issue88 ugw战队4号第十七次作业

王可UID: 2190701

TOPIC: ISSUE88 - "Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."
WORDS: 457          TIME: 0:45:00 Tony          DATE: 2006-8-3

Do technologies determine social customs and ethics as the speaker claims? Albeit I agree that in some aspects our social customs and ethics are changed by the development of technologies, however, the statement fails to take into account that modern technologies are not able to change all our customs and ethics.

Admittedly, as the modern technologies are developing such rapidly, the society is changing all the time, and so are the customs, which are being influenced by the development of technologies. Modern technologies have come into people everyday life. They make their lives more comfortably and do things more conveniently as people wish. Of course, some of the traditional ways of doing things are substituted by new technical methods. Take the way people communicate with each other for example. Hundreds of years ago, when people wanted to communicate with a person far away, they had to write a letter and called another person to send it by horse, by boat, or by train. Then latter, when we created telephone, we could hear each other in a long distance through telephone calls. And up to now, we even could see a person no matter where he or she is through the internet. Also, people today send more and more emails or telephone short messages instead of writing letters. In short, modern technologies change the way of communications.

Not only daily life, but also business customs have been changed by technologies. Comparing to the traditional business, a new way called e-business which is developed with the technology of computer and internet make business more effective. People could make deal online and also pay for it through online banks. It costs the merchant less time and money which would spend on the way to meet their partners.

However, some of traditional ethics cannot be changed by new technologies. Ethics in a society is accumulated during hundreds of years, even thousands of years, thus it is not easy to be changed. A typical example of this is the technology of clone. For many years people argue on this subject. Many people including scientists hold the view that clone human is betray our ethics, while other people stick to that human beings could benefit from the technology of clone. Here I don't want to talk about whether clone is good for us people; I just want to cite the fact that there is an argument about the development of clone which means the new technology cannot decide our ethics easily.

In sum, we benefit much from the development of technologies, as well as we have changed many of our customs from daily life to business and other realms of life. However, our ethics are not so easily changed as customs because forming an ethic needs a myriad of time.