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....