Season 4: May "Book Lunch" “Technopoly” by Neil Postman

Thanks to all who joined us for our recent Book Lunch" livestream featuring a book from 1992 by the late Neil Postman called “Technopoly”. We loved your insightful thoughts and questions. I took the deep dive into one of the last great polemical works on culture and technology - Neil Postman's Technopoly. I situate Postman as one of the greatest examples of New York Jewish intellectual life of the twentieth century more generally, as well as possessing totally unique perspective on what technology can and can't do in particular. More on this recent livestream event, here: This “Book Lunch” will feature a book from 1992 by the late Neil Postman called “Technopoly”. At once a humanities and liberal arts based and informed historical survey of attitudes towards technology in the United States as well as a cultural polemic, rereading it in our current moment makes it is some ways a book that could have been written his very month even - as its examples are incredibly "dated" in a technical sense. I will do the deep dive into Technopoly, the title word being Postman's neologism for a new kind of totalitarianism, one where machines rather than we humans would be in charge. I situate the author's attitudes and perspectives within the context of the legacy of Marshall McLuhan in particular and the liberal artsand humanities in general, the latter being in many respects the foundation of our very podcast. #booklunch #techopoly #NeilPostman #author #amwriting #mitchhampton #podcasts