{"id":913,"date":"2008-05-02T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-02T23:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=913"},"modified":"2008-05-04T18:50:52","modified_gmt":"2008-05-05T00:50:52","slug":"postman-on-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2008\/05\/postman-on-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Postman on technology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">I<\/span> recently came across <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mat.upm.es\/~jcm\/neil-postman--five-things.html\" target=\"_blank\">this brief essay<\/a> from the late, great <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bigbrother.net\/~mugwump\/Postman\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold\">Neil Postman<\/span><\/a>. You might enjoy it. His five conclusions below.<span id=\"fullpost\"><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price.<\/p>\n<p>Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not.<\/p>\n<p>The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on.<\/p>\n<p>Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates [<em>Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.<\/em>].<\/p>\n<p>And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently came across this brief essay from the late, great Neil Postman. You might enjoy it. His five conclusions below. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[217],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-techno"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}