issue68 求狠拍！

superyfanUID: 2716198

68
"Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."

技术不仅仅影响而且实际上是决定了社会传统和道德规范。

I agree with the speaker that technologies have influenced our social customs and ethics unconsciously. With the development of technologies, it offers us more opportunities to contact with other foreign customs and even we have been affected during this process. Also, the ethics are always being challenged. Nevertheless, even assuming that technologies have brought out such huge change, I still believe that it is human beings not technologies determine these two aspects.

To begin with, the first reason why I fundamentally agree with the speaker is that we have to admit that technologies have exactly influenced our social customs. Technologies attribute to more connections among different countries, which make us much easier to contact customs that we don’t know before. Since people are always curious about foreign things, it is entirely possible that we pay too much attention on such customs and neglect our own conditional customs gradually. For example, in China, we have fallen into an embarrassed situation that foreign festivals such as the Christmas, All Saint’s Day have become more popular than Chinese traditional festivals. People, especially young people, trends to only be interested in celebrating festivals like these. At the same time, Chinese traditional festivals, which are valuable fortunes, however, are facing to be forgotten by national people.

Another reason for my partially agreement is that out ethics have been challenged with the technological advancement. Technologies make the workplace less friendly. But it is not an advantage since Confucius has emphasized the importance of harmony of ethics since old days. The reason for this is the computer’s potential to “deskill” work-to reduce it to sample, repetitive actions. For instance, instead of having each worker in an insurance company record an incoming insurance claim and then stay with it through all phases of processing, the job is broken up: one does nothing but complete the same log-in forms; another grind out identical letters to different addresses. For that matter, colleagues lack communication between each other and thus affect the harmony of the whole company.

However, even if we are passively influenced by technologies on both social customs and ethics, I believe that we have the initiative to determine them finally. Nowadays, people have realized such a phenomenon and are trying to change it. Taking China as the example a second time, China has already make strategies to solve the problem of the less attention on traditional festivals: increasing courses about the education of Chinese social customs, organizing activities in order to give actual experience of customs and the like.

In sum, there is no escaping the fact that the effect of technologies on both social customs and ethics is great and will continue as well in the future. However, under the impact of foreign culture, the problem that how to keep our national culture being carried on well, need everyone consider seriously.