ISSUE88

TOPIC: ISSUE88 - "Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."
WORDS: 546 TIME: 01:03:02 DATE: 2008/7/30 0:41:35

The speaker asserts that technologies have influences on social customs and ethics and actually determine them. I can't agree more with the former statement but be against with the view that social customs and ethics are determined by technologies.

To begin with, technologies influence our social customs and ethics in fact. For example, nearly 60 years ago, when there is no telegraph or telephone, we can only use letters, which were written by hands and transferred by labors, for communication of each other. So, it is part of their life for the people working or study far from their hometown to write a letter daily or weekly for sending their status to the relatives in order to make them easy. And with the development of our technologies, we use telephones to contract each other, by which we can hear sounds of the other side or even see the pictures or videos. But it is not the modernest way for communication too. The E-mail, which is the result of computer science and technology, will take place of all the other ways and be the most popular methods of commucation in the future.

However, the technologies cannot determine our social customs at all. For example, the Spring Day, which is the grandest festival in China, on which all the Chinese people set off firecrackers in order to celebrate the new year's coming. Although there is much more activities for us to do in that day, such as playing computer games, driving for holidays and so on, the firecrackers actually represent a culture which Chinese people cannot get rid of. In addition, the same thing happens in America, when the Chirstmas Day, all the children want the gifts from Santa Claus and there parents fill their willings, although the parents and some of the children know there is no Santa Claus at all because of the modern technologies. These two examples suggest that under certain circumstances, the technologies cannot influence or even determine our social customs.

In addition, the technologies cannot determine our ethics too. For example, although we can manage to know the sex of a child before he was born, it is cannot be used widely and be a sufficient reason for one's abortion due to the couple's descrimination of boy or girl, because it will break the balance between man and woman. Furthermore, the clone, which is a modern technology and became popular nowadays, do not take actions on human so far. Admittedly, it is believed that there is no problem for our human beings to clone ourselves in technology, but our ethics constrains the use of clone on human beings.

Furthermore, our social customs and ethics are determined by many complex and complicated factors. For instance, the Arabic woman always wear vein on their head while the Japanese woman dress with kimono, which are not the result of the development of technology actually. And the difference ways of education between American parents and Chinese parents also reflects many factors, influence or determine our social customs and ethics, except technology.

Generally speaking, technologies really have influences on our social customs and ethics, but cannot determine them. There are more significant factors, including history, culture, geology and so forth, than technology for our social customs and ethics.