Scarcity... Neil Postman's misguided perspective

If the second half of Computers: The Life Story of a Technology was defined by abundance, then the first half of Neil Postman’s Technopoly illustrated scarcity. As a discriminating reader, I find it helpful to due some due diligence on an author when I am engaged in reading any text. And, it wasn’t surprising to discover that Mr. Postman was a college professor. As a forty-something year-old guy returning to college, I find the onslaught by some professors against technology to be somewhat tedious. The waxing poetic about the simpler times of tool-using cultures (20) by Postman is in the same vain. My personal opinion is that this stems from fear. University professors, in the past, could spoon feed their dribble to naïve 20 year-olds who had very little life experience against which they could weigh the theory presented to them within the confines of the university classroom. In the first class I took after my “brief 18-year hiatus,” I heard something in a class of over four hundred students that I knew, from personal experience, to be misinformation. I get the same vibe when reading Postman. The author claims to be a dissenting voice (5) but, I would argue, that he is actually mimicking what many in his profession believe. And, dissenting opinions very rarely reach the insulated world of a college classroom. Postman is afraid of information because now his profession is not in charge of its dissemination.

The very act of seeking information is the essence of the human experience. One of the first things a child learns to do is ask… why? Postman says that, “Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which new technology will take us.”(15) The author apparently wants humans to stop asking questions. What his scarcity, fear-based mind can’t comprehend is that to survive is to rely on constancy, but to change is to grow. The author admits that “history takes a long time” (81) but his fear wants to isolate modernity as negative. A great paradox of the human existence is the fear of change versus the desire to grow and create. In the past which Postman is describing during the first half of the book and apparently where he wants us to stay, there was some security in doing things the same way, but what any forwarding thinking person understands is that the only security that really exists is embracing growth.


Postman references God often in the first half of the book. He often implies that technology has replaced spirituality, or at least is in conflict with it. Somehow he has concluded that penicillin is an alternative to prayer. (54) This is the essence of a scarcity mindset. “In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what,” claims Postman. (58) What he doesn’t and will never understand with a scarcity mindset, is that theology, spirituality, economics and technological innovation are all the same thing. All of these factors contribute to the idea that God has given us the tools to go out and create an abundant life. There is no such thing as a trouble-free world. But, information combined with new technologies will create a better more abundant world for all who embrace, not run from change.