The Age of Technology
From the time you are born until the day you die one thing will remain constant and that is the progress of technology. Everyday there is something new brought into our world. Whether it be a revision of an old technology or just a new discovery, it doesn¹t matter, there is always progress. Today we live in a culture where technology has effected everything. Technology has come in to play a role in religion, science, and even the imitation of humankind. Today it is hard to find one thing that technology does not play a role in. With technology there is always progress and until the end of time it will always be in motion.
Recently, I have had to do some research concerning the progress of technology and it¹s effects on humankind throughout history. Throughout my research one thing became obvious to me and that is technology, in a short period of time, has progressed drastically. Whether you agree with the bible that Cain was the first inventor(Genesis 4) or simply believe in the mythological character Thamus, it doesn¹t matter. Somehow and somewhere technology began and since then it has never stopped growing. To research this topic I went to a cultural critic who is an expert in analyzing technology¹s effect on culture. In the technological world Neil Postman is a well regarded as a cultural critic for his opinion and for his view of technology today. He is also known for other books such as, The Disappearance of Childhood, and Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk. The book that I concentrated on was a book entitled Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. In this book Neil Postman reasons that ultimately the technological world will render us more harm, than benefit. Also, he goes on at length abou...
... middle of paper ...
...ngulfed him with technology and now lives in a technopoly. Postman went on to show that today for every old world belief there is a technological answer. Man, no longer needs to depend on his culture, rather he could depend on technology. For prayer, he would take penicillin. For reading, just switch on the television and for sin all you need is psychotherapy. You can see clearly that man has left their God entirely. He went from total dependency to total independence, just as Cain did. I believe that throughout the whole book of Technopoly,
Mr. Postman¹s stressed one thing the most and that is that man has left God, has replaced God, and realizes that unless something is done to bring man back, he has surrendered his life to technology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
TECHNOPOLY: THE SURRENDER OF CULTURE TO TECHNOLOGY. Neil Postman.
Random House Inc. NEW YORK. C1992
Technology has been around as long as people have and has been advancing ever since. It is the reason that we have access to the miraculous tools that we do today. From the forks that we eat our supper with to the cars that get us from place to place technology is everywhere. However, with technology advancing at such a rapid pace, it could pose a threat to our future society. In the short stories “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut and “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benet, the authors describe how bleak society could become if we do not take precautions when using technology.
Postman’s fifth idea is reification, which is used to confuse people with names and things. A name might not necessarily suggest the real meaning behind it. This is why people use this idea in advertisements and politics so they can lure people into what is actually not there. Postman then suggests students to study reification, so that they could identify the problem and work it
In this first chapter of Jesus and the Disinherited , the author Howard Thurman describes
Postman bases his argument on the belief that public discourse in America, when governed by the epistemology of the printing press, was "generally coherent, serious, and rational" (16) because the reader was required to ingest, understand, and think about the logic of the author's arguments before coming to a verdict. In effect, intelligence in a print-based world "implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations" (26). However, with the emergence of television and its rapid ascendancy in our culture, Postman argues that discourse has become "shriveled and absurd" (16). TV, he says, assaults us with fleeting images and disconnected bits of information with no context except for the "pseudo-context" which is manufactured "to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use" (76). In effect, TV demands a certain kind of content-the "medium is the message" in the words of Marshall McLuhan-that Postman believes is suitable to the world of show business and hostile to the print-based world of logical thinking (80). This is not to say that TV ignores important subjects such as current affairs, politics, religion, science, and e...
Neil Postman (March 8, 1931- Octomber 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, ,media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known for his seventeen books, including “Amusing Ourselves to Death”(1985). Postman’s best known book is “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. Since TV replace the written word , Postman belive that people would be more and more attracted to this, but he also argue that television is not an effective way of providing education after all.
Neil Postman, writer, educator, critic and communications theorist, has written many books, including Technopoly. Mr. Postman is one of America's most visible cultural critics, who attempts to analyze culture and history in terms of the effects of technology on western culture. For Postman, it seems more important to consider what society loses from new technology than what it gains. To illustrate this, Postman uses the Egyptian mythology called "The Judgment of Thamus," which attempts to explain how the development of writing in Egyptian civilization decreases the amount of knowledge and wisdom in the society. He traces the roots of technology to show how technology impacts the moral and intellectual attitude of people. Postman seems to criticize societies with high technologies, yet he seems naive to the benefits technology has given society. Postman can be considered fairly conservative in his views regarding technology. His lucid writing style stimulates thoughts on issues in today's technological society; however because of his moral interpretations and historical revisions, his ethos is arguable. For every good insight he makes, he skips another mark completely.
