ISSUE88【六人行8.4】by Eileen

Eileen312UID: 2648750

I-88"Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."

【另起炉灶】

WORDS: 607

Living in a society where technologies have flooded into every corner of our life, including the social ideological field, we can feel their enormous influence more than ever. Then, are technologies so powerful to affect and even determine social norms and morals, as is asserted by the quotation? As far as I am concerned, technologies do influence but cannot determine social customs and ethics; instead, the rules and moralities of a society determine its technologies.

Admittedly, technological development has promoted the spread of traditional rules and morals of our society, as well as resulted in the emergence of technique related ethical dilemmas. On one hand, multimedia technology in combination with printed materials makes traditional social principles and values more prevailing and influential. Retrospect to one hundred years ago when the promotion of religious ideas was realized by missionaries difficultly traveling around the world and orally promoting their religions. Nowadays, people just transmit their beliefs through far-reaching and public acceptable media, such as TV programs, textbooks, and online videos. On the other hand, technology challenges social ethics and customs in that it causes conflicts between potential technological benefits and moral contradictions. One case related here is the development of robots. It is true that robots are endowed with super ability to work efficiently in industry, to do detection in extreme environments, and to precisely calculate mathematical problems. Nevertheless, since lacking ethical awareness and operating beyond human customs, robots are equally likely to kill people as intelligent weapons, which is morally unacceptable.

Although powerful techniques are, they can not reverse the fate of being decided by social ideas and customs. Obviously, each technology originates from and is realized by scientists, whose ideas and behaviors are restrained by norms rooted in the society. Thus, scientists have to weigh their concepts against social values before carrying out the new technology, so that they are not in conflict. I concede that a handful of scientists would turn a deaf ear to social restrictions and carry in the experiments. For example, some scientists are trying human clone regardless of the strong protest all over the world. However, from another perspective, the protest voice is actually the representative of human morality, which effectively obstructs most majorities of attempts for human cloning. Moreover, even after the realization of a new technology, its results have to be monitored by social ethics. Say, the initial Freon based refrigerator is out of use today because its destruction to the ozone sphere threatened the human beings. All in all, from the origins to the experiments and later utility, technologies are in charged of social thoughts and traditional values.

Actually, social ideas and customs are decided by human’s experiences in the original society, geological environment of a nation and other elements appeared during the society’s developing process. In ancient times when human lived in wild nature, they had to form certain rules and taboos, which varied to according to different environmental areas, to face threats and risks outside cooperatively. And during the developing of human society, new factors, such as farm and industrialization, continuously joined to help shape the social rules, which finally resulted in the diverse social ideas and customs of each current nation. Take, for example, loyalty which is highly emphasized nowadays. It makes sense to asset that loyalty came from our ancestors who lived in forest and required sincerity to each other.

In conclusion, social rules and thoughts serve as basic laws to decide other factors of a society, like technologies; on the contrary, technologies might make some minor modifications toward social ideologies, but could never shake the fundamental role of ideas and customs in a society.

fclwdfUID: 2852654

写得真好。