Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. Lessons for Digital Marketing in 2025
Here is how Neil Postman’s famous talk “Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change" translate into the world of digital marketing and design in 2025.
This is a handout I designed for my students in the course Digital Marketing and Social Media at the New Media Design program, class of 2025. I’ve used Neil Postman’s famous talk “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” (1998) source here as a starting point.
I teach future designers, marketers, and web developers, but the lessons are relevant for anyone trying to understand how technology shapes our world. Postman’s insights remind us that technology is never neutral. It doesn’t just give us new tools; it reshapes how we think, how we work, and how society organizes itself.
Here’s how Postman’s five lessons translate into the world of digital marketing and design in 2025.
1. All technological change is a trade-off
We always pay a price for technology. Greater technology usually means a greater price. Every gain comes with a loss, some benefits accrue, while others diminish.
With AI, for instance, we save time. But we also risk losing learning.
You cannot let AI do the workout for you if you want to be fit. And you cannot let AI do your schoolwork for you if you want to actually learn.
The trade-off is always there. The question is whether we see it—or whether we choose to look away.
2. Technology giveth and taketh away
Every new technology arrives unevenly. It creates winners and losers, advantages and disadvantages. While some groups gain efficiency, visibility, or profit, others are displaced or marginalized. Importantly, the people who lose out are often those who feel the strongest need to rationalize the technology’s benefits, convincing themselves that the trade-offs are worth it, even when the costs fall directly on them.
Designers and marketers are not exempt from this dynamic. The professions will not disappear, but their numbers will shrink as automation and AI take over tasks that were once the core of their craft: generating copy, producing visuals, and running campaigns. What remains will be more strategic, interpretive, and creative work; the kind that requires judgment and human nuance.
So, while there will be designers and marketers in the future, the demand will be concentrated in fewer roles, with higher expectations for those who remain. This is not a universal positive outcome, but rather a redistribution: some will thrive in these leaner, more specialized positions, while others will be forced to pivot or exit.
3. Every technology has a hidden bias
Every technology embeds a hidden bias. It privileges some practices and ways of thinking while pushing others to the margins.
In 2025, digital marketing and design technologies favor speed, measurability, and scale. Campaigns are structured around what can be tracked, optimized, and automated, which privileges short-term metrics (clicks, conversions, impressions) over slower, less tangible goals like trust, cultural meaning, or brand depth.
This hidden bias means that:
Creativity is shaped by algorithms. Designers and marketers are nudged to produce content that performs well within platform logics, favoring formats that can be A/B tested and optimized, rather than open-ended or experimental ideas.
Relationships risk being reduced to data points. Customers are understood primarily through their digital footprints, which favors transactional interactions over holistic understanding.
Homogenization increases. Automated design tools and AI-generated content can make outputs efficient, but also more uniform, privileging what “works at scale” rather than what stands out.
Just as the printing press elevated written text over oral culture, today’s digital marketing infrastructure elevates efficiency, standardization, and quantification over slower, more human-centered forms of persuasion.
For marketers and designers in 2025, this means they must be conscious of the bias built into their tools: they are not neutral. Choosing to work within - or against - those biases is itself a strategic and ethical decision.
4. Technological change is ecological, not additive
A new technology never enters a neutral space. It doesn’t just sit on top of what came before; it reshapes the whole system.
When the printing press arrived, it didn’t simply mean “the same Europe, plus books.” It reorganized religion, education, politics, and even how people thought about truth and authority. The environment itself changed.
The same holds for media technologies in our time. The arrival of television didn’t eliminate radio, it forced radio to reinvent itself around music, immediacy, and the intimacy of the voice. Instagram didn’t erase Facebook, it transformed what Facebook was for, pushing it toward community groups, events, and different age demographics.
So, the key lesson is: new technologies don’t necessarily kill old ones; they redefine the ecosystem. Each medium finds a new niche, often by amplifying what it can do uniquely well. In marketing and design, this means you can’t think in terms of simple replacement (“TikTok will kill everything else”). Instead, you have to understand how each platform reshapes the environment, changes user expectations, and forces older technologies to adapt.
In 2025, marketers operate in these overlapping environments. The question is not “which channel survives?” but “how does each channel evolve when a new one enters the scene?”
5. Technology tends to become mythic
Over time, technologies lose their status as human inventions and start to feel like part of the natural order. Once something becomes mythic, its costs and biases are obscured.
Digital marketing is often treated as the universal answer to organizational problems: “we just need a better campaign, more data, better targeting.” In schools, digitalization is increasingly spoken of as if it will solve every challenge, from grading to personalized learning.
The danger of mythic thinking is that it blinds us to alternatives. We stop asking: What are we giving up? Who is excluded? What values are embedded in the system?
For marketers and educators in 2025, the challenge is to resist the myth—to remember that technology is a tool created by humans, not a destiny. Its outcomes depend on how we choose to design, regulate, and use it.
Final thought
Neil Postman gave his talk in 1998, but his warnings feel sharper than ever in 2025. If there’s one takeaway for my students, and for anyone working with digital technology, it’s this: technology always gives and takes away. It transforms environments, hides biases, and becomes mythic if we stop questioning it.
The job of a designer, marketer, or developer is not only to use these tools well, but to see clearly what they make possible, and what they make impossible.