Technology is a powerful social tool that has made vast advancements in our society today. It has also led to rapid social change. Modernity has taken us to the next level of humanity, where science is the basis for all reasoning. Compare this to the 1800s, when religion was the dominating factor that people used as a reasoning tool. In fact, it is what people use to divide the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’.
One of the technologies that was invented was the media. And with media, information was transferred with amazing speed. First, there was the radio, which transmitted news and entertainment. Then, there was the television, which gave further enhancement to the meaning of entertainment by moving pictures. Now, we have the internet, which allows us to virtually connect to the world, through email, games and the abundance of information. Is this good or bad? For the traditional, it is bad, because your beliefs are being threatened. Science explains what could not be explained before, and many believed it was God who controlled it. For the modernist, namely the capitalist, it is good, because they will be able to handle production more efficiently and effectively.
Has technology actually solved our social problems? I would say that it might have not fully solved social problems but led to a progress and social development can be seen throughout the world. With globalisation, poverty is slowly being eradicated, and educational levels are increasing. Standards of living are increasing and people are beginning to prosper. But with globalisation, social stratification is getting wider. Those who could not keep up with the fast pace of globalisation is getting poorer. When technology becomes the basis for globalisation, people become stratified by their ‘worth’, if they are able to use advanced machines or not. The poor, having less education and unable to use IT with their more ‘traditional’ mindset, will fall into the lower class, doing more of the manual jobs that are more hands on and earns little income. On the other hand, most of the middle-class and the rich, who are able to afford some standard of proper education, will learn scientific ‘modern’ knowledge and the ability to use IT. They will have the advantage to earn a more decent income. However, why the rich are able to dominate the higher-ranking classes is probably because they are able to afford prestigious schools and universities, which the normal working-class citizen are most likely not able to. By having a prestigious school in your resume, you have a higher status in your education level as well, which firms would readily employ with good pay.
Technology is important because it is intricately associated with globalisation. With globalisation arise the need for economic growth, and the skill to be economically active. In the globalised world, to be skilled will somehow be linked to you proficiency with IT. But if the theory of the poverty cycle persists in society, instead of bringing people out of poverty, it will only make the poor worse off. They might earn more then what they earned before, but with the rising living standards, their salary is still not enough to sustain them in the modern economy. We must remember that when we see statistics, it is the average income per person. If the rich and middle-class become richer but the poor remains stagnant in their income, the overall average still rises, and it does not show the real poverty situation. Like what Marx says, it is to serve the capitalists and the elites self-interests. If there was no outlet, like social institutions, the poor ultimately suffer a worse fate than what they face today, in the modern capitalist economy.
We cannot deny the fact that information technology is important to us. Our lives revolve around information, and our actions are socially controlled by information. That is probably why people who are surrounded with information technology have different values and insights from the people who do not have information readily around them. Information influences our actions. And at the pace of technology now, social change is far more rapid than it was before.
Tags: development, globalisation, Technology
