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Pattie:
Harvard History professor, Bruce Mazlish, in his
book A New Science: The
Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology argues that
during the industrialization of Europe in the late 18th
century and early 19th century, two types of thinkers arose
and influenced the birth of what we now know as sociology.
He calls these thinkers: breakers
and lamenters.
The breakers hailed a new scientific era free of the past tyrannies of
state and church. Science
and rational thought were going to save mankind and move it into a world
under the control of humans – a world where dignity and freedom were
possible as long as we learned to be rational.
The lamenters feared industrialization and what
came to be known as capitalism. They
saw the pastoral life increasingly being swallowed up by urban blight.
Social relationships were breaking down.
Human connections were falling apart.
Extended families were disintegrating, leaving selfish
individuals with no sense of civility.
Poverty, disease, fear and exploitation were the results of
industrialization:
Carl:
"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND
SOON" (1806)
A poem by William Wordsworth, written in 1806
THE world is too much with
us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we
lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature
that is ours;
We have given our hearts
away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her
bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be
howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now
like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything,
we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great
God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed
outworn;
So might I, standing on
this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would
make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus
rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow
his wreathed horn.
Pattie:
Science
has become a much more complicated and controversial subject since the
early 19th century. In
the 20th century, along side great accomplishments, a
high-spirit of invention produced death machines, world wars, toxic
waste dumps, genetically altered food, and cloned sheep.
We continue to see rapid changes in technologies and inventions,
but we are jaded, no longer impressed.
Or we are scared of the implications of science out of control.
With each new technology comes doubts about what it all means, where it
all leads. Science has
become Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – two minds from the same persona:
one brilliant, the other insane.
Neil
Postman’s cultural critique: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture
to Technology reminds me of Mazlish’s lamenters. Postman longs for the good old days when things were simpler.
Ironically, Postman is lamenting the 19th Century’s
age of science, not the pastoral countryside, but the age of invention
and reason.
Postman
divides societies up into three types:
Tools, Technocracy and Technopoly.
Tool societies have the simplest technologies and rely heavily
upon human labour
to survive. Technocracies
are more technologically advanced that Tool societies, but the
technology remains under the control of society.
Technopolies, however, lose their control over technology.
People respect technology qua technology with little thought of
why it is better or what purpose it has.
It’s the latest thing, so it must be cool:
Carl:
Postman writes:
Quote: Technocracy gave us
the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with
tradition—whether political or spiritual.
Technocracy filled the air with promise of new freedoms and new
forms of social organization. …
Technocracy did not completely destroy the traditions of the
social and symbolic worlds. Technocracy
subordinated these worlds – yes, even humiliated them—but it did not
render them totally ineffectual. …
Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous
Huxley outlined in Brave New World.
It does not make them illegal.
It does not make them immoral.
It does not even make them unpopular.
It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.
And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by
family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence,
so that our definitions fit its new requirements.
Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy. Unquote.
Pattie:
After establishing this taxonomy of societies and
asserting that the United States is the only technopoly in existence as
of the writing of the book in 1993, Postman makes his case for
technopoly being the source of a number of social problems:
iatrogenic disease, injury and death; alienation in
relationships; poor human judgment; dumbing down of intellectuals;
over-valuation of science; loss of symbols; and the loss of a foundation
for education. The picture
he paints is a dismal one indeed.
There are many ideas in the book that resonate with
me. I do think that science
has become too powerful a symbol in western society.
There is little examination of the information we receive and we
are not teaching young people to think for themselves.
Schools are becoming more and more a method of social control and
less and less a place where people learn to question authority, demand
an understanding of not only “what” but “how and “why.” I agree that teaching such things as the history of
science and semantics ought be as common as reading, writing and
arithmetic.
There is no question in my mind that a
“technological imperative” exists in medicine, communications and
transportation. If we CAN
do it, we think we should do it. Human
cloning and genetic engineering are probably the scariest manifestations
of science getting ahead of itself.
When Dolly, the cloned sheep, made headlines in 1997, I thought
to myself, “the world as we know has just ended.”
Now scientists are discussing when, not if, human cloning will
happen.
Even in the nine years since the publication of Technopoly,
the world has changed in many ways.
