Nowadays, our society depends on technology; we
no longer depend on ourselves, as humanity used to do before the Industrial
Revolution. If we look at ourselves today, we are less capable of dealing with
face to face communication. We want everything done as quickly as possible, and
when things do not work well or are a bit harsh, we just throw them and buy new ones. All these things mentioned above,
are a clear example of what the modernists called the chaos in the modern
society. I've always believed that, albeit we live in a different time, we
still have the same ghosts of the modern world.
Every
day, humanity is overwhelmed with the new upcoming technologies, most of the
people are expectant to get the new iphone, the more advanced tablet and the
ultimate x-box game, and this seems for everyone that our world is running as
normal as it is. But, if we go back in history, if we go back to the modern
society, if we go back to the overall change carried out by the new inventions
such as the automobile, the telephone, the dynamite, and the new effective ways
to kill people, we can understand and feel the same feeling that probably
William Butler Yeats experienced at the moment of writing “the second coming”
and “Leda and the Swan”. He was
observing that the world was coming to an end age of reason, due to this new
age of science, progress, democracy and modernization.
Let’s
think for a moment of the drastically change that the modernist lived, all the
changes he observed were in some way destroying the valuable aspects of a society
that was not rule out by technologies, but by its nature.
On the contrary, today our society relies on
these “technologies” that were supposed to improve our lives and make it
easier, but the question is: are we conscious as modernists were about the huge
and profound impact that the modern society has left to our actual society?
I sincerely believe that our society has become
sightless as its tempo has become faster and faster and has not let things take
its course and also has not giving the chance to take in all the changes we
have been going through.
Even though I see your point, I am afraid I disagree with your opinion. I don’t think that our dependency on “technology” is the one to blame for our problems as a society. If you look back in our history we have always depended on something to make our life easier, whether it was a stone, a wooden spear or a car. Scientist believe that the moment in which the ancient man started its development to become what we are know was when they started hunting and in order to hunt they used objects.
ResponderEliminarIn addition to that, you wrote “we no longer depend on ourselves”. Human beings in order to survive have depended on many things besides its own intellect, such as animals, nature, objects, and even luck or fate. Moreover in what sense “we no longer depend on ourselves” ?, What do you mean by depending on ourselves?.
A history teacher at my high school once told me that human history is cyclical, for instance what happened 200 hundred years ago is going to happen again but in a different setting and context. Even though it is just a theory, it has a bit of truth in it. You wrote about how much western society, in particular, changed after the Industrial Revolution with its factories and specialized work. However do you really think the purposes in the life of a person was different in the medieval period than in the first civilizations?. I am not so sure about it.
Another thing is that it was not after the Industrial revolution that humans started looking for more effective ways to kill, it has always been like that. Knights did and before them the Romans did, and so on and so forth. Our biggest accomplishments as a society have been achieved through violence, take for example the French Revolution. That is our nature, the nature of the society that we have created whether we like it or not. So pointing out technology, which is made by men, as the biggest cause of our ongoing crisis as a society its being a little bit too simple.