Neil Postman Quotes

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.

Warfare evolves. It changes as a result of technology. It changes as the culture changes.

Technologies are political; what technologies finally appear as is not something decided in a laboratory.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

I don't feel sentimental about the past, but I can't help noticing how hard it has become to keep a grip on anything. Maybe it's the totalizing impact of corporate culture, maybe it's the atomizing impact of technology.

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

Introducing a technology is not a neutral act--it is profoundly revolutionary. If you present a new technology to the world you are effectively legislating a change in the way we all live. You are changing society, not some vague democratic process. The individuals who are driven to use that technology by the disparities of wealth and power it creates do not have a real choice in the matter. So the idea that we are giving people more freedom by developing technologies and then simply making them available is a dangerous illusion.

iPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

[The blame for the future 'plight of civilization] must rest on scientific men, equally with others, for being incapable of accepting the responsibility for the profound social upheavals which their own work primarily has brought about in human relationships.

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: 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. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.

Technology changes nothing.

Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.

It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called "progress" to alter our lives without attempting to control it-as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.

A deep analysis judges technology morally - from its conception and intention to the totality of its consequences, knowing that all "raw materials" once were someone's home or sustenance, that extraction and manufacture at industrial scale reduce landscapes and their human beings, that distribution, employment, and disposal of technologies change lives in unpredictable ways.

The world is not bound to get better as a result of new discoveries in science and technology, nor is it bound to get worse, there will simply be new opportunities for making it better or worse.

It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.

A friend of mine said that when Barack Obama was running for president, there was a whole generation of white kids who are used to looking up to a black person center stage speaking. And that's because of hip-hop. So there was no adjustment. A person of color in authority at times is very startling to people. But as time goes on, it becomes less startling.

Resistance is always possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a technological culture.

Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.