I thought Claude Fischer did a good job in the opening chapters of his book by going through and dissecting many theories that have been used to explain technology's roles, such as determinism and modernization. By giving this comprehensive look at the other ways of thinking about this subject he is going to write about, he allows the reader to not only see the way he feels about technology, but also his thoughts on why those other theories are not correct. One thing I found particularly interesting about his discussion on other theories was his disliking of the word "impact" and why he felt its' use should be abandoned (Fischer 6-12). By this line of thinking,technology is seen as a force that comes and affects society through a series of interlinking events. The example used in the book is how automobiles caused less of a demand for horses, which made demand for feed grain go down, which allowed more land for food, which caused food prices to drop. I am more of the belief that technology is something created by culture and used for certain purposes from person to person, rather than it being a force that controls us.
I believe that as humans, it is in our nature to want to continue to advance and progress as a society, Technology is a perfect example of the way we are always looking to take the next step, as we are constantly seeing advances in all fields of technology, most notably to us in cell phones, computers, and televisions. So it may seem that by this line of thinking we are so caught up in our hunt to keep growing technology that we are not in control of technology, but rather being controlled by it because are using it so much and will not stop continuing to make it better. In this case it would appear that technology is in fact a force that is impacting our culture. However, I do not follow this belief because of the fact that not all cultures are in such a technology crazed world.
There are tribes people living in the Amazon rain forest, or parts of Africa who wouldn't even know what a car was if they saw one. Their concept of technology is spears and pottery bowls. Joshua Hammer from the Smithsonian writes about one of these tribes in the Amazon in this article. So although we rarely hear about these people and the idea of not knowing what a car is is crazy to us here in in America, there are people that do not use the technologies that we do. So my point is, technology is something that is cultural and is adapted and used by the people of a culture so much as the people in that culture wish to use it. In America, we have the desire to continuously build new electronic technologies and such, because that is what the people and businesses in our country want. To the people of the amazon, they have no wish for things like cell phones and cars, because they have never chosen to try and adapt those things into their society.
I do believe that technologies role in society is complex and cannot be summed up by just one simple theory, but rather a combination of ideas and theories. However, I think in order for technology to have an effect on a culture, that culture must first allow the technology to brought into it in order for people to use it. Once it is in, people will use technology for all different types of reasons, mainly for uses and gratifications. However, if a culture does not use an Apple products for example, there is no way an Ipad will be able to affect the way they live their lives.
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