ISSUE 88 求拍，前三链接必回

毛毛天虫UID: 2997563

88. "Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."
求各位猛拍

Advanced technologies have promoted people’s daily life and have pushed our society forward in the past decades during when many human customs and ethics have changed. People tend to believe technology play a decisive role in changing these customs and ethics. However, technologies are just one of the factors contributing to the change of customs and ethics. Some essential factors may be ignored. Thus, I believe technologies simply have influence on customs and ethics instead of determining these customs.

To start with, advanced technologies bring some innovations to society, enriching people’s life and changing people’s understanding and awareness of objective world. Ethics and customs are some disciplines needed for people to deal with others or to adapt themselves to a certain environment. These ethics and customs reflect the general situation of society. And technologies, regarded as an effective way to improve people’s life, often propel society forward thus change the general situation of society. So development of technologies is likely to have impact on social ethics and customs. For example, a few centuries ago, students who studied in the university abroad or far away from hometown used to communicate with parents by letters. While, students in today’s global universities prefer to chart with family members by instant massager, for example MSN and written-letters have been treated as something used in the time of Shakespeare. Therefore, social customs and ethics are gradually changing with the development of technologies.

However, customs and ethics are often determined by regional environment and culture. Living in a certain natural environment, native people have to develop many habits to adapt themselves in the environment and have to consider some methods to make the best of natural resources. These habits and methods gradually evolved into customs over a long time. At the same time, people’s understanding of nature, awareness of human beings and feelings about life all developed into national culture, which accounts the detail of ethics for native people. Even though technologies provide many innovations for a certain nation, the essential parts of the culture remain the same or change little. For example, Chinese people are able to communicate with their parents by mobile phones almost everywhere and come back home from a faraway state whenever they want by advanced vehicles, but the tradition that people will go home to visit family members during spring festival has never been changed. This indicates that advanced technologies may have little effect on changing many important customs and ethics.

Finally, this statement make people think deeply about the relationship between customs and technologies. After the influence of technologies on customs and ethics has been analyzed, the reaction of customs to technologies also needs to be noticed. In fact, what kinds of technologies are welcomed is determined by people’s attitude toward these technologies. If the technology is conflict with people’s values and ethics, those people would not like to accept and utilize this technology and thus the development of this technology is hinder. For example, human clone is strongly against general ethic causing objections of the development of clone technology on human. Then this kind of technology develops at a slow speed. While clone technology on animals or plants progresses quickly in order to solve the starvation around the world. Thus, technology and ethics influence each other at the same time.

In sum, customs and ethics, which determined by culture and natural environment, are influenced by technologies on one hand. But on the other hand, the development of technologies is restricted by human ethics. The two aspects of human civilization push our society forward together.

毛毛天虫UID: 2997563

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