up of any mechanical parts."
Postman, Technopoly, p. 141
Mechanical meaning possessing "moving parts"
[Doric Greek makhana ( Attic Greek m?khan?, from m?khos ‘contrivance’) having a structure.]
Postman's cornerstone personalities:
Sylvanus Thayer , The new (1814) relation of military organization to practical, corporate organization to promote industrial advancement, pp. 139-141.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management author and advocate of machine-like labor. See also Pursell
Machinery alone --even automated mechanical implements-- cannot create a culture, but organizing people to make, use, and disperse that machinery based originally on clocks, magnetism and transportation created the basis for the New Industrial State, with corresponding mixed economies, top-down management, and the control of education by specialists needed by corporations to prosper.
It was the set of assumptions that sprang from the mechanization of key inventions, used throughout society and which influenced how people thought about the world.
Theory or theories (concepts that rationally support each other) can have influence equal at times to tools:
Francis Bacon's empiricism used to challenge the four idols that enslave the human mind, psychologically crippling people to believe in superstitions based on perceptual errors, ethnic prejudice, rhetorical skill, or appearances.
Adam Smith's concept of wealth, commerce and monopoly capitalism. Specialization and exchange of goods is the source of money and influence that should be controlled to alleviate poverty and oppression.
Richard Arkwright's machinery , inventor and the transformation of textile production through the use of factory discipline.
Media (Communication's) Revolution, from 1830-1890, is an example of just one element in the material triumph.
Technopoly is defined as "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology."
Certain inventions are more central or key than other tools and these tool complexes converge, such that the full influence of their combined impacts is greater than the mere sum of their respective parts.
How did the process of culture surrendering to technology occur?
Postman's argument includes these several elements which are distinctly important to his belief about how culture surrendered to technological change in the 1800s:
a new value emerged that "if something could be made, it should be made.
a powerful "thought world" or world of ideas emerged to challenge customary rules and traditional beliefs
Technocracy, or the rule of the machines, he says "did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic worlds."
The eclipse of religion, craft, custom, regional pride and hereditary aristocracy as means of control over new technology led to an absence of control.
The appeal to mechanistic, material and machine qualities to justify behavior, ethics and education led to a redefinition of morals.
Postman, Technopoly, pp. 40-55.
Richard Arkwright, hairdresser and barber was also an inventor. "One thinks of that other hairdresser. Richard Arkwright, whose eighteenth-century water frame was a key invention in the shift from hand to power spinning in the transformation of the textile industry."
Pursell, p. 45.
Thomas Alva Edison, was a telegraph key operator for a Midwestern railway, as a young man. Early in his career, when he fell asleep at the telegraph key, two trains collided, because he had failed to send the required message to the next control point on the main line.
This may be an example of Murphy's Law: "when anything technical involving people can go wrong, it will go wrong."
Comments: Postman's analysis of the transition from a tool using to a tool commanding culture is not easy to summarize, but his argument forces you to understand how material changes brought about psychological, behavioral and intellectual changes that redefined ideas that helped to anchor customary boundaries that shape modern industrial cultures.
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