Technopoly

The excerpt from Technopoly by Neil Postman's had both radical ideas and some that I could really stand behind. His ideas such as “Money, not land was the key to wealth” for that era this was a revolutionary idea. Since before then the thinking was that if you had land you had power and essentially wealth to go along with it, this was the start to the idea of technopoly. The idea that if you had a society where there is free thinking and enlightenment rather than religious customs or a culture that has been set long ago on how things should be run. The more efficient you are with your work, the lower cost on making your product and this a cheaper price you can sell them for and that is how you could control wealth and society. There was an instance in the chapter where in the early 1900’s the train company requested to raise their charges because they could not pay their workers an adequate amount to keep the train company a float. But in the hearing they brought up Frederick Winslow Taylor’s idea of increasing the efficiently of society and the outcome was that there was no reason to raise the rates because they had the potential to be a very wealthy company. Taylor’s idea of efficiently saved this company and made his life very prosperous as well. This idea of Technopoly is the idea that technology has taken over the industries in America and the hand made personal touch has been replaces with machines. In reading this chapter I had a sense that this technopoly could not be reversed. Machines will only be more and more common and society will fall into the era of technology as being the sole creator if goods in American and the world.