Technopoly (Part One)

Technopoly (Part One)

It was easy for me to agree with many of Postman's thoughts from his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I would classify myself as a person who knows the history of technology, understand the roles it's had in society and know how to use it (and not be abused by it). With that said, control of technology and the information it involves is what keeps a technology-using society from becoming a technocracy or technopoly. However, we're losing control over the information we have access to on the internet.

In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Postman talked about information glut. Information glut is information overload. Information glut is the idea that there is so much information available that information has become garbage and barely useful.

Let's take a look at some facts about the internet from Penn Olson:

From this infographic, I can surmise that with all the information available on the internet, most of it is garbage. First of all, the internet has so much information that it's practically too big to measure. Second, the internet has more information than any one human brain can retain -- there is one million times more information on the internet than any one person can keep in their memory. Then, there are some statistics about e-mail: 81% of e-mails are spam. There are also statistics on how the internet is used. Those numbers support the idea of information glut. 

I believe that humans place too much emphasis on the importance of information. We see any kind of information as being "good" or "important". The more you know, the better you'll be... right? Not when the information is garbage...