Technology’s Shadow
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, chained prisoners are so used to seeing the world as shadows projected on an outer wall that they distrust any other view. Those carrying the shadow-producing objects name them in a way to cause the prisoners to believe the voices are coming from the shadows themselves.
With technology being so ubiquitous, it appears that we only see the world through the shadows and sounds of our screens. The iPhone was launched in 2007. Eighteen years later, few people walk down the street looking at the trees or other people; our eyes are glued to the screen of the personal computer in our hand.
In this way we are no different than the prisoners in Plato’s Cave. In the allegory, freedom was suspect, just as freedom from the shackles of our screens is suspect today.
The first quarter of the 21st century is behind us, and technology has changed our world traumatically. Perhaps it’s time to linger in the rearview mirror to reflect on how technology has changed us and identify the characteristics of technology that have caused these changes.
Neil Postman delivered a speech, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” in 1998 to a gathering of theologians and religious leaders in Denver, Colorado. Only five years away from his untimely passing at the age of 72, this speech was the culmination of “thirty years of studying the history of technological change.” He offered the speech’s ideas as “the sort of things everyone who is concerned with cultural stability and balance should know.” Each one of his “Five Things” is offered not as negative criticism, but more of a reality check, a realisation of the consequences of technology, no matter the technology. They are a surprising gift to us, and most relevant to our current moment of reflection.
“Idea Number One,” states Postman, “is that culture always pays a price for technology.”
Postman ascertained that “…technological change is a trade-off…Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may well exceed in the importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost.”
This may seem simple, but perhaps not so simple when you watch people panic if their cell phone is not immediately within reach. Postman forecast this conundrum. When he discusses the glowing enthusiasm for the wonder of a computer, he states, “You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of technology, the greater will be its negative consequences.”
“Perhaps the best way I can express this idea,” said Postman, “is to say that the question, “What will a new technology do?” is no more important than the question, “What will a new technology undo?” So, while we carry a cellphone with 100,000 times the processing power of the Apollo moonshot Guidance Computer, we rarely stop to smell the flowers. We prefer to look at them on our screens.
This leads Postman to his second idea: “that the advantages and disadvantages of new technology are not distributed evenly among the population. This means that every technology benefits some and harms others.”
Postman expands on this by asking “who specifically benefits from the development of a new technology?” It is a boon to large-scale organizations, like the military, tax collectors, banks or airlines, but to “what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people?” Our private matters are now made accessible to these large organizations. We are being tracked and manipulated. We are reduced to “mere numerical objects.” And for those people who do not have access, they are left out of society, which hums along on the matrix. Even those who have access may not know how to use it effectively enough to conduct day to day activities, like basic financial tasks, and are subjected to harassing spam and disinformation.
Technology was once seen as the great leveler. However, our dependency on technology has become exclusionary; it exacerbates disparities. Those who are not “in the system” do not, to all intents and purposes, exist.
“Embedded in every technology is a powerful idea,” goes Postman’s third idea, “These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But that this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.”
In essence, Postman is saying that “every technology has a prejudice.” It is not neutral or benign. It has a predisposition. “To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data.”
“The third idea then”, clarifies Postman, “is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendences it disregards.”
Technology is curating the world for us, through its own biased lens. The more we get our reality from screens, the more we enter the reality of the screens. They literally change us and how we see the world, precisely because we only see the world through the screens, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave.
Postman’s fourth idea is perhaps his most insightful. “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological… a new medium does not add something; it changes everything.” When the printing press was invented in 1500, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press, you had a new Europe.
“The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible,” which is why we must be cautious about technological innovation.
As we stand on the precipice of the next quarter century, we may wish to look over our shoulders, to look back, to be nostalgic for the good ol’ aughts, or even the 1960’s, but there is no going back. We must jump.
Postman points out that the greatest influence in education was not John Dewey, but “the quiet men, in grey suits in a suburb of New York City called Princeton, New Jersey. There, they developed and promoted the technology known as the standardized test, such as the IQ test, the SATs, the GREs. Their tests redefined what we mean by learning and have resulted in our reorganizing the curriculum to accommodate the tests.” And our education system has been irrevocably changed.
Similarly, from his vantage point, television transformed “political discourse into a form of entertainment” … in order “to make television into a vast and unsleeping money machine.” It has been said many times that our politics have been lessened by the sound bite, now it is reduced to “verb noun” on the internet.
Finally, Postman, in his fifth idea, points out that technology tends to become “mythic.” In the sense used by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes, there is a “common tendency to think of our technical creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things.” Being part of the natural order means that we take it for granted, as though it were always there, part of the landscape, like a rock or a tree. Of course, neither rock nor tree is permanent.
During Postman’s time, Bill Gates was seen as the tech-God, delivering the tablets from the mount. Imagine what he would think of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg…
Hence, Postman warns. “When a technology becomes mythic, it is dangerous because it is then accepted as it is and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control.”
Technology controls us. We do not control technology. The first rule in Timothy Snyder's “On Tyranny” is “Do not obey in advance.” Yet, we do. “Our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute,” said Postman.
We know that now. Or do we?
Socrates explains that the philosopher is like a prisoner freed from the cave, who sees the shadows for what they are. The philosopher wants us to see the world as it is, not as shadows and sounds. Neil Postman is that philosopher. He wants us to see how technological change has created a world of shadows and sounds that we now falsely take as real.
Will we take up his challenge or turn our heads back to the screens and remain prisoners?
“We pay a price for technology,” Postman cautioned, “The greater the technology, the greater the price.” There are always winners and losers, the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Every technology is biased, yet it changes everything, forever. And it is mythic, which means it tends to control our lives.
Postman’s “Five Ideas” may help us reflect on the technological changes of the past quarter century. They may even prepare us for the next 25 years. And going forward, like the laws of physics, the ideas may not change; even though technology will. Most importantly, reflection on his “Five Ideas” may help us unshackle ourselves, so we can see the world as it is, and perhaps, just perhaps, slip out from under technology’s shadow.