Neil Postman's Technopoly, pages 92-199

Postman starts out the latter part of his book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by citing Americans tendency to aggressively diagnose and treat patients with medicine. A phrase that correlates with Postman's thesis about the aggressiveness of American physicians, most likely due to the abudance of machinery available and the amount of potential capital earned by using such machines, highlights the attitude towards American medicine both in the time it was written, and even today, in a technologically brimming society: "Desperate diseases require desperate remedies" (Postman 97). Postman writes; "...American medicine was attracted to new technologies. Far from being 'neutral', technology was to be the weapon with which disease and illness would be vanquished" (Postman 97). The effects of such technologies in the field of medicine had subsequent results, of which are still just as relevant today as they were when these technologies were first introduced into the field: "...interposing an instrument between patient and doctor would transform the practice of medicine; the traditional methods of questioning patients, taking their reports seriously, and making careful observations of exterior symptoms would become increasingly irrelevant" (Postman 99). With the introduction of technology to the practice of medicine, the methods in which doctors diagnose and treat patients has completely transformed, although we, the present society, have not really noticed this transformation as we have only existed in society that has had availability to such technologies. Of course, as Postman mentioned in the beginning of his work, not all technology is bad, in fact in most cases specific technologies are developed to benefit mankind in a certain aspect, otherwise their creation would be useless and the practice of such technologies would be obsolete. However, that is not to say that all medicinal technologies are beneficial, in fact Postman highlights this in the beginning of this chapter by citing statistics in which American doctors seemingly overuse such technologies, conducting unnecessary X-rays and performing C-sections to an nth degree, etc.  However, in the present society, there really is no stopping this overuse and American aggressiveness with medicine, rather the emergence of this technology has become so integrated in our society that it would be hard to imagine modern medicine without its practice.

Postman later goes on to describe the machine like attributes of language; "But in many respects, a sentence functions very much like a machine, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the sentences we call questions"(Postman 125). He later goes on to give an example of the difference between a fill-in question and a multiple choice question, highlighting the concept that students would be "smarter" at the latter question than at the first because it gives us choices. Although not a machine, language does similarly reflect some of the most basic functions  that machines do. Postman makes us aware of the modification of language, and how this modification can differ our perception of the world around us. He gives us an example of a Japanese professor/doctor at MIT, who addressed his country men to reason with science in the English language, because it contains an "ideological bias" that helps deal with the reasoning of science more effectively than Japanese (Postman 124).