Technological Revolutions In Neil Postman's The World Is Flat

“Change alone is unchanging,” according to Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher (Polito, 2004). This a widely applied idea and is particularly relevant as we discuss the Net Generation’s use of what David Weinberger has called, “social knowledge (Weinberger, 2007).” We are in the midst of a major revolution equal in significance to the industrial revolutions of the past. Author Daniel Pink describes this as a monumental shift from the information age to the conceptual age in his book entitled A Whole New Mind (2006). Journalist Thomas Friedman described a similar shift in his book entitled The World is Flat (2005). Dr. Jay Walker is among those that argue that we can not know anything about this new age we’re entering into because it is unlike any other revolution we have seen in the history of man (Walker, …show more content…
However, Neil Postman claimed that there are five things we definitely can know about technological change (Postman, 1998). To qualify Postman’s proclamation it is necessary to explore the findings of research conducted on the study of previous technological revolutions. Professor Carlotta Perez, in her paper Technological Revolutions and Techno-economic Paradigms, researched five successive technological revolutions and found that technological innovations reveal a pattern in the way they diffuse (Perez, 2009). It is my contention that there is nothing unique about this techno-economic paradigm shift except the innovations. The diffusion patterns that Postman and Perez described will repeat themselves, according to socio-economic patterns, in the conceptual age with the help of the Net Generation in order to form the new infrastructure of information based on social knowledge. The analysis begins with a deconstruction of Dr. Walker’s challenge to all those who speculate about the future of