Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

TL;DR — Postman’s 1998 Denver talk: every technology is a trade-off, its benefits are unevenly shared, it carries a philosophy, it changes everything, and it becomes mythic.

A five-page talk delivered in Denver on March 28, 1998, hosted on Bret Victor’s reference shelf. Postman gives his five ideas for thinking about any new technology, condensing the argument of Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death into one lecture.

What it is: a talk transcript. Short, and probably the most-cited summary of Postman’s thinking.

Where this came from

• r/obscurePDFs post, March 2019 — “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change by Neil Postman”. Routing record: The obscurePDFs Subreddit

5 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.