Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Das Buch hilft, den eigentlichen Auftrag von Technik wieder ins Gedächtnis zu rufen: dem Menschen zu dienen, das Leben leichter oder Notwendiges möglich zu machen. Technik wird dort ueberfluessig, wo sie um ihrer selbst willen besteht oder wo sich der Mensch der Technik anpaßt oder gar unterordnet -- aktuell zu beobachten zB im Bereich des Mobilfunks oder anderer Drahtlostechniken wie wLAN, Bluetooth, DECT-Schnurlostelefone, wo ohne Ruecksicht auf gesundheitliche Risiken durch Mikrowellenstrahlung irrsinnige Machinerien, Netze und Geräte fuer fragwuerdige, durchweg auch auf risikoloserem technischem Wege zu bearbeitende, Aufgabenstellungen entwickelt werden, die der Lebensqualität und Gesundheit des Menschen schaden. Doch auch auf anderen Gebieten sind technische Spielereien ueberfluessig, selbst wenn sie nicht gesundheitsgefährdend sind. Neil Postmans Buch regt zum Nachdenken ueber solche Themen an.

Trotz seines theoretischen und sehr weit ausholeneden Ansatzes gibt Postman durch "Technopoly" sogar auch Antworten auf sehr konkrete Fragen des Alltags, die sich jeder auf Grundlage der Lektuere von "Technopoly" selbst erarbeiten kann.

"Technopoly" ist damit ein weiteres sehr lesenswertes Werk des großen Zeitgeist-Kritikers und Kultur-"Analysten" Neil Postman.

Sociologist Max Weber warned almost 100 years ago of an alarming tendency in western civilization to displace our tradition-based religious cultural ethos with a dangerously superficial "faux" rationality in which all decisions and all measures would come to be made more and more exclusively by scientific and logical means. Yet science by its very nature cannot answer questions dealing with values, advising us as to what is right, or good, or best. It can only speak to us in terms of effective and efficient means to achieve such cultural values and social ends. It is this tension between a human-oriented cultural ethos, on the one hand, and scientific progress through technological innovation not so oriented on the other that is Mr. Postman's real subject.

Mr. Postman understands that science and technology are both our friends and our antagonists, and as our amigo the Unabomber has pointed out, what technical innovation introduces as "voluntary and optional" soon becomes "compulsory and obligatory", as did the introduction of automobiles and traffic regulation. In this fashion, by flooding our social, economic, and political environment with items and objects that drive the nature of society as much as enhance it (can anyone now doubt that the introduction of personal computers poses such a double-bind?), we are radically changing the nature of our society and its culture without benefit of any guiding values, precepts, or notions as to what is best for our people and our community other than to allow frenzied competition between technological rivals to see who can unlease the latest/neatest technological innovation to make our lives easier or entertain us more cleverly. Our direction in terms of progress seems to be random, at best, and Postman argues most persuasively that there are hidden dangers to our freedoms, our prosperity, and even our awareness that result from this surrender to the indifferent impulses of technological innovation. We best recognize this indifference and the dangers it poses for a free and open society.

As author Sales Kirkpatrick notes in his wonderful book "Rebels Against the Future", "technology is never neutral"; it carries out its exclusively rational and logical intent to its conclusion. Yet often the fact that this conclusion is not necessarily in the public interest or consistent with the long-term goals and aspirations of our culture seems somehow irrelevant. Yet it is anything but irrelevant; it is central to the question as to how critically important decisions regarding our future and well-being are to be made, and on what basis. Will we have a society in which such decisions are made through open debate in a public forum, or one in which the decisions are made for us, based on market projections, what can be sold and distributed, researched based on its sales potential in anonymous test tubes and clinical labs, where the latest in scientific certainty is readied for pandemic public introduction? Time is growing short and we must soon decide. This is a fascinating, provocative, and important book. Read it!