Neil Postman: Technopoly. The Surrender of Culture to Technology

With characteristic wit and candor, Neil Postman, our most astute and engagmg cultural critic, launches a trenchant — and harrowing — warning against the tyranny of machines over man in the late twentieth century. We live in a time when physical well-being is determined by CAT scan results. Facts need the substantiation of statistical study. The human mind needs "deprogramming” while computers catch devastating "viruses.” We live, then, in a Technopoly — a self-justifying, self-perpetuating system wherein technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life.
In this provocative work, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation from a society that uses technology to one that is shaped by it, as he traces its effects upon what we mean by politics, intellect, religion, history — even privacy and truth. But if Technopoly is disturbing, it is also a passionate rallying cry filled with a humane rationalism as it asserts the manifold means by which technology, placed within the context of our larger human goals and social values, is an invaluable instrument for furthering the most worthy human endeavors.