Technological Change

Excerpt from Five Things the Church Needs to Know About Technological Change | Between Two Worlds

In 1998 Neil Postman delivered a lecture on his five ideas about technological change.

First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

John Dyer--the web guy behind Best Commentaries and Dallas Theoloogical Seminary's website--runs the blog Don't Eat the Fruit, where he's recently been exploring Postman's lecture as it relates to church life and spirituality:

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