Neil Postman is not convinced that technology would improve our ability to participate in a public discourse. In his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, we are exposed to topics that most people would avoid. Postman believes that technology would only disable our critical minds, forcing us to be mindless followers. Even though we know that television is poisoning our minds with unfiltered content, most of us still prefer television as our primary media of information. Postman acknowledged that this problem lies in the nature of human communication. The current media reveals information in an oral culture instead of printed language, which is why there would be more bias involved. In the foreword of the book, Huxley feared of “those who would
If only but an insignificant counter argument may be made that reading remains to be an everyday activity. However, this requires one to slowly consider the litteratre’s argument and construct thoughts, a sophisticated approved that seems too ancient now. Postman can easily defend himself by assuring that, “...[A] reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness” (50). Just as Postman begins with Huxley’s warning, he also ends saying that, “What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicious and hate” (155). Getting everyone to stop watching television remains hopeless, but to educate people about the dreadful effects could help with understanding what television does. And eventually, the entertainment society of disorited discourse may find the lost culture in which more intelligent discourse is common
Postman’s main argument here is that the power of typography has the ability to control discourse. When language is controlled by print, an idea, a fact, or a claim is the result. And today we have this unrelenting demand to understand and know everything we are presented with. Print gave priority to the intellectual and rational mind, therefore encouraging serious, logical public discourse. Postman supports this claim by arguing that the Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason”, a written pamphlet that challenged the religious and political institutions of the 18th century, was coexistent with the growth of print culture. Paine scrutinized the Bible and charged its divine claims as false. He did this through careful analysis and came up with logical conclusions. In essence, typography and print created and changed people’s identities and beliefs.
Ong believes that some technologies act in the same way that old technologies do. For example, the calculator is an external resource for thinking similar to how writing is an external source for thinking. Moreover, Ong believes that new technologies as well as the old have a power that we are oblivious to. He states, “…writing is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word” (Ong 32). Technology has a great ability to manipulate the people using it, which can be a positive thing if it is properly interiorized. Instead of degrading human life, as Postman seems to believe, new technology can, on the contrary, enhance it. Postman explains that photography shattered context which lead to the decline of rationality in advertisement. The effect that this has on the public is that it also makes them irrational as well as seek and distribute information that is out of context, as Postman discusses in later chapters of his book. Even so, Ong believes, “The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge human spirit, set it free, intensify its interior life” (Ong33). Although Postman seems to believe that writing does this in regards to public discourse but he would
In “ 5 Things We Need To Know About Technological Change”, by Neil Postman, Postman describes the prices we have to pay each time something new is made. The first price is culture, culture always pays a price for technology. For example, cars and pollution ( and many other less obvious examples). As Postman says: “Technology giveth and technology taketh away”.The second thing to know is that there are always winners and losers in technological change. As Postman explains: “the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population”. There are always winners and losers in technological change. Winners tend to be those whose lifestyle is most closely aligned with the values of technology. The losers are those who don’t put technology on the first place. So for some technology is everything, while others are not that into it. As for the third thing that Postman describes is that in every technology there is a hidden philosophy about how the mind should work. I believe what Postman is saying is very similar to what Nicholas Carr, the author of “Tools Of The Mind” said. In “Tools of the Mind”, Carr introduces us to a new word, which he frequently uses called “intellectual ethic”, meaning an assumption implicit in a tool about how the mind should work. Carr explains how the map, clock, and writing are “intellectual technologies” that changed society and our ways
In today's world, technology is constantly changing from a new paperclip to an improvement in hospital machinery. Technology lets people improve the way they live so that they can preserve their own personal energy and focus on the really important factors in life. Some people focus their energy on making new innovations to improve transportation and the health of people that may save lives and some people focus on making new designs of packaging CDS. Technology is significant in everyone's life because it rapidly changes what is in the market. But, some new innovations of technology are ridiculous because they serve no purpose in helping mankind.
There are four gods in Postman’s theory that are part of these “False” gods that lead us to and end. Technology, economic utility, consumership, and separatism are the four gods which we work to achieve. Postman says that to achieve economic utility, we go to school to establish a secure career so that we will be able to provide for ourselves, and our family. He thinks that in our society, it is morally important to buy things to be happy, which is his god of consumership. Postman believes that people think that they are not as good as someone else unless they have the same material things. Separatism or “Multiculturalism” is the god that postman believes brings to to an finalized end. Postman believes that it is tribalistic thinking and that through emphasis on ethnicity and learning about different cultures we become actually separate. Instead of pointing out the differences between one ethnicity and another, we should just be who were are as a culture.
Technology is one of the groundbreaking inventions humans have come up with. Technology nowadays is so broad there are thousands upon thousands of companies out there with their only intention is to make better technology. Back when it first came out they thought it was going to evolve extremely fast and flying cars would be out in 30 years and such. It’s not evolving at an extraordinary rate, but it’s still evolving at an extremely fast rate.
At just a quarter of a century in governing regulations, listening to complains and making recommendations, while maintaining the standards of the laws of Jamaica as it is concerned with the media. There is one inevitable aspect the Broadcasting Commission has to continuously keep abreast with, and that is change.