That Postman essay was really quite thoughtful, perhaps you should submit it as its own post. More specifically, he said that the printing press destroyed the: This seems like a valid point to me. People in this very thread have spoken about how great they think it is that they can look up tidbits of information with no context or meaning whenever they want. You may think that's great too. Good for you, but Postman thinks that this may have significant effects on society, and not all of those effects are necessarily good ones:[Postman said] that the printing press has destroyed social interaction and community in the medieval sense.
... coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.
Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.
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.
I can't find the argument you appear to be responding to in the essay you linked to. However, technological determinism shouldn't be wholly dismissed. It may describe only one aspect of technology, but you can't argue that technology doesn't alter society, nor can you argue that the maintenance and support of that technology doesn't require many, if not most, of us to spend an astonishing amount of time, energy, and resources ensuring that everything our technologies require is provided to them. So it would certainly seem that technology is at least one significant factor which drives our social structures and cultural values. I'm afraid that my reading of the essay was much more like Wikipedia's description of it: In any event, the article originally posted was bemoaning the extent to which Americans pay attention to their phones instead of their environment and each other. I've noticed the same phenomenon and worry about where our technology might be leading us.Market forces and social and business demands drove the creation of such devices, and not, as Postman might have argued, the other way around.
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.
He also compares contemporary society to the Middle Ages, where instead of individuals believing in anything told to them by religious leaders, now individuals believe everything told to them by science, making people more naive than in Middle Ages. Individuals in a contemporary society, one that is mediated by technology, could possibly believe in anything and everything, whereas in the Middle Ages the populace believed in the benevolent design they were all part of and there was order to their beliefs.
It is an interesting and well-thought out essay, but while I emphatically agree with the second passage you quoted, I question what it means in the first one for those in the Middle Ages to have "known" where they came from, were going, and why. Can we call this "knowledge" true? He makes statements that their worldview was ordered and comprehensible, and that the inflow of information from the printing press muddled and unraveled things. I say that it is vital to be able to filter all the input we get today, but having a limited amount of input is not the same thing. He says, "there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable." So regardless of what the information was, it had value. I don't like that. Information needs to stand on its own merits, or be filtered out. He states that Galileo and Kepler disturbed folks' faith concerning their place in the universe with the heliocentric model. They also revealed truth to us.