Tumbled Thoughts On American Muslim Life

"It is still both possible and useful to distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives."

— Neil Postman, Technopoly.

"A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God?"

— Neil Postman, Technopoly.

"Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?"

— Neil Postman, Technopoly.

"The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money."

— Neil Postman, Technopoly. I would caution Postman, however, from getting ahead of himself for “it” and “we” have not ended yet. Who can say what further uses the clock will be put to. Or perhaps it will be putout of use.

"To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A— and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson."

— Neil Postman, Technopoly.

"Our psychologists, sociologists, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers. They believe that without numbers they cannot acquire or express authentic knowledge."

— Neil Postman, Technopoly.

"The first instance of grading students’ papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. No one knows much about William Farish; not more than a handful have ever heard of him. And yet his idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality."

— Neil Postman,Technopoly.