Culture N Technology
...countries insufficient progress in science and technology is considered to be the chief reason for |
|general backwardness; on the contrary, many in the industrially advanced societies hold unfettered technological progress as|
|the roots of all social ills. |
|Is it really possible that all social and political upheavals of the past decades are the byproduct of thoughtless advance |
|in technology? Does it make sense to think of technology as an ‘inhumane force’ that has somehow managed to throw ‘human |
|relations’ into disorder and chaos. |
|Are we faced with a kind of technological determinism that places man and society in a particular direction with no |
|discernible horizon? Or is it after all possible that technology is independent, neutral and free of any values, whose |
|benefits and faults are chiefly by the use to which it is put by man? |
|Is it possible for traditional societies to import technology and then try to weave it into their own cultural fabric? Does |
|technology cause alienation? Or is it, as an Iranian thinker has put it, a necessary evil equally harmful in presence as in |
|absence? |
|Finally, how are we equipped, the people of the Third World, to cope with the great power that technology is? And of course |
|a host of other questions that are fashioned ever anew with respect to technology. |
|The friction between technological development and the preservation of cultural values, in particular and the influence of |...
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