Technology

TECHNOLOGY IS DEFINED as applying science to manipulate or change the human environment. Although it is usually thought to involve some form of machinery or physical equipment, technology can just as effectively be intangible in form, such as with management technology, which provides different ways of understanding how resources, including [Page 951]people, maybe organized for more efficient production or operation. Historically, technology changed and developed very slowly around the world. However in more recent years, the improvements in infrastructure—and particularly in communications—have meant that technological advances have increased at an ever-quicker rate. Meanwhile, the dissemination ofthat technology has spread around the world, although there are still many hundreds of millions of people too poor to benefit from it. Nevertheless, for most people, especially in the Western world, life and society have been transformed completely by the technologies that have emerged over the last two decades.

Because the rate of change of new technological innovation continues to accelerate, it seems likely that life and society in the future will be at least as difficult to predict now as it would have been a few decades in the past. Because of its prevalence in society, its ability to reduce the time needed for generally undesirable domestic tasks, and its ability to improve leisure opportunities, among other attributes, most people welcome technology and believe it to be beneficial to their lives. However there are still individuals and groups of people who may, perhaps for ideological or religious reasons, reject the use of technology. Because global climate change has come to be associated with the use of technology and the energy required to power so much of it, technology as a whole has come to be regarded by some people as an enemy that must be resisted and eradicated. In the extreme case, there are people who believe that only by returning to a form of society in which all forms of technology are rejected can humanity survive the forthcoming environmental crisis.

Philosophers such as Michael Foucault, meanwhile, consider technology to be a tool most commonly used by the powered elites of society to suppress the masses. They would point out that the introduction of technology is customarily followed by the imposition of restrictions that prevent the majority of people from accessing the benefits of that technology. For example, internet technology in China is regularly used to spy on the activities of ordinary people and keep their discussions heavily monitored. This is an instance of technology being used to suppress people and to maintain the existing architecture of power. In contrast, it is possible to argue that the very same technology actually repre-sents a liberation of people because of the many new ways it enables people to communicate with each other and to share information.

Most people tend toward a more moderate position, recognizing the better lifestyle that some aspects of technology provide and being unwilling to abandon these forms, while accepting the need for greater efficiency in the use of resources. They would be unwilling to voluntarily choose to forego the use of that technology to cause some future effects to abate. In other words, people will not vote for significant reductions in the use of personal technologies to reduce future damage caused by climate change. To change their minds, some activists believe that it is necessary to startle or scare people into realizing what sort of changes are likely in the future. Those more skeptical of those future changes, meanwhile, accuse such activists of regularly committing this act and concluding, as a result, that all calls for changes in behavior are overstated and, possibly, politically motivated. This argument has been successfully deployed, in that it has muddied the waters of debate and, hence, reduced the likelihood of future changes in behavior.

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