Neil Postman:


"Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century" (1999)
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Postman is the author of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985), a seminal book about the TV culture of the 20th century. This new book takes issue with the rapid technological progress of the last part of the 20th century, mostly driven by the digitalization of just about everything. Postman is clearly not competent enough to argue about the computer and Internet technologies, so his argument is in general about technological progress. Postman identifies the prophets of the Internet's "information superhighways" with the "hollow men" of T.S. Eliot's poem, people who have lost the meaning of life in their quest for ever more powerful technologies. Postman admits to being an enemy of the 20th century, who three grandest political inventions were fascism, nazism and communism, a century in which humankind developed weapons that can cause its extinction. Since his view is moralistic and not materialistic, he doesn't appreciate the stunning improvement in longevity, comfort and prosperity. The century that he invokes as a model for the future is the 18th century, the century mostly famous for the Enlightenment, the century that invented the modern ideas of "rationalism" (as opposed to superstition, faith, tradition) and "progress" but also, Postman points out, critiqued such progress. Rationalism led to cruel and inhumane theories of society. Rousseau was the first major thinker who reacted to rationalism, championing the superiority of the "romantic" spirit.

Postman points out that we learned "how" to invent things but we forgot to ask "why" we should invent them. Postman argues that we should pose a number of questions when we are confronted with a new technology: "what is the problem that this technology solves?"; "whose problem is it?"; "who will be harmed by this new technology?"; "what new problems will be created by this new technology?"; "who will become more powerful thanks to this new technology?".

In many cases futurists reply that modern technologies improve the speed at which things are done. It is assumed that the time that we save is a precious asset. However, many people spend that extra time watching television, eating junk food, consuming disinformation on the Internet, and sometimes watching pornographic videos. It is debatable if they are better off (and we all are better off) by saving time and spending it on such occupations.

The problem that gets solve by new technologies is sometimes not my problem. For example, the Internet has enabled marketing departments to bombard us with advertising. This solves a problem of the marketing department (how to reach millions of people), not a problem of the average person.

A new technology typically turns many workers into unemployed people, or at least people who have to frantically re-trained themselves.

There is hardly a new technology that hasn't created new problems. Today we can argue that the car, plastic and air conditioning are gigantic problems. Each was invented to solve a problem, but now we are living with the risk of mass climate disasters caused precisely by those "solutions". The Internet was supposed to provide an infinite amount of information, but it has also created an infinite amount of disinformation.

A new technology typically creates a new class of powerful people/institutions/corporations. The big tech companies have been the beneficiaries of the Internet revolution, and in China the Communist Party.

Postman offers a scathing critique of post-modernism, although he never truly explains what post-modernism is. Postman acknowledges that we live in the age of radical historicism, in the age in which there are no absolute truths. However, he thinks that some kind of "transcended narrative" is required to give meaning to our lives. It is not clear what exactly he means by that, but later he advocates a role for "both" science and religion, as long as they both are taken as "narratives", not truths. Later in the book, he argues that ignoring religion would be a serious mistakes and describes the merits of "great religions". The problem of course is that some of us think that "great religions" were fundamentally big lies that led to mass murder, torture, warfare, and assorted horrors.

Postman criticizes the whole "information" culture of the computer age as founded on the wrong premise: in the Enlightenment information was never a simple datum, but had a context and a purpose. Information was given in order to elicit thought or action. I disagree that today is any different (in fact, that's why we have so much "disinformation", precisely because information is generally given to cause opinions and actions), but Postman believes that the telegraph and photography turned information into mere data because they both isolate information from the context instead of telling a story. Postman argues that new technologies have greatly enhanced the speed and the amount of information but we don't know what to do with it. He also claims that more information doesn't solve the big problems of the world, for example starvation. He points at the newspaper, invented in 1711, as a medium that did a lot with very little information: it explained the context, and drew some conclusions from it. He argues that democracy itsels is in danger when we are limited to information: "Democracy depends on public discourse, and therefore the kind and quality of the discourse is of singular importance." I find this very debatable. As any social scientist knows, we can derive a lot of useful insight by analyzing data. Postman himself shows what happens when you don't gather enough data: he repeatedly implies that violence increased in the 20th century but all data say the opposite (see Pinker's book "Better Angels"). Sometimes he is the one trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist: because he doesn't accumulate enough information, he then assumes the wrong context and reaches the wrong conclusions and presumably the wrong prescriptions for how to solve the "problem". He is certainly right when he advocates a transition from information to knowledge and to wisdom, but many of us believe that more information is useful (essential) to create knowledge and then wisdom. We can be misled easily if we don't have enough information and then build precisely the opposite of knowledge and reach precisely the opposite of wisdom. Collecting data is a science, and not an easy one.

Along the way we learn that "America's greatest book" is Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (which i personally wouldn't rank in the top 10). That makes us doubt of how much "information" Postman has gathered in his life.

Postman's appendix on childhood is the least credible of his arguments. He claims that childhood was created by the printed book and the need for learning how to read (and write), and were segregated in schools. I don't think that's historically accurate. Children learned how to read and write faster than their parents, and it was common that children were the only ones in a family able to read and write. He argues that television is erasing childhood because children and adults can watch the same programs, but that's just false: children watch cartoons, adults watch garbage.