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The Limits of Technology

Technology is a Poor Substitute for Everything

My original one-line review of Neil Postman's book Technopoly was: If you have a computer or a phone, or have ever used one, read this book.

I guess you could say I liked it. Get Technopoly here.

Technopoly tells us that technology has an inherent viewpoint, a 'take' on reality. More unsettling is that Postman argues we adopt the viewpoint of the technology we use. Modern American society has been wholly taken into technological development and wholly sapped of social mores and the traditions that uphold them (and counter technology's utilitarianism).

Religion and liberal education have been replaced by bureaucracy and science. God and learning have been replaced by efficiency and progress. Postman is less interested with renewing the vigor of God and learning than with remarking on what's lost in this exchange.

Postman called the computer a "quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect" technology for making al of human life and culture subordinated to the tool. And this was before the computer could fit in your pocket and was your ever-present companion. He thought that the computer's technical superiority to the human brain would help it become sovereign over human experience. And it did.

How to Recognize that Technology Has Limits

As my weekly email has attempted to demonstrate for a few years, simply showing where technology breaks down is a vital start. When baseball added instant video replay to its century-old game, apparently few people thought of the downside: video-enabled cheating. And yet, that cheating almost instantly became a major factor in the game. This wasn't just an error of judgment (although it was), it was an error of trusting the technologists.

Beyond showing its foibles, understanding the limits of technology means rejecting that more technology is the solution. We need to respect the human being. To me, this means not using a phone app to track whether we use phone apps too much. It means not relying on the next software update to fix our behavior problems. As a technology solutions consultant, this is a challenge! But the most impactful work I can do happens when I work with the people, the business processes, and the underlying reality. The worst work I can do ignores those and focuses on the buttons people can click to do their work.

Put Technology in Its Place

How do we live in a technopoly world? Jon Ward, a writer I've long followed, wrote a little guide to "how to stay sane in the age of too much information." His advice is in the context of a rage-inducing political news media, but I think it works in the context of a culture driven by tech.

Tech pushes us to consume, react, and move on. Jon's ideas are the opposite:

1. The 24-hour rule: wait roughly a day before reacting to any piece of news with any strong reaction or opinion.
2. Pick one thing and become an expert on that one issue or area.
3. Make time for beauty.

Read the rest of Jon Ward's "Survival Guide for Normal People" here.