Such a fundamental question is at the heart of Neil Postman's book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. "Technopoly" describes "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology."11 Tools -- Technologies -- have always played a central role in the development and transformation of culture. Social mores, myth, religion, ritual and morals become subject to this transformation. As Postman pointed out that "embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another."ÃÂ12 Technology is who we are and how we live. We are not even fully conscious of how it defines us. We cannot live other than in a technological 9 Ibid.
10 Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p.
1st edition (publ. Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
1st edition cover (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
1st ediiton cover (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)5.
11 Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 48.
12 Ibid., p.13.
5 5 world, with all its consequences. It has both positive and negative aspects. For example , medical technology has extended our life spans with a higher quality of life but the patient, however, becomes the disease, in the process losing his/her humanity. But to live in a world without modern medicine or even "ÃÂsimpler' things such as electricity, plastic, in-door plumbing, etc., is inconceivable. Our technologies have formed how we perceive reality and, therefore, construct the world, how we interact with others, how and what we believe and determine what is "ÃÂwrong' and "ÃÂright.' It is totalitarian; it is Technopoly.
Because of the authoritarian nature of Technopoly, it seeks to eliminate any competition by...