Five things we need to know about technological change
This week's episode of Modem Futura revisits Neil Postman's influential 1998 talk about understanding and navigating transformative technologies
In March 1998, the Archbishop of Denver hosted an international conference on "The New Technologies and the Human Person: Communicating the Faith in the New Millennium." The meeting, by all accounts, brought together an eclectic group of clergy, theologians, educators, and technology experts concerned with how new media and technological change would affect society and religious faith as the year 2000.1
And one of those speakers was the author and tech critic Neil Postman.
Postman’s presentation at the 1998 NewTech ’98 conference has become something of a touchstone within communities of scholars and practitioners grappling with the intersection between society and emerging technologies. Titled Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change, his talk was inspired by the potential effects of technology on religious faith — especially as the transition to the year 2000 approached. But his message resonates far further than this.
Postman grounds his ideas in “people whom we can trust, and whose thoughtfulness, it's safe to say, exceeds that of President Clinton, Newt Gingrich, or even Bill Gates” (remember, this was 1998) — people like (in Postman’s words) Henry David Thoreau, Goethe, Socrates, Jesus, Isaiah, Mohammad, Spinoza, and Shakespeare.
He also suggested that “I doubt that the 21st century will pose for us problems that are more stunning, disorienting or complex than those we faced in this century, or the 19th, 18th, 17th, or for that matter, many of the centuries before that.”
If he was giving the talk today, I suspect he’d include people like Zuckerburg, Musk and Altman in his list of people whose “thoughtfulness” is exceeded (in some cases by rather a lot) by thinkers from the past.
But I do wonder whether he’d be so confident about how the past reflects the present — especially given the rate of technological change and sociopolitical upheaval we’re currently experiencing.
Despite this though, his “five things” talk is still deeply relevant — perhaps more so now than they were 27 years ago.
Which is why we thought it would be worth doing a deep dive into it in this week’s episode of Modem Futura.
We are, of course, far from the only futures-focused folks to have revisited Postman’s 1998 talk in recent times — a testament to how resilient his insights were. In fact in preparing to write this post I came across an excellent summary of Postman’s talk by our colleague Punya Mishra from a couple of years ago (which, embarrassingly, I hadn’t come across before we recorded).
But given everything that’s currently happening in the world of tech, a revisit seemed more than a little timely.
As always, you can listen to the episode below or on Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
And in case you’re interested in specific parts of the conversation you’re interested in, here are also linked timestamps:
00:00 Cold open, and how to get in touch with us
09:00 Looking back to look forward
09:46 Introduction
11:00 Revisiting Neil Postman’s 1998 Five Things we Need to Know about Technological Change
21:00 Getting distracted by Michael Crichton
23:40 Who was Neil Postman?
24:40 Five Things we Need to Know about Technological Change
25:30 1. All technologies come with tradeoffs
32:55 (Microdosing on AI)
37:42 2. There are winners and losers with all technological advances
44:30 3. All technologies have embedded biases
52:35 4. Technological change has deep systemic impacts
57:15 (Getting distracted again: Doctor Who this time!)
1:00:35 5. Over time technologies take on a “mythic” quality
And as always, a reminder that you can watch us recording this week’s episode on YouTube:
Thanks for listening!
Despite Neil Postman’s talk from this meeting being highly cited and discussed, it’s surprisingly hard to piece together details about the meeting itself. Based on some Google sleuthing and a bit of help from ChatGPT the meeting was hosted Archdiocese of Denver under Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, in collaboration with the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications). The lineup of speakers can be found here, and the link to Archbishop Chaput’s involvement comes from this source.