issue88 科技有否影响并决定社会伦理道德～（狠狠拍）

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TOPIC: ISSUE88 - "Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."
WORDS: 512(538)          TIME: 上午 12:43:00          DATE: 2006-7-26

Our modern era has marked with tremendous technological achievements. Aside from our daily trivial, more importantly, technologies have influenced but yet completely determined human beings' social customs as well as ethics.

To begin with, looking into our everyday life, we would astonishingly find that it has been greatly influenced by the technologies. No doubt, the material civilization has led a path on which people began their spiritual revolution as well. Since technological facilities have liberated people from repetitive and heavy work, more spare time has been left for individuals to think about their inner voices. In ancient times, humanities lived in a primal fashion, conforming to the traditional social customs and ethics. They lived a social life, because only through living together could they overcome the changeable climate, avert the attack of brutal beasts, and protect vulnerable members, such as the children and the old in the group. This gregarious living fashion is due to lack pf sufficient and fundamental tools for survival. While throughout the recorded history, endless technologies have emerged, influencing our social customs, to a large extent. These great achievements have allowed people to be more independent and stronger than ever before. Due to these machines, people gradually change their living customs. They learn to live alone, think independently, behavior in a more efficient and effective way because of the help of technologies.

And indeed, technologies have caused such a prevailing trend in our society that some ethics have been overturned and new ones established. As for these new ones, they are decided by the technologies to some extent. When the industrial revolution striked a new era a century ago, many social traditions which deterred the development of the society were overturned. Consider, for instance, over the past half centuries, the civil movement has changed humanities' attitudes apparently and deeply. Technological machines allow women to free from onerous housework. As a result, they began to take part in the social work to earn their own social bread, which led them to be more independent from men. Over these decades, women' status not only in economy, also in politics and other realms in the society has been enhanced greatly. Undoubtedly, it is the technologies that brought about this great improvement in ethics of humanistic development

Nevertheless, not all the social customs and ethics are determined by technologies. In some place on the planet, some individuals, some social groups are striving to preserve their customs and ethics, in order to keep their unique group identities. In the fierce combat between the modernization and tradition, luckily enough, they are the winners. In the southeast of China, where lived a large group of individuals called Hakka, they preserve their traditional manner of living, using the very prime tools in cooking and living in the earth buildings, in which all the activities ranging from eating to sleeping are very primal yet stable. During the conflict between the modern technologies and conventions, their old manners of living survived, and are preserved till now.

Simply put, due to continuous emergence of technologies over millions of years, humanities' social customs and ethics have been influenced greatly. Nevertheless, fortunately, technologies have not played the role of determinants as for these conventions which people treasure, protect and preserve strenuously.