Barbara Jarabik talking about culture and technology synergy in 2022 : Nowadays, whenever we look around us in our home, in public spheres, we will definitely see a tool of technology. Modern technology occupies an important position in our daily life by providing a sense of independence and connectedness. Human societies and their technology have become inseparable from one another, they have a co-dependent relationship manifested in co-influence and co-production. Technology influences socio-culture as much as socio-culture influences technology production.
Whereas people invest more time in technology and less time in social environment. Technology has been blamed for turndown of traditional media such as TV and newspaper, etc. The complete use of technology has been limited in the periphery of educated people only. The more technology grows up, the more human regresses. Invention of robots and machines has made human lazy and dependant. Bombs, nuclear weapons and missiles exist due to use of technology. Implementation of technology influences the values of society by changing expectations and realities. Over emphasizing technology has created lack of trust among people. Technology can also be blamed for unemployment, cultural lag, changes in social institutions.
In case of mobile phones initially mobile phones were designed for an industrial purpose in a factory by Motorola, the main reason why mobile phones became famous was when Japanese companies were influenced and inspired by their own culture of talking and sharing knowledge with each other. Technology sometimes gets integrated with a culture and community, in cases when technology cannot integrate, technology adapts to the culture as seen in Kosher phone which was made to adapt to the Jewish culture (which prohibited cameras, text messaging service).
Technology influences society through its products and processes, which consequently influences the quality of life and the ways people act and interact. On the other hand, social needs, attitudes, and values also influence the direction of technological development. For societies to thrive and evolve, technological innovations have become necessary. It has evolved over the last centuries from simple tools such as stone tools and basic books to complex genetic engineering, smart machines, and information technology such as TV, computers, and cell phones. As technological systems are invented by humans, they reflect the very essence of a population’s needs and culture. Read even more info on Barbara Jarabik.
But it has been observed during a period of time that different people add to their cultures, ideas and feelings to improve the technology (Williams, 1996) the speed of advancement of technology increases. For example, the android, which itself is an open source platform where advancements takes place from the individual’s perspective, people tend to use the basic technology as a foundation and build over it, to get it adapted in their cultural perspective, few examples of this would be applications which allow farmers to switch on the watering machine to applications such as Skype, which was started from the basic concept of collective sharing of information and got its impact into the various segments of the society like businesses, education, travel, research and many more. It has been observed that there is “no inherent or compelling logic of technical development” (Rohracher, 1998). “Social construction of technology approach (SCOT)” (Pinch, 1984) gives an insight on how culture and sociology of scientific knowledge helps in technological development.