The Purpose: To numb our brains with essays written by a scarily pessimistic and pretentious author who likes to torture his readers with extreme run-on sentences.
The Book: Technopoly, by Neil Postman, above said pessimistic pretentious man.
What I think: I think that Technopoly is a fine collection of essays, and if read in small doses, would be very enjoyable. However, being not having had that experience with it, I’d have to say that this has been one of the least enjoyable reading experiences of my school life... Long winded and self-important, this book is as dry as its cover makes it out to be. The few parts that I enjoyed were short, very far-between, and not highly important to his main ideas. I think my favorite part was the first two paragraphs of “The Great Symbol Drain”, in which he describes two advertisements, one real, one fictional, but frighteningly plausible. My least favorite part? The entire chapter (possibly chapters) that he devoted to bashing sociology, and social sciences, writing them off as useless. This seemed an uninformed and, honestly, stupid conclusion to draw. These things are anything but useless! They serve a surprisingly large portion of the population, and are only depended upon (he despises “dependency”, and often mistakes it with “addiction”) because they are so useful and in modern day life. However, although I mainly disagree with him, I think that his ideas have a lot of basis in reality! They aren't actually that ridiculous, but the way that he describes them, with such an extreme and unrealistic attitude, make me want to cry and tear the pages from their spine.
Good, good.
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