Technopoly

I just finished reading Neil Postman's Technopoly today. It was a very interesting read. It was also required read for Human Situations II with Dr. Garner this fall. Mr. Postman had a unique way of writing circles around what he wanted to say without actually saying it. What his message basically boils down to is that we are living in a society where unchecked technological progress has destroyed the moderating forces of religion and politics, replacing it instead with the worship and proliferation of unfiltered information.

If you combine this book's message with George Orwell's message in 1984, you have a very scary situation on your hands. A situation where information is the god that man worships, and whichever man has the greatest ability to manipulate information has the greatest potential to wield an authoritarian control over people's lives. Postman shares a lot of his ideas over the technical control of language with Orwell, such as its ability to limit the realm of people's thoughts. They both believe that a word like truth becomes warped in its meaning with the progress of society and that information glut has the power to change people's concepts of truth and by consequence, reality.

I still have to read Michael Crichton's Prey and Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution for this class. I have the feeling it will be one of the highlights of my next semester. I begin Prey tonight.