College Lecture Series - Neil Postman - "The Surrender of Culture to Technology"

Why HN readers recommended it

HN recommends it to engineers as a skeptical counterweight to technology boosterism, especially for those building AI and consumer tech features.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

College of DuPage

Topic

technology and culture

Format

lecture

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

5

HN mentions in dataset

5

Recommendation years in dataset

2014–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• I suggest the people working on those features watch Neil Postman's "The Surrender of Culture to Technology": [VIDEO] Part of me is actually excited for the acceleration of the end of the web, I even wrote [LINK] few days ago in frustration. The sooner it …

• There's a related video from a March, 1997 lecture, in which Postman discusses the questions. Though I agree with much of what he says, I also feel he suffered from a bit of failure of imagination in conceiving of what the possible utility of information …

• > Not necessarily more smarts, but better tech means more affordable connectivity and education, and better education too. This is not true. Neil Postman has something to say about this, already in 1996, in "The Surrender of Culture to Technology". It specifically mentions education and …