The Idea of Technopoly

3 Stages of the Technology/Culture Relationship

(1)  Tool Use - "technology is not autonomous, and is seen as subject to the control of some binding social or religious system." (83)

(2) Technocracy - tools increase in importance (but are still not treated as autonomous), technology is seen as a means to progress

(3) Technopoly - "submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology." (83)

Postman thinks we live in a Technopoly.

Is he right?

A common way of thinking about technology - technologies are neutral, the uses we make of them are not.

Postman wants to reject the claim that technologies are themselves neutral.

Ideology

Ideology - 'a set of assumptions of which we are barely conscious but which nonetheless directs our efforts to give shape and coherence to the world.' (84)

Language - "Language is pure ideology." (84)

"It instructs us not only in the names of things, but, more important, in which things can be named." (84)

"A question, even of the simplest kind, is not and can never be unbiased." (85)

Are these claims convincing?  Important?

Postman claims that language is an invisible technology.

Invisible Technologies

"Some technologies come in disguise." (90)

Zero
Giving Grades to Papers
Statistics

"They do not look like technologies, and because of that, they do their work, for good or ill, without much criticism or even awareness." (90)

"When a method of doing things becomes so deeply associated with an institution that we no longer know which came first -- the method or the institution -- then it is difficult to change the institution or even to imagine alternative methods for achieving its purposes." (92)

Grading Papers

First instance - Cambridge University - 1792

What effects, good or bad, does this invisible technology have?

How else could we run universities?
 

Statistics

The idea that what can be quantified is what can be known is a tempting one.

Galileo - "the grand book of the universe cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the alphabet in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics."

Statistics allow this idea to operate in new places.

"Statistics makes possible new perceptions and realities by making visible large-scale patterns." (86)

Why is this bad?

"there is nothing to fear from techniques, unless, like so much of our machinery, they become autonomous." (92)

But in a Technopoly, they do just that.  Everything becomes the subject of statistics (without anyone considering whether this is a good thing or not).

3 Problems:

1. Reification - "converting an abstract idea (mostly, a word) into a thing." (87)

E.g., Charles Spearman, in 1904, took a positive statistical correlation amongst the results individuals got on various intelligence tests as a sign that there was such a thing as General Intelligence (g).

The idea of g was reified into a thing.

This idea took hold and provided a theoretical justification for IQ tests.

(Question:  'What do IQ tests measure?  Answer: 'g')

The problem:  there's no good reason (aside from a mathematical correlation) to believe in g.

Just as we should look before we leap, we should look, before we reify.

2. Ranking - what we can quantify, we can rank.

E.g., The idea of g had many concrete effects.

It occurred to many people, that if g existed, then perhaps it could be inherited.

(Notice this thought is only possible because of reification.  Only things can be inherited, not concepts.)

If so, what should we do?

One result:  in the U.S., the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 had the effect of capping immigration from places where the inhabitants were thought to be low in g.

Another:  in the U.K., the 11+ Exams were aimed at finding which children were sufficiently high in g to go on to higher education.

3. False Objectivity - what is numerical is considered objective

But this objectivity can hide subjective judgments.

E.g., Some early intelligence tests were reworked because women tended to score higher on them than men.  (That showed the test was flawed because everyone knows that men are smarter than women, right?)