Postman finished and current readings

Well, to sum the Technopoly up, Postman ends by saying that education is the one place that could set controls on technology and re-establish healthy habits in our cutlure. I agree, but it is too bad the church wasn't on his list.

Moving on, I have been reading/finished a couple of other books.
For Christians in Education, you MUST read - The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil. James Davison Hunter offers an amazing critique of the movements that have swayed educational paradigms, and offers a chapter of critique on the protestant churches while applauding certain faithful Catholic and Jewish Communities. The way Hunter sees moral education most fully incarnated and taught is through the consistent communities that live out their morality in service to each other and to their broader communities. It is a powerful testament to faith communities, and a radical call to protestant churches to rethink their childrens' education. I have passed copies of the articles out to quite a few people I respect, and have received primarily positive responses.

My critique on Hunter is that he didn't go far enough. This may have been limited by his publisher, but this is where I would have gone next. In an Excursus after Chapter 8, he mentions 5 different mentalities that guide moral orientation (Expressivist, Utilitarian, Civic Humanist, Conventionalist, and Theist) in America. He then shows significant data regarding these orientations. There is an obvious trend for the Expressivist and Utilitarian to have no true north of moral orientation. It leads to a moment by moment, choice by choice basis. These students were most likely to lie, cheat, steal, and undergo sexual promiscuity if the opportunity presented itself. Flat in the middle was the Civic humanist, and the Conventionalist and Theist were the most likely to NOT lie, cheat, steal, or be sexually promiscuous. Hunter uses these data to emphasize the need for teaching of an objective, innate understanding of right and wrong (per C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity).

I think, for Christians, this falls a bit short. The primary reason we are moral is because we are called to love God and obey his commands. The question of why God made the rules he did is another thing. God's reasons seem to be all 5 of the categories mentioned by Hunter. They are to make the people feel good, they are useful (especially in Deuteronomy for tilling land, et. al.) they are good for the community at large, they are to honor our parents, and they exist because God made them. This seems to be a more complete, albeit short and simplistic perspective on morality. Hunter's challenge to America, and to any person that reads this book is: How do we teach our kids right and wrong? Do we say that doing good makes others and the self feel good and vice versa for bad? Or do we teach our kids that laws were created to glorify a Holy God? I hope I teach my kids the latter with a holistic perspective following. But needless to say, American Christians and churches need to rethink their understanding and teaching of morality.

More to come

I am doing my best to get this review done. I finished the book a bit too quickly and have moved on in my head. Maybe this is one of the signs of being in an info-glut culture.

Technopoly chapters 5 and 6: The Broken Defenses and Medical Technology

F. The Broken Defenses
- Pg. 72 - "Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechansisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with new information. When additional contrll mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer conrollable, a general breakdown in psychic traniquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures."
1. What are the defenses?
a. Social institutions - they can simply deny people access to information, but prinicipally by directing how much weight and value one must give to it.
i. the court room - presenting of information as evidence - information must be of value, and significant to the cases being presented, or it is not permissable. There is a control on the info.
ii. Schools - college catalogue says what is important enough to be a class, and omission deems it unimportant (this is open to debate in my mind, at least as far as instructor availability goes)
iii. elementary schools - What does it take to be a good citizen? The mastery of a certain body of knowledge.
iv. family
v. political party
vi. Religion
vii. The state - parts vi. and vii. went to war in the Scopes Monkey Trial - symbolic of Divine Theology vs. Science (technology and information) - and science won.
b. Bureaucracy - a coordinated series of techniques for reducint the amount of information that requires processing
i. e.g. of world being cut into time zones. Suddenly, all peoples schedules were unified, and traveling technology was able to move across continents and eventually around the world with scheduling
ii. standardized forms - formal, objective information is collected that is supposedly the most pertinent for solving problems - it often does, but depersonalizes the process (consider the critique of medical technology a little later...)
iii. Adolf Eichman becomes the prototype bureaucrat - his job was moving people, and he was not concerned with the before or after. He was just another cog in the wheel doing his job. (Postman doesn't call it this, but I think this is primarily a problem in reducing a position or job to simply filling a role and filing information. The person is only responsible for his/her job, not for the consequences)
c. Technical Machinery
i. the tools of the bureaucrat - poll, standardized test - they take the personality and symbolism out of life. Everything becomes objective information. Can a test truly measure someone's intellicgence?

G. The Ideology of Machines: Medical Technology
-Pages 93 and 94 " Philosphers may agonize over the questions "What is truth?" "What is intelligence?" But in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbersr that you can see and calculate with. They tell us that when eight green lights go onsomeone is speaking the truth. That is all ther eis to it. They tell us that a score of 136 means more brains that a score of 104. This is Technopoly's version of magic.

What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than of understanding."

1. Medicine moves from being based on a person's information, to a read out of the tools
a. the stethoscope - Doctors used to ask many questions about how a person is breathing, feeling, etc. but with the invention of the stethoscople, insight was received from a tool that purveys objective information, not words that may be objective.

