Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman (review)

In “Soldier,Cyborg, Citizen,” Kevin date from 1985or later. Harawdy, in the process. After all, this has been Robins and Les Levidow offer a psychoanalytic assessment of the military-technological panopticon that scrapes away at the gangrenous flesh of our accumulated rationalizations. They introduce the notion of “paranoid rationality”: “through a paranoid rationality, expressed in the machine-like self, we combine an omnipotent phantasy of self control with fear and aggression directed against the emotional and bodily limitations of mere mortals. Through regression to a phantasy of infantile omnipotence we deny our dependency on nature, upon our own nature, upon the ‘bloody mess’ of organic nature. We fantasize about controlling the world, freezing historical forces and if necessary , even destroying them in rage; we thereby contain our anxiety in the name of maintaining rational control” One could continue discussing each contribution in turn, but I’ll leave that to the reader. Suffice it to say that there are remarkably few contributions in this book that I regretted spending time on. The authors avoid vacuous theoretical posturing, and little in the volume demands specialist knowledge. Most of it is accessible to reasonably literate undergrads. The quality and general readability of the essays, combined with the breadth of issues the volume addresses, commends it as a required text in any course on technology and society. This is a good book and very reasonably priced. (p. 112). TECHNOPOLY: THE SURRENDER OF CULTURE TO TECHNOLOGY by Neil Postman. Vintage Books, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1993 (first published 74540-8. Reviewed by Simon Penny, Art and Robotics, Department of Art, College ofFine Arts, Carneg‘eMellorr University,Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A.Email: . I had chided myself for not having read ?‘echno~~oly since it came out. A book with such a catchy title automatically puts itself on the must-read list for anyone interested in techno-critique, but I just didn’t get around to it. Though first published in 1992, the general tenor of the book feels dated: only 10 of the 60 references in Postman’s bibliography 1992). 222 pp. $11.00. ISBN: 0-679Virilio , even Guy Debord,John Berger and Armand Mattelart are absent from the list, let alone Deleuze and Guattari, Serres, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard and the rest of the French post-structuralist gang. Ellul and Mumford figure strongly. Postman’s structuring argument is that human culture divides itself into three periods with respect to technology : the tool-using, the technocratic and the technopolistic. This is an interesting , if somewhat pessimistic, analysis. In contrast to the technocratic, the condition of technopoly is one in which the logic of industrial production comes to control not just economic thought, but cultural and philosophical thought as well. The book is full of amusing and pertinent factoids, but ultimately Postman’s support for his argument feels anecdotal. Postman’s view offers us no way out: the subtitle of the book, “The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” says it all. Most disappointing is that Postman never suggests possible emancipatory or potentially democratizing aspects of any technologies, nor does he offer any recipe for resistance, subversion or detournement . Much of the text reads like a thinly veiled sermon on moral collapse. The relentlessness of this tone became draining to me and began to echo the sentiment “it ain’t like the good old days.” CYBERSPACEREFLECTIONS by Herman E. van Bolhuis and Vicente Colom. W B University Press, Brussels, Belgium, 1995. 222 pp., illus. $14.50 orders to: Paul & Company, P.O.B. 44, Concord, MA 01742, U.S.A.; fax: 508PIUS postage. ISBN: 90-5487-121-0. U.S. 369-2385. Reviewed by Mil Mitropoulos, 11 Eljiidos Street, Athens 10434, Greece. Since the age of six, I have known that there was a third way out, besides fight or flight: networking (although traveling and telecommunicating was not easy in post-World War I1 Europe). Today the freedom to move and communicate in cyberspace, before the US. National Security Agency (NSA) closes in on you (and your fancy encryption, if it is perceived to be a potentially disruptive influence), should be enough to satisfy most network users-and practically exhaust a good part of them...