In 1993, only 600 websites existed with only 2 million hosts and
28,000 domain names. Mosaic
was the new software that allowed graphics to be viewed by some users
and Internic was formed by NSF to handle the cataloguing of Internet
services and websites. I had text-based e-mail through the university on a
telephone modem and for the first time ever, I didn’t have to have the
phone company come and put in a special line.
Windows 95 did not exist. CD-ROMs
were not standard on computers. A
big hard drive had 50 megabytes. Pentiums
were the big buzz in high-speed computers because they had the promise
of delivering over 100 megahertz of speed to the computer.
There are now over 40 million websites on the
worldwide web with over 160 million hosts and 1 million, 600 hundred
thousand (1,600,000) domain names.
My computer has 1.7 gig megahertz clock speed and a 40 gig hard
drive and it is not the latest or the greatest.
I regularly send photos via e-mail.
And, well, I’m recording, editing and producing this broadcast
using computers and software. In
fact, you may even be listening on a computer.
The rates of change are staggering to contemplate.
They are especially staggering when I consider that most of the
world still hasn’t caught up (if up is the correct term).
My friend, Tish, has on her website the following quote by the
writer, Pico Iver: “May we remember, as we log on, that half the world's people have never
used a telephone, and recall, as we chatter, that most of those around
us have no chance to speak or move as they choose.”
Even if this is exaggerated, it is true that the
term “world” in World Wide Web is more hopeful than accurate.
So as I thought about technology and it’s place
in society while reading Postman’s book, I wanted badly to agree with
him. But I had this gnawing
sense of something being off-kilter to his analysis.
I was waiting for a punch line that never quite came. I wanted to see more about how technology could help.
I wanted to talk about the people who were being left out:
women, people of
colour, third-world nations.
I wanted to talk about the advernet and how questions of
intellectual property and spamming junk e-mail were ruining things.
Where was capitalism? Where was racism? Where
was sexism? Where was anything that indicated that these things were not
happening in a technological vacuum?
Postman often comes up to the edge of these things.
His discussion of the great symbol drain and the place of
advertising in cheapening the meaningful things in American culture is
promising, but his desire to indict technology gets in the way:
Carl:
Postman writes:
Quotes: In the process, a fundamental
principle of capitalist ideology was rejected:
namely, that the producer and the consumer were engaged in a
rational enterprise in which consumers made choices on the basis of a
careful consideration of the quality of a product and their own
self-interest. This, at
least, is what Adam Smith had in mind.
But today, the television commercial, for example, is rarely
about the character of the products.
It is about the character of the consumers of products.
… The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the
consumer, a patient reassured by psychodramas.
What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly
is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to
further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of
consumers. … In putting
it this way, I mean to say that mass advertising is not the cause of
the great symbol drain. Such
cultural abuse could not occurred without the technologies to make it
possible and world-view to make it desirable.
In the institutional form of a world-view that sees tradition
as an obstacle to its claims. There
can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure
of respect for symbols. Tradition
is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgement of the authority of
symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them.
Unquote.
Pattie:
Postman wants to hold onto his traditions dearly
and like Mazlish’s lamenters, he sees a world he wants changing faster
than he wants it to change and changing in ways he does not want it to
change. His unquestioning
devotion to primacy of science and reason seems out of place with his
assertion that technology for technology’s sake will lead to social
upheaval. It is his blind spot, in my opinion, because he does not
address the fundamental problem of science and technology as it has been
used to further the cause of imperialism, including American
imperialism. His assumption
of progress and his basic three-fold taxonomy of societies reflect the
worn-out assumptions of westerners that theirs is the superior society,
that theirs is the superior world view and that somehow the rest of the
world wants to be just like them. Take
away these assumptions and add a critique of the long history of
colonization and hegemonic techniques in and by America and you see that
it isn’t the technology that is causing these problems.
It’s the fabric of American society itself.
Like Mazlish’s lamenters, Postman longs for a time that never
really existed and symbols that long ago lost their meanings.
Carl:
This ends another episode of First Person,
Plural on CFUV-101.9 FM, 104.3 on cable, and for those of you living
in the Technopoly, cfuv.uvic.ca on the World Wide Web.
We hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about the social
world around you. See you
next Thursday at noon.
copyright
by Pattie Thomas and Carl Wilkerson 2002
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