Essay on technology advancement
Answers
The advancement in technology has been exceptionally fast in the 20th and 21st century. With electronic technology and machines being produced and improved all the time, it was very likely that along with the positive aspects of these new advancements, people would also consider the negative aspects and look to criticise new technology.
Every day another company brings out something more advanced in an attempt to win the consumer war against another company. This consumerism is driving the rate of advancement faster and faster each year. The development of the IPhone by Apple is an example of this. Apple brought out a phone that could literally do everything and no other company in the mobile phone market could compare to it. Not only could you make phone calls and text, but you could also watch videos, take pictures and videos, listen to music, connect to the internet, you had app’s for almost anything. It’s the application market that really blew the other mobile phone companies out of the market at the time. You could download games, books, news, social networking sites in seconds. Of course this was a positive as people could use the phone to store data for work, education, entertainment. But the negative claims began as well, too expensive, quick battery power loss and could a device like this stop face to face communication all together to name just a few claims.
Technology will always have negative aspects because it depends on what the use of the technology is for and who is using it; Albert Einstein once said ‘Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal’.[1]
One of the biggest negative claims seen in past years was against the advancement of gaming technology. A game called Grand Theft Auto was developed and the game consisted of stealing cars, shooting and hurting random people to more offensive material like the prostitute characters. Computer games were given negative press after an incident in the USA with one teenage boy who shot at two police men and a dispatcher killing them in 2003. He had already been brought into the station on suspicion of driving a stolen car, which is something that happens within the game series. But he was not old enough to be playing the game in the first place. The media reported the incident in ways such as ‘Lawsuit: 'Grand Theft Auto' Led Teen to Kill’[2]. The media chose to blame the technology and the companies who created and sold the game "What has happened in Alabama is that four companies participated in the training of Devin ... to kill three men."[3] This sort of media attention can be seen to support the negative claims made by Jacques Ellul, a French sociologist. He viewed ‘technology as an irresistible, mysterious force’[4] he continued in calling it ‘menacing’[5] and ‘has an ability to change every aspect of life that it encounters’[6]. The press on this advancement in technology were trying to make out that the console and the game was changing and disrupting the young boys life, they quoted him to have said ‘’Life is a video game. You've got to die sometime."[7]Showing how this technology has changed the boy’s mental state and changed his view on life itself, that it’s nothing but a game. They make out that technology has taken over the boy and controlled him into committing such an act of violence. Ellul also described technology as ‘some kind of living breathing monster, out of control’[8] like it’s trying to distribute evil and change and scare people like it changed and persuaded Devin to kill those policemen. Although the argument to the negative claims that technology is evil and changes peoples mind set’s is that it’s one of the only cases like this to emerge from such technology. There hasn’t been an instant in the UK where a murder was blamed upon console or gaming technology.
Another critic of technology is Neil Postman. He writes in his book called Technopoly, that ‘technology in sum, is both friend and enemy’. He can see the benefits and how technology can be seen as a friend to humanity that ‘it makes life easier, cleaner and longer’[9]. ............
Advancement in Science and Technology in many spheres has without any doubt made our lives better than the earlier times. We cannot refute the fact that the life of each one of us is highly dependent on the scientific inventions and modern day technology.
It has bought an end to the wooden toys era and replaced the same with automatic cars. Its effect has been well observed in spheres like medicines, education, infrastructure, electricity, aviation, information, computer, metallurgy, physics, nuclear energy, space technology, defence research, biotechnology, household, sports, job, tourism, agriculture and numerous other fields as well.
Introduction of such technological strides, ideas and inventions to all these fields has brought a gigantic level of positive change in the current generation and thus, has provided them a variety of new and innovative opportunities. In India, technology has become the main source of the foundational and creative developments. It has improved and brought some huge developments in the Indian Economic status worldwide and has also created many new programmes for our new generation to grow in this technical world.
The maximum advantages have been seen in the educational sector. The more technological modifications, the better benefits it provides for students at several educational levels. For instance, since many students find the normal lectures boring and monotonous, the idea of smart classes makes them more engrossed in the same lectures that they earlier found boring.