Technopoly
I’m not going to lie – this whole technopoly thing is way over my head. But I’m going to try to summarize my understanding of the topic. According to Neil Postman, Technopoly is a state of culture and a state of mind. Today it is easy to say that our culture revolves around technology. Once a new technology is introduced, members of society have to figure out what it is for and how to use it. The tape player, personal computer, walkman, digital camera, cell phones and ipods are just a few technologies that have been invented in the last twenty or so years.
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Those who believe that these new inventions are the key to solving society’s dilemmas are most comfortable with Technopoly. In Neil Postman’s article about Technopoly he wrote about how in today’s society we are being accustomed to new inventions and technologies. He said, “If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different.� This understanding of “real� is now different than it was only one hundred years ago. Technopolies make us change the way we think about and view religion, family, politics, history, the actual truth and intelligence itself. It does not add or subtract something, it changes everything. This is how Postman defines Technopoly.
Somehow, these technologies and Technopoly is linked to an order of nature. Lance LaVine said something in the beginning of his lecture and for some reason, it stuck with me. He said, “Gravity is the only thing in your entire life that will be constant and never changing.� This is true and it’s nice to know there’s at least one stable thing in my life! We depend on gravity to function. We build houses according to the earth’s gravity. There is a certain balance between push and pull on the earth. A long time ago, one of the greatest technologies was the column. Columns were a rooted order of the earth and were a great invention for building a strong structure for massive buildings.
www.cwrl.utexas.edu
The Christian sense of order says that from one comes everything. One column holds up the ceiling. Flying buttresses were also a new technology back in the day and were used to support extremely tall buildings.
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Technologies have always been advancing and today it seems like the speed of new inventions is faster than ever!