Community Chat

[madzonie]

"Once a technology enters a culture, it takes over. It feeds on itself, assisted by eager adoption and demands for more of it. Social structures, such as values, behaviors, and politics, can’t help but organize around the new technology’s values. The predictable result is the loss of existing cultural traditions and the emergence of a new culture."

Jacques Ellul, philosopher

[Lila Belle]

yep

[Free2be]

It's true about cell phones, for instance. Not sure it's applicable for any/all technologies.

[NoelSeven]

On 1/2/2014 madzonie said:

"Once a technology enters a culture, it takes over. It feeds on itself, assisted by eager adoption and demands for more of it. Social structures, such as values, behaviors, and politics, can’t help but organize around the new technology’s values. The predictable result is the loss of existing cultural traditions and the emergence of a new culture."

Jacques Ellul, philosopher

No. That's a stretch.

[Q_spirit]

not ""loss of all existing cultural traditions."" some. not all.

[madzonie]

I had to think of the way most of us have had our lives changed by technology:

• cell phone - I dislike how so many of my friends EXPECT me to be accessible at all times

• email - I sometimes feel overwhelmed with all I get, both personal and business-related

• social networking - I find myself kind of "addicted" to keeping up with all the postings on my Facebook page

• instant "news" spread all over the world with a few keys and clicks - we know in an instance of tragedies in distant lands and our homeland. We know immediately that someone famous has died or married or given birth

• my camera takes pictures that I can send across the country in seconds

• I depend on my iPad to keep me "connected" when I'm not home

• I depend on my microwave oven and my machines that make soda and coffee in an instant

• I have 100's of TV channels from which to choose, and can rarely find anything interesting or enlightening to watch

I have an ongoing love/hate relationship with most of my "technology" and wonder if it's because I'm 66 and have had to learn so many new "things" in the past few decades. It seems the younger generations take it all in stride without missing a beat.

Just a few of my thoughts...

[wildcat fan]

I see this as it relates to cell phones and how they are changing school culture. For one, a considerable amount of time is spent in recent years emphasizing that u and r and all lowercase letters without punctuation just aren't acceptable for writing assignments. Our middle school students think they can bring that texting language to the classroom writing assignments, so they literally have to be reprogrammed. Teachers now have to attend workshops showing them how to design engaging lessons for students who bring Smart phones to school (and then try to figure out what to do with the ones who don't have a phone while the Smart phone users are conducting their activity!). People chastise me all the time because I don't have a texting plan for my iPhone, but I refuse to give in. Sometimes I think the spoken conversation is becoming a lost art.

[LilacTree]

"The emergence of a new culture" is the least of it, when one considers cyber warfare.

[NoelSeven]

Re: "The predictable result is the loss of existing cultural traditions and the emergence of a new culture."

We've been flooded with technology over the past few decades and, while it has added to the culture, there's no logical way we can say there has been a loss of existing cultural traditions,

I did a quick scan for basic American cultural traditions and found a good summary from livescience. If you check it out, you'll see we have not lost these things.

http://www.livescience.com/28945-american-culture.html

[Mominohio]

I'd have to say I pretty much agree with the statements in the original post. If you look much earlier in history, this "loss of existing cultural traditions....." has occurred over and over again throughout the ages. It has come about as we went from hunter/gathers to agrarian lifestyles, as agriculture progressed to the point we could feed ourselves enough to allow the industrial revolution, and more recently the advent of things like electric lights, telephone, automobiles, and so on. It is not really a new phenomenon, but much accelerated as the technology advances faster than ever before.