Informing Ourselves To Death
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Informing Ourselves To Death
By Neil Postman
The following speech was given at a meeting of the German<br>Informatics Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990<br>in Stuttgart, sponsored by IBM-Germany.
The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard<br>Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the<br>common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades --<br>physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists -- protect their special<br>status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the<br>general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding<br>what the profession is doing and why -- and protects the insiders from<br>close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build<br>forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and<br>alien eye cannot see.
Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for<br>I consider myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical<br>gobbledegook as much as anyone. But I do not object if occasionally<br>someone who does not know the secrets of my trade is allowed entry to<br>the inner halls to express an untutored point of view. Such a person<br>may sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even better, see something<br>in a way that the professionals have overlooked.
I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just<br>such a purpose. I do not know very much more about computer<br>technology than the average person -- which isn't very much. I have<br>little understanding of what excites a computer programmer or<br>scientist, and in examining the descriptions of the presentations at<br>this conference, I found each one more mysterious than the next. So,<br>I clearly qualify as an outsider.
But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but<br>an outsider who has a point of view that might be useful to the<br>insiders. And that is why I accepted the invitation to speak. I<br>believe I know something about what technologies do to culture, and I<br>know even more about what technologies undo in a culture. In fact, I<br>might say, at the start, that what a technology undoes is a subject<br>that computer experts apparently know very little about. I have heard<br>many experts in computer technology speak about the advantages that<br>computers will bring. With one exception -- namely, Joseph Weizenbaum<br>-- I have never heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about<br>the disadvantages of computer technology, which strikes me as odd, and<br>makes me wonder if the profession is hiding something important. That<br>is to say, what seems to be lacking among computer experts is a sense<br>of technological modesty.
After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows<br>that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology<br>giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A<br>new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it<br>destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.
The invention of the printing press is an excellent example.<br>Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed<br>the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing<br>created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of<br>expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed<br>religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing<br>assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made<br>patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion.
Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor<br>some groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for<br>example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by<br>television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as<br>balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press. Technological<br>change, in other words, always results in winners and losers.
In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that<br>the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like<br>military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax<br>collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now<br>indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural<br>sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage<br>to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners,<br>teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick...