Technopoly pgs 93-199

The second half of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman explains how our culture has wonderful resources when it comes to technology but the resources are used in negative ways.  He explains how the medical industry could easily be used to keep us healthier but instead its allowing us to be unhealthy by knowing that we can just get our health problems fixed later on in life.  The next chapter discusses the idea that different technologies help encourage different forms of thinking but our culture ignores this and uses certain technologies with wrong form of thinking.  The next point brought up was the fact that symbols do not effect people like they used to since we have become so desensitized to them through commercialism in technology.  Postman ends the book by admitting that he mostly just lists problems without addressing possible solutions, but then explains that his point was to help people distance themselves from the technology thought process so we could then criticize and modify it.

Postman brings up a very important idea about how technology has allowed our culture to become lazy.  Instead of helping us advance and become better people it has made it possible to indulge in the present guilt free and then fix it later using technology.  The best example explaining this was when Postman talked about the increase in heart bypass surgeries and how common they have become in America.  Instead of using technology to allow us to become healthier, we allow ourselves to become unhealthy guilt free knowing its possible to fix ourselves later. Postman blames technology mostly when even he is willing to see the potential in new technological developments that are being abused by the people using them.  Postman even explains how technology is abused because of a lack of understanding of the thought process involved with each piece of technology.  In American culture we seem to want to use the same devices for everything.  We use television to educate and for down time, and we seem to try to use the computer to do pretty much everything.  Postman's main point pertaining to this is that just because the technology is there does not mean we should use it for everything.  One odd point that Postman makes is that through technology we have become desensitized to symbols.  I do not think this is such a bad thing.  This means that people in American culture are so used to seeing symbols along with things that we have finally realized we can not judge things at face value and have become willing to look deeper.  I do not know why Postman would view this as negative since he himself does not want to view technological advancements as what people present to him.