The above is the idea of the whole chapter. It is the tension between better information to direct doctors toward a cure and a reliance on the tool gathered information rather than the words of a patient. Have you ever told a doctor what you think your problem is, and then have them diagnose it differently, only to later find out you were right? I have had this happen, and I think it is an example of Postman's gripe. Doctors have become less personal and much more focused on the answers. The good of this? People can be cured. The bad? An over reliance on the tools leads to just needing certain information (like those forms you fill out - they call them medical histories) which is often ignored by the doctor for the sake of the tools. This is a big conversation I would love to see doctors have, as I am no doctor (although I am a WFR until May). Postman asks - "Do tools lead to better medicine?" and answers - in some ways yes and in some ways no. And has a lot of proof for the over use of medical technology at the cost of health insurance, and ultimately, the consumer. I just realized how upset I am if the doctor doesn't give me an x-ray and I have a pain in my bones. Maybe I need to think twice and learn how to describe my problem better.

More to come in the future

Technopoly: Chapters 3 and 4

Well, I finished the book this morning, but will work on hammering out the outlines over the next day or two.

D. From Technocracy to Technopoly
1. The beginning of Technocracy - Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations"
a. justified the transition from small scale, personal, skilled labor to large scale, impersonal, mechanized production
b. Money, not land signified wealth
c. Market would control itself (unseen hand)
2. Notable creations in the history of technocracy - the communication revolution
a. photograph and telegraph - 1830s
b. rotary power printing - 1840s
c. typewriter - 1860s
d. transatlantic cable - 1866
e. telephone - 1876
f. motion pictures and wireless telegraphy - 1895
g. A.N. Whitehead - the greatest invention of the 19th century was the idea of invention itself
3. Individuality on the increase due to the importance of "everyman"
a. "the disease" of work needed to be eliminated (who wants to work?)
b. development of person comes into focus - public school systems, labor unions, libraries, and magazines became important
4. What has technocracy accomplished:
a. gave us progress - looses the bonds of tradition and religion
b. new freedoms and new forms of social organization
c. speeds up the world
d. conquers time in the name of efficiency
5. If efficiency and progress is king, there is no time to look back and remember the past
6. In technocracy, the technological world and traditional world were in tension, but co-existing.
7. In comes Technopoly - a totalitarian technocracy.
a. Technology starts to redefine our understanding of everything - it trumps tradition
b. Possible starting points
i. A. Huxley - Brave New World - points to Henry Ford and Ford Manufacturing
ii. Postman points to Scopes Monkey Trial due to its drama - it pitted new ideas and religion against each other
iii. Postman - Taylor takes principles of scientific management into the railroad and makes it faster, more efficient, and more productive than ever before, and it spreads like wildfire
8. The masters of scientific management were the "robber barons" of Morse, Bell, Edison, Rockefeller, Astor, Ford, and Carnegie - took advantage of technopoly and progress

E. The Improbable World
1. The world as we know it is nearly incomprehensible to us
a. The fallacy of "social science" and technopoly
i. if you say that a study has proven that something outlandish has happened, most people will pause and at least consider it
ii. Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief. (pg 58)
2. Information is the new god of culture - this is a lie
a. very few problems arise from a lack of information
b. technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is more information
c. common school arose to calm the anxieties and confusion of uncontrollable information
i. schools started setting the standard for what information is truly important

After moving through an oration of the change of culture around the increasing speed and amount of information available, Postman closes the chapter on page 70 as follows:

"All of this has called into being a new world. I have referred to it elsewhere as a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, as been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and may of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from the information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms."

In the words of Steve Garber, through the words of others - "Knowledge is power" and "He he knows the most, mourns deepest."

DEW

Postman's "Technopoly" Intro, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2

For my own sake, I am going to be doing a barebones outline of books I am reading. If other's find it helpful, all the better.

A. Introduction:
1. Technology is a friend.
2. Technology does not invite a close examination of its consequences.
a. Postman assesses the consequences, or when technology becomes an enemy.

B. The judgment of Thamus
1. "Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology" (pg. 8)
a. The simple tool of the pencil will alter the understanding of memory, history, wisdom, etc.
2. "Changes wrought by technology are subtle if not downright mysterious... wildly unpredictable"
3. A metaphor from T.S. Eliot - the chief use of the overt content of poetry is "to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog."
4. Technology alters:
a. the things we think about (interests)
b. the things we think with (symbols)
c. the nature of community (the arena that thoughts develop)

C. From Tools to Technocracy
1. Technology create ways in which people perceive reality
a. Marx connected technological conditions to symbolic life and psychic habits
b. e.g. The Iron Age, The Bronze Age, The Steel Age, The Industrial Revolution, The Post-Industrial Revolution
c. common day examples - Transitions from oral cultures, to typographic cultures, to electronic culture - are we now in the wireless age?(my addition)
2. Tool-using culture
a. Tools were made to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life (waterpower, windmills, and the heavy wheeled plow)
b. Tools were made to serve the symbolic world of art, politics , myth, ritual, and religion (castles, cathedrals, the mechanical clock)
c. Tools did NOT (for the most part) prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization
d. The quantity of technology available to a tool-using culture is not the characteristic
e. Tool-using cultures are not necessarily impoverished technologically, and may even be surprisingly sophisticated
f. Tool-using cultures may have many tools or few, may be enthusiastic about tools or contemptuous
g. The name is derived from the relationship in a culture between tools and the belief system or ideology
3. Transition from tool-using culture to technocracy
a. e.g. introduction of matches to "The People of the Deer" (pg 28)
b. e.g. movement of the clock from monastic faithfulness to industrial productivity and control
c. Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton - advancements in technology led to debunking of traditional theology (earth as the universe center) and separation of church and science (even thought scientist remained very devout)
d. salvation of people moved from God to mechanistic invention that provided jobs and goods (I state a bit more straightforward than Postman


More to come as I read....