Technology is Ideology
I don’t have many ideas of my own, but borrow them from others. One of them is Neil Postman, an amazing fellow. For your edification, here is a sample from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) page 157:
For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?
But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption the technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.
I like that last sentence particularly, it is poetic in its flow of words.
He is our best critic of Television, the most disruptive force known when he wrote this in 1985. But he did not understand the Computer at all – the triple-whammy that laid us in the dust.
The net effect of this was to eliminate people altogether. After its Coming (note the religious parallel) technology would not just be ideology – it would be everything!
No trackbacks yet.