Amusing Ourselves to Death - Technology: Friend or Foe

Technology: Friend or Foe They are many arguments that can be made as to what technology has done to our society, but the one argument postman would make is that it has made us into robots. The technological development that have ensued in the last 25 years, seem to be thought of as the greatest things that ever happened to man, but is it still the friend we once knew or has it become the foe that will ruin us. The dependency we place on our phones and computers forces us to use little to no thought or brain activity. So, if postman could see us now he would think we were obviously robots and our phones, computers, and the internet were our controllers. If postman really could have predicted the future of what society would become and the technological dependencies we would be facing and are facing today; he would be shocked to find that he was eerily correct. As an observer and to support the arguments that technology is our friend, postman would say that some of the many accomplishments of today's age are possible because of the technology we have. But one could also support the argument that technology is our foe because it does all the work for us, requiring us to do almost nothing. In the text Postman quotes, Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, remarked in his acceptance speech in Stockholm that our age is characterized by a “refusal to remember”; he cited, among other things, the shattering fact that there are now more than one hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place. (137) Postman elaborates on this saying that, “We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis—a theory, a vision, a metaphor—something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such