We seem too busy, when we are doing nothing.
According to anthropologists, “culture is consisted of all learned beliefs and behaviours, the rules to order our lives, and the meanings that humans construct to interpret their universes and their place in them”. These characteristics are non-instinct and are prone to change, thus culture is experienced, shared and adopted. Culture has different components and technology is the major one, as it affects rest of the components too. Cultural changes are intricately connected to technology.
Recent advancement in technology has greatly changed it. There is a mutual dependence among culture and technology. As technology and culture evolve side by side, and a new culture tends to produce even better and advanced technology to satiate its thirst.
Its true that technology helped humanity, making it capable to cope with natural selection process. It is now easier to live on harsh environments rather than to become the victim of nature. It is because of technology, human can survive the height of sky and the depth of sea.
The most influential aspect of technology is innovation. For example “time” is actually a measurement of solar position and before 16th century, people had to look at the sun in order to have an idea about time, and looking at solar-position remained a part of culture until the invention of Portable Drums. These drum used a sun-dial to give an idea about the solar position instead of watching in the sky. The apogee of this invention can be seen in the form of digital watches now.
We are living in this computer age and we do not think about fire and tools as technologies. While our ancestors did experiments for inventing tools that led to the modern technologies like TV, Cell Phones and Computer. They learnt how to sharp a flint and attaching it to a piece of wood in order to make a spear, were all technologies. Those people invented fire, but uncontrolled fire greatly affected them, they were terrified with the fire just like other animals. Yet, they had an intuitive intelligence to use fire for various beneficial purposes. They used fire to get warmth, light and kept wild animals away from them.
Advancement of agriculture was the result of advancement in tool-making technology. Before the concept and or advancement of agriculture humans were dependant on hunting wild animals. But with the invention of different agriculture tools e.g. plough invention helped people to plant seeds and grow crops. Agriculture changed the hunting fate of people.
Its because of this technology that we can travel miles within hours. It has greatly changed our transportation culture. Some societies used to keep horses for travelling purpose and it was an important culture of societies. Those people used to have a good knowledge about horse farming. With the advancement in transportation technology, huge vehicles have taken the place of horses and now only few people have horses as a token of their interest not for travel.
In the 21st century, a person can never get bored because technology has made our isolation more enjoyable, and he has access to some technology like iPAD, iPhone, Laptop or even a walkman. Now a days certain terminologies like globalization, worldwide culture, global village and digital culture are frequently used. One culture is easily affected by another with communication technology, and has resulted in the form of globalization.
Some years before, friends use to go for trips, picnics and campaigning to spend some time together and discuss different aspects of life. But now, technology has changed this tradition and gave them the virtual social networks like facebook and twitter.
Now lets talk about negative aspects of technology on our culture. It is deteriorating our ethics, norms etc. As culture is non-instinctive, it is not in our genetics to follow parents culture. A common observation of this change is the way of raising of our children. We are careless about our kids and let them use computer or cell phones thus giving them a freedom to be in touch with the new technologies. Consequently growing generation is losing family values.
We are promoting digital culture, its queer observation that individual of the same family living together in a same house, but looking at different screens, using different devices and communicating with different people, while less communicating within family individual.
Technology has modified our fears, people are no scary about any kind of ghost, instead they are more fearful about the loss of technology, and a person said “Our worst fear is a black screen and a lost charger.”
A recent research done by a team headed by Prof. Antonio Rodriguez de las Heras, explained how ICTs are affecting the consumption of cultural products. He illustrated, importance of paper is fading with the introduction of multimedia writing supports. Writing support transferred from clay tablets to papyrus and then from scroll to paper and now digital media provides the main support for writing.
Technology has an adverse effect on our environment, e.g, wastes of industries, vehicles are affecting our environment, and change in environment is directly change to our cultural habits. In short it is affecting the planet as well.
Ultimately any technology that is produced to make life easier, most of the times, in long term, has negative, irreversible effects on our cultures. It depends upon us, if we can use it in a right direction or can destroy us, and culture deterioration comes very first.
The writer is associated with the Centre of Excellence in Molecular Biology, University of the Punjab, Lahore.