326 Book Reviews
down here?" the policeman replies. The gentleman re-
sponds, "There's more light here."
Are we in marketing seeking answers to the right ques-
tions, or are we seeking questions for which our accepted
methods can provide answers? The answer to this question
will determine the nature of human existence in the future.
WILLIAM E. KILBOURNE
Sam Houston State University
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture
to Technology
by Neil Postman (New York: Vintage Books, 1993,
$11.00)
In this thoroughly researched, skillfully crafted book. Post-
man asks us to step back and examine how our obsession
with technology is destroying American culture. Although
he recognizes that technologies have many positive effects,
this is not intended to be a balanced view of the topic. Using
a wealth of interdisciplinary perspectives, he discusses the
impact of recent technological innovations on some of our
social institutions, including politics, medicine, the family,
religion, and education. An educator himself. Postman em-
phasizes the education system, both as an institution on the
verge of profound change due to new technologies and as a
potential force to counterbalance the negative impact of
technology run rampant.
The book begins with a story that dramatizes several of
Postman's major points. Plato's Phaedrus contains a story
about Thamus, an Egyptian king, as he entertained the god
Theuth. Theuth was a great inventor, and he showed Thamus
many of his inventions, explaining their benefits and why
they should be made available to Egyptians. When it came
to his invention of writing (p. 3-4),
Theuth declared, 'Here is an accomplishment, my lord the King,
which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the
Egyptians'.... Thamus replied, 'Theuth, my paragon of inven-
tors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or
harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this;
you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your
off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function.
Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and
become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to
their remembrance by extemal signs instead of by their own in-
temal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for rec-
ollection, not for memory.'
From this story Postman wants us to leam that any new
technology can have a profound impact, altering processes
as basic as the way we think. He argues that technologies are
not neutral until put to use, for good or ill, by humans; that
is, the uses made of any technology are largely determined
by the form of the technology itself.
Unfortunately, many of the changes brought by a technol-
ogy are unpredictable, especially the ideological ones. Yet,
every technology has an ideological bias, and new technolo-
gies compete with old ones for dominance of their world-
views. Our current technologies have become so powerful
that we Americans are in a state of cultural crisis, with our
social, intellectual, and value systems under attack. Postman
traces historically how we got to this state by classifying
cultures into three types. In the first two types, the social and
symbolic traditions (e.g., politics, mores, religion) kept
some control over the available tools. The third type of cul-
ture is technopoly, which he defines as totalitarian technoc-
racy. Here the opposition between the thought worlds of the
] technological and the traditional has been resolved: Tech-
J nology reigns supreme. In the process, the traditional
thought world has been made invisible and irrelevant.
Some basic assumptions of technopoly are that (1) the
primary goal of labor and thought is efficiency, (2) technical
calculation is superior to human judgment, (3) what cannot
be measured either does not exist or is of no value, (4) af-
fairs of citizens are best guided by experts, and (5) tech-
niques and technical machinery can do our thinking for us.
The overriding belief is that technical innovation equals
human progress, so a major goal becomes accommodating
ourselves to the new technologies. Rather than carefully
considering the consequences, we blindly welcome every
new innovation, believing that if something can be done, it
should be done. The result is a society that deifies technolo-
gya culture that seeks its authorization in technology,
finds its satisfactions there, and takes its orders from it. Post-
man believes that, so far, the United States is the only coun-
try to have become a technopoly.
One result of being a technopoly is information glutwe
are drowning in information, and we no longer have cohe-
sive social structures to help us manage it. Due to inventions
such as the telegraph, photography, broadcasting, and the
computer, the direct link between information and human
purpose has been severed. Infonnation appears indiscrimi-
nately, directed at no one in particular, in huge volume and
at high speeds, disconnected from theory, meaning, or pur-
pose. In spite of this, we persist in believing that what we
need to solve the pressing problems of the world is still more
information, a notion Postman finds ridiculous.
Another result of technopoly is the adoption of what Post-
man calls scientism. This includes (1) the belief that the so-
cial sciences will discover principles to help us rationally
and humanely reorganize society and (2) faith that science
provides a comprehensive belief system that can give mean-
ing to life. Science has become the ultimate authority and, in
the process, has discredited all other systems, including our
traditional sources of moral authority. Technopoly's grand
illusion is that scientists can be an empirical source of moral
authority, although science cannot, and never was intended
to, tell us what we ought to do. The result is a weakening of
our value systems, a virtual moral vacuum.
One additional result of technocracy that Postman dis-
cusses is an agentic shift, the process of transferring respon-
sibility from humans to a more abstract agent, which, in this
case, is a technical method, such as scientific measurement,
or a piece of technical machinery. For example, when the
computer at a bank is not functioning, tellers can no longer
handle customersthey have shifted responsibility to the
computer.
