![]() ![]() There’s even evidence our brains are rewiring to privilege the quick, scanning reading the internet demands over the sequential, focused reading of books and physical texts. Infinite scroll and petabytes of data mean the content never ends, and making sense of it all is difficult. We encounter an unprecedented amount of information in the 21st Century. But it’s in 1997’s Technopoly: The Surrender of the Culture to Technology that he explains the principles and operative logic that allow a technological outlook to truly dominate culture. Postman traces the history that carried us to the edge of A Brave New World's reality in Amusing Ourselves to Death. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. In the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman presents two fearful visions of the future, those of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World. It’s a worthwhile read made all the more enjoyable by Postman’s humour and the many ways it helps explain the rise of the internet and our broken public discourse. ![]() He wrote several books, the best-known being Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), where he surveys the history of media and explores, in particular, the culture shaping power of television. Postman saw a public that seemed to care more about the features of the hand-basket than where it was going, and he sounded the alarm. His main critique wasn’t that society was going to hell in a hand-basket, it was the unwillingness to consider where our choices were leading us. He spent his career as an educator and communications theorist critiquing developments in media, education, and politics. Not the kind that deals in predictions, but one who warns. Chapter 3: From Technocracy to Technopoly ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |