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