As an example of a declining cultural institution. Postman
discusses education. The reigning technology in school has
always been the printed word, which fosters placing a high
 Journal of Public Policy & Marketing
value on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity,
and discipline. Recently, however, the dominance of writing
has come under attack by television, which shifts our values
to imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, intimacy,
immediate gratification, and quick emotional response.
Children now come to school so strongly conditioned by
television that some cannot or will not leam to read, many
cannot organize their thoughts into a logical structure, and
most cannot attend to a lecture for more than a few minutes.'
Added to this challenge is the current big push for improv-
ing our "leaming technologies," which typically means inte-
grating computers into the classroom to make learning more
efficient and interesting. But this does not address the basic
question: What is leaming for? Postman argues that we are
using no philosophy of education to guide the process. To
the extent that this is tme, the technology will drive what is
taught as well as the process of teaching.
In searching for what our philosophy of education has be-
come. Postman examines the advertisements used to per-
suade people to retum to school. They explain that the pur-
pose of an education is to get a good job and maybe also to
compete more effectively with Japan or Germany in the eco-
nomic struggle to be number one. For Postman, this demon-
strates that the United States is more an economy than a cul-
ture. That is, we have lost our transcendent political, spiritu-
al, and social ideas of the purpose of education and replaced
them with efficiency, personal interest, and economic ad-
vance. As a result, we are producing skilled, not educated,
persons.
Although Postman does not see much hope of diminish-
ing our love of new technologies, he does suggest several
possible solutions for restoring some balance. I will describe
one: changing the focus of our educational system. He be-
lieves that education can give students a sense of coherence,
purpose, and interconnectedness that would help inoculate
them against the negative effects of technopoly. For the
theme of the education system across all levels, he suggests
the ascent of humanity, joining art and science, the past and
present, in a celebration of human intelligence and creativi-
ty. Because every subject has a history, every teacher must
be a history teacher, giving context and connections to each
subject. We should get beyond the event level to concepts,
theories, comparisons, evaluationsin other words, raise
the level of abstraction. Every school should teach the phi-
losophy of science, semantics, the history of technology,
comparative religion, and noncontemporary literature,
music, and art. The goal of this system would be that stu-
dents leam about the origins and growth of knowledge sys-
tems, about the intellectual 326and creative processes by
which the best that has been thought and said has been pro-
duced. As a result, they should be equipped to actively par-
ticipate in the ascent of humanity.
Although the views presented in this book are intention-
ally one-sided, this is a side we rarely hear, for our exuber-
ant love affair with technology has put blinders on us. Al-
though it is probably an overstatement to say that
'Those interested in a lengthier discussion of the impact of television on
our intellectual abilities are referred to an earlier book by Postman, Amus-
ing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
(t985).
327
technopoly is leading to the destmction of our culture, many
of us academicians are concemed that Americans may have
little left of a unifying core value system. Instead, we see
growing cynicism and moral relativism, attitudes that make
the serious discussion of values unimportant and irrelevant.
Postman's views raise many questions about public poli-
cy beyond the educational system. For example, as we strive
toward developing the information superhighway, should we
put some serious effort into anticipating the possible nega-
tive effects so we can try to minimize them? Might the
power given to those with access to computers and other in-
formation-controlling technologies result in a larger and
more hopeless underclass of people who do not have access
to these technologies? How can we keep this from happen-
ing? Broadcast technologies have begun the homogenization
of the cultures of the world, and the information superhigh-
way is likely to hasten this process. Do we want this to con-
tinue? If not, can we design some social structures to at least
slow this process?
As another example, if Americans are becoming more
emotion driven and less capable of handling logical argu-
ments due to the many hours spent glued to the television,
are our social marketing campaigns, which generally rely on
rational arguments, doomed to failure? If so, should the
Food and Dmg Administration, for example, be condition-
ing the public to have positive emotional reactions to healthy
foods rather than explaining the components of the new food
labels? And, if we were to design more emotion-based social
marketing campaigns, would this not further contribute to
the decline of people's capacity to think deeply about diffi-
cult issues, including how to handle the immense problems
in our increasingly complex world? Although these are dis-
turbing questions, they, and this book, deserve attention.
LOISA.MOHR
Georgia State University
The Good Society
by Robert Beliah, Richard Madsen, William M.
Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (New
York: Vintage Books, 1992, $13.00)
Written collectively by five sociologists. The Good Society
is a thoughtful but passionate condemnation of perhaps the
key principle on which the United States is basedLockean
individualism. The writings of the British philosopher, John
Locke, had great impact on the founders of the United
Statesin particular Thomas Jefferson. As perceived
through the eyes of Robert Beliah and colleagues (p. 86), the
key idea of Lockean individualism is that "we can create the
good life simply by striving for individual comfort and se-
curity, and that by doing so we are indirectly enriching the
lives of those around us." Thus, the American goal is to free
the individual for happiness, by making a "social world that
would serve the self." The authors argue (p. 94), however,
that an "economic idealogy that tums human beings into re-
lentless market maximizers undermines commitments to
family, church, neighborhood, school, and national and larg-