Technology and Society - Essay Example

The issue at hand is not the impact that the technology would have on the culture of a society that has yet to reach the evolution level of societies in the developed world, but rather the societies in the least developed world. Information technology is given high importance in the article, with the inference that the modern societies are information driven. This is true of the developed world. However, it becomes diminished in value in the least developed countries, where the culture of the society has not evolved to be in a position to accept a high technology.

For instance, in such societies, being literate in terms of the developed world may be a luxury very few can afford, and so the vast majority of the society remains illiterate. For a high technology like the Internet to diffuse and be absorbed in this society would be nigh impossible , because of the complexity involved in the use of the technology. Yes, there is mention complexity of the technological product acting as a barrier to diffusion in a society, but the complexity suggested there is much higher than the simple ability to read and write.

Yet, another aspect missed out in relevance to this issue is that there should be the presence of supportive technologies for a new technology to diffuse in a society. For a technology like the Internet to diffuse in the society, there should be enough diffusion of the supportive telecommunication technologies. The again this article has a greater bearing on markets and diffusion and adoption of technologies into these markets, and the developed world is where the large markets exists, and hence the tailoring of the article to the developed world (1).

Do you agree with the concepts suggested in the Nye and Ceruzzi readings? Is technology 'fixing' or is it 'harming'? Is this something we can measure? Why or why not? Technology is both fixing and harming. Looking at the development of the spread of information and technology, the biggest barrier to this was the inability of one computer to communicate with another and thus impeding the flow of information. A technology fix occurred in the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW).

The barrier of flow of information from one computer to another just vanished. The technological fix of the Internet and the World Wide Web demonstrated the potential of their being a medium through which a host of various kinds of activities ranging from information activity sites to commercial activity sites, and social interaction sites and soon the technological fix fell in place like search engines for information, e-commerce sites for commercial activity, and yahoo mail, hotmail, etc., as social ad business activity sites.

So technology is fixing providing a host of benefits, but along with it comes the price in the form of the harm it can cause. The activities of hackers and pornography sites may be arguably discounted as the actions with a criminal bend of mind misusing the technology towards their objectives. Yet, the harm transcends this with the potential of reducing the very quality of the society we live in. Being students it is easy to see how the technology fixes of the Internet a