I understand the quote about the double-edged nature of technology, I've seen it many times. And I don't disagree - I'm not so blinded in my enthusiasm for technological progress that I can't recognize its faults, large and small. My issue is with what he regards as faults, and I find him to have an often overwhelmingly negative view of science and technology.

In response to his suggestion that "We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why," I submit that they didn't know either. In fact, I would argue that we know rather more than our Medieval counterparts. The spread of information has dramatically increased our knowledge, our health, and our human rights and liberties, and in fact without the invention of the printing press, many of us would not be aware that we had a choice of these things. By that quote, it seems to me that Postman is suggesting he looks back, with great nostalgia and envy, at a time when we were forced to ignorantly accept whatever we were told, with absolutely no recourse for informing ourselves.

I also know that Postman suggests the printing press was only another tool of the elite to find new ways to force their views, en masse, upon the populace, and took away things like poetry and turned them into the art of the high-class. I simply do not see evidence for that, especially when you consider that Paine's Common Sense and Marx's Communist Manifesto, among many, many other revolutionary documents, have been (and still are) in fact printed and distributed.

It would take me a full night and many pages to fully and properly respond to his speech here. For brevity, I will argue against his core position. Postman's work mostly serves to point out flaws in how we, as humans, use our technology, and then, seemingly, he lays the blame on that technology, as though every inventor would regret seeing what became of their creations. He is a technological determinist, meaning that he thinks that technology "drives the development of its social structure or cultural values," or put another way, puts technology first as the main controlling factor of society. I can't help but disagree, and see more that our society and economic forces mold the technology we create to better fit the goals of our lives. For example, smartphones developed when there became a demand for multi-purpose devices - a swiss-army knife of electronics. Market forces and social and business demands drove the creation of such devices, and not, as Postman might have argued, the other way around.