Quotes About Technology

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything".

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.

We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.

Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear.

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. No

Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.

In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.

Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

What's wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies

Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.

But statistics, like any other technology, has a tendency to run out of control, to occupy more of our mental space than it warrants, to invade realms of discourse where it can only wreak havoc. When it is out of control, statistics buries in a heap of trivia what is necessary to know.

Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.

I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words "The computer shows …" or "The computer has determined …" It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is God's will," and the effect is roughly the same.

There was a time when educators became famous for providing reasons for learning; now they become famous for inventing a method.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

television can be used to support the literate tradition.