ISSUE88 [Victors小组]7月10日作业 by jennetrj

jennetrjUID: 2275453

ISSUE88 - "Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."
WORDS: 557          TIME: 00:45:00         

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In this statement, the speaker claims that technologies serve either as the determinant or the influential factor to the social customs and ethics. In my point of view, I concede that the development of technology has played an important role in human life and social activities. However, the author overlooks the innate interaction between technology and ideology.

For hundreds of years, human life is greatly influenced by the development of technology. Any breakthrough in the realm of technology brings about considerable changes among human life. From the medieval application of windmills which emancipated human labor out of the fields to those mechanical facilities invented during the years of Industrial Revolution dramatically improved the human productivity. We, human beings, have taken great advantages of new technologies.

Moreover, those conservative customs transferred quietly under the development of technology. Since the development of home appliances, like the sewing machine, vacuum cleaners and so on, women were freed from those miscellaneous housework and able to have extra time to get more education. Meanwhile, the society dumped the prejudices that only man should be the provider for the household and the ethic criteria switched from condemning married women to work outdoors to the tolerance to it. Therefore, the small step in the development of technology might trigger the cascade changes in the realm of social customs and thus moderate everyday life.

For the relationship between people, technologies seem to be a double-blade sword and makes people entrapped into the dilemma created by ourselves. The improvement of tele-communication illustrates a typical customs change among people. As the development of telegraph, mobile phones and the expanded usage of Internet, people are more willing to express their motion by using the high-tech facilities, but overlook the importance of emotional exchange by the means of talk. The traditional meeting of the family members during the Chinese New Year is somehow replaced by greetings along the phone line or in the cyberspace. Even the merits of taking care of the senile parents, the most important part in Chinese ethics, is merely supplanted by providing more modern appliances for the pleasure. Such changes among social custom and ethics caused the absence of psychological supports which could not be redeemed by those modern facilities developed with the help of technologies.

On another hand, social customs and ethics are the background for the development of new technologies. It's not unusual that some new ideas and technologies are easily being accepted in some society, whereas, under some ideological background, the new development is stuck by the conservative thoughts. Take the development of Internet as an example, although the popularity has captured the most part of the planet, in some despotism regimes, the usage of personal accesses to the modern technologies is strongly restricted for the easily obtained information, let alone the influence brought by such technologies on normal life. In North Korea, even the foreign visitors are forbidden to have cell phones in the country. People under such dictatorship are secluded from the modern apparatus, but for the new technologies, they meet their threshold of infiltrating personal life and getting developed.

In sum, technologies brought about new chances for human beings to elevate the life quality and generate the new realm in society. Simultaneously, tolerant social environment is conducive to the new development and application of technologies.