ISSUE31 【CSMY作文互改小组】 第七次作业

stevenhuUID: 172722

ISSUE31
Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics.

1. Technologies indeed changed lot of our conventions.
      e-mail, international marriage
2. The fundamental part of social customs and ethics didn't change.
        people's mind on crimes such as drug abuse, appreciation of art and so on
3. Technologies are still trying to cope with our customs
      human-computer interaction.

15:41

I agree with the speaker that technologies significantly influence our social customs and ethics, since lots of historical fact justify so. However, with the speaker' more aggressive opinion that technologies can determine our customs and ethics, I take a more conservative position. My opinion on the speaker's conclusion is based on the following reasons.

Looking back into histories and observing modern society, we have to concede that technologies greatly changed our social conventions and ethics. Every day, we use mobile phone, short messages and MSN to instantly communicate with each other, which can not happen even ten years ago. At home, we enjoy DVDs instead of tape recorders, we use microwave ovens to replace traditional ovens, we surf internet instead of reading newspapers. All of these are quite different scenarios from those of ten years before. Even in areas of ethics, we do believe hackers are to some degree heroes, and pay certain amount of sympathy when they are captured, quite different from traditional thieves and terrorists. All of these changes are the result of more and more prosperous technology innovating activities..

Despite lots of changed has happened with the development of technology, some of our traditions and moral values are still remained. Perhaps the most consistent one during the history of human is the respect of freedom and independence. Thousands of years passed, people still view this one as the most precious right of being a person. As a result, criminals are sent to prison, where restriction of one's freedom are taken as penalty to his or her disturbance to other’s freedom, and lots of races take pains to fight against the invaders, which aims to detriment their independence. Technologies are always progressing, but people just use the achievements to maximize their most precious freedom and individuality. What is more, this also holds in people’s attitudes towards beauty, goodness, and so on. For short, though appearance changes, the most crucial value of people will still last long.

Quite different from the speaker's opinion, technology even always copes with people's social conventions and moral ideas. And this trend is increasingly popular in lots of aspects concerning both technology and people. Among the more and more sophisticated subdivisions of computer science, there is a special and dramatically developing one called human-computer interaction, which is specially aimed to alter the computer to accustom people's tradition to the degree that of interact with the natural world. Besides, lots of products labeled 'human-machine engineering' are provided in the market, which are also the evidence of technology are accompanying with people's customs. Actually, the most beneficial aspect of modern technology is to make our life better, which determines it must take people's feedback as an critical consideration.

Based on the above demonstrations, though technology has greatly influenced our customs and ideas, it can not determine our mind at all. What is more, technologies advancements should all the time consider people as a key factor.