Neil Postman's Technopoly, pages xi-91

Neil Postman begins his book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by recounting the legend of Thamus and Theuth, told through the ancient philosopher Socrates. In this legend, Postman highlights a key error that Thamus makes when considering Theuth's new invention, writing. Thamus decides that the invention of writing will force those who "...rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources" (Postman 4). Postman points out Thamus's error; "We may learn from this that it is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect" (Postman 4). Thus, by taking from Postman's argument, it would be irresponsible of us to only view new technologies in a one sided manner, rather noting the pros and cons of each developing technology is the only healthy way to predicting its impact on culture.

Postman later goes on to develop his theory of our culture emerging as a technocracy, or "a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent"(Postman 41). Postman marks the date of America rising as a technocracy with the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in which Smith defines humanity as an "Economic Man", "born with an instinct to barter and aquire wealth"(Postman 41). Smith's theory of the Economic Man, and Postman's deliverance of it to his book highlights the direction in which our culture, one explicitly revolving around the development of new technologies. With this emergent culture, and Smith's Economic Man, it is easy to see how our day to day life is becoming more intertwined with these new technologies and how they benefit our capitalist society, rather than the individualistic society that has been lost with the emergence of our new technological culture, or technopoly.

Towards the end of the chapter, Postman describes his social scientific experiments, in which he claims something outlandish to see if his colleagues would believe him. Although it may appear rather silly, Postman's experiments actually underline a very crucial aspect of our culture; we almost believe anything that seems outlandish, or more specifically something that seems outlandish that has to deal with science, because we do not have the information ready to disprove such concotions of the imagination, and thus we have become more susceptible to new and somewhat outlandish technologies in our society that may have no real purpose or use.