How Technology Influences the Society - Literature review Example

How Technology Influences the Society. Insert Insert Insert Introduction Belkin and Turkle are two authors who came up with two conflicting articles describing achievements of technology, as well as its effects and impacts on our daily lives; the stories concern every member of the audience. This essay is aimed at critically analyzing these articles to bring out both positive and negative effects of technology on man. It is unimaginable to have a perception that an individual is given birth to in order to act as a spare part for family members who are in need of specific body parts. People get strange experience when they are favored, but they would criticize the event when it is not in their favor. When my sibling is to act as a source of cure to my problem, I would be positive towards the decision: “In the case of technological advance, for instance, when parents opt for test tube babies, medicine had achieved the level of creating children conceived in-vitro; later it turned out that their child could be a possible donor, this was a surprise and incurred a lot of criticism as they did not believe that human being would be born just to be used as a spare part” (Belkin 04). Ethically, saving life is far better and should not be termed as using a human being as a spare part. As a donor, you may assist to restore life for someone who had lost hope completely. However, with the technological advancement, assisting through donation has negligible effects on the donor due to the high technology involved in carrying out the procedure. Despite criticism from other organizations and scientists, it is not ethical for them. Belkin reiterated that it is human to do everything to save lives through donation; hence, the donation of embryo parts was not prejudiced as malpractice despite the ethical aspects involved (Belkin 06). Just as a scientific laboratory researchers struggled through hurricane with risk for their lives aiming at saving lives of other people, the story of Henry and Molly became a successful breakthrough in the scientific view of life that can continue without medical services and assistance. According to the article, the young girl underwent a lot of tribulations, for instance, having unbalanced limbs, being deaf on one ear, and also having malfunctions in the heart (Belkin 07). Due to the doctor’s observation, she was whisked from her parents, Lisa and Jack. However, just the couple went through hard times, Laurie and Allen also faced tough times as they struggled to salvage lives at their early 30’s. They managed to get good medical support from doctors through the use of computers; Laurie was employed by nonprofit making organization, while Allen worked with computers. Through the expertise that Allen had, they managed to find a doctor online who could help with the issues of their illnesses (Belkin 10). Technology is used both for leisure and curative, for instance, as Belkin states, a lot of research was carried out through technology to salvage life, especially to cure long term illnesses that could only be managed with stop-gap solutions, so that the patient lives longer. We get informed by Belkin that “by 1982 patients suffering from Franconia are likely to survive on provision of lower dose of chemotherapeutic drug referred to as Cytoxan”. However, many women, described in the article, resorted to abortion in case the children were not healthy; this follows numerous cases of sickness from complicated diseases. To some extent, “they were getting older as their children got sicker as time continued running” (Belkin 104). However, the article states that the younger the patient is during organ transplantation, the better the chances of survival. As in the case of a child, most of the body parts are still under construction and development, hence, they have high chances of survival during and after operations. This is essential to the children whose transplant cases were diagnosed at an early age. In addition, the article clearly indicates that “good doctors learn from their patients” (Belkin 11). The decision to burn embryo research under Bush administration was not taken with ease, as the researchers criticized the intention to stop the research which was not performed through government funds; instead, the private partners who supported the research would have been the real people to stop or criticize the research. According to Belkin, “Wagner argued that stem cells are collected from then placenta during birth and not from the child” (13). Due to this reason, he based his argument upon the claim that HLA testing was defensive ethically. However, another reason which he gave was that it was indefensible not to try. Due to the high chances of survival in children who required transplant, Wagner explicitly declared his interest to stand tall as the children advocate; this was because children had better chances of recovering after transplant procedures (Belkin 16). Ethically, it was not right for him to make such decisions considering the nursing codes of ethics which do not rely on speculation and opinionated decision in regard to patient care. However, the poor health status, experienced in almost all the children characterized in the article, was a clear indication of why women are negatively influenced by bringing up such children. Just to confirm, nobody would expect to know exactly the characters of every person (Belkin 014). Women should not cause trouble by carrying out abortion after speculative information on the expected life of their unborn which would avert the birth rate. After the review of the whole article, it is believed that in dealing with science we should start with simple procedures followed by complicated cases (Belkin 16). And now let’s consider another situation connected with technological achievements: an individual forgets to a carry the phone going for a journey. The person may not accept staying without a phone for a week. Taking a day would cause enough suffering from such drastic changes in the ways of life. Once individuals are used to communication, they tend to be inseparable with its means, oblivious of the longer period they had existed before getting in touch with other people through phones. Due to the influence of such devices, most of the people who are addicted to the phones would opt for either coming back to pick their phones or sending money so that the phone would be posted to them through the security system (Turkle 271). Through the advent of technology people have become too lazy to respond to their daily duties and chores. Lets take the example from the article that reports the preference for devices as they work more without stoppage, do not feel any pain due to external influences and operate on basis of control systems that only require electricity. However, according to the article, we realize that people have gone far much beyond ethical concerns (Turkle 274). “When an interviewer could physically make efforts to interview Ronnie, Ronnie’s friend who had bandaged thumbs informed the interviewer that she was too busy on her blackberry mobile phone”. Efforts to knock her bedroom door failed as roommate/colleague recapped that it would be a trespass, this left them with only one option of texting an interviewee who was only few meters away within the same house” (Turkle 276). The writer enlightens the audience on the “ effects of computers on them instead of what computers can do for them, considering children who deduced that computers were alive”, being intelligent and able to accept commands and respond with the perceived information. They were totally convinced that computers were the only way to go. As technology advanced, a lot of changes evolved with proposals to replace robots with human beings to perform duties like collecting rugs and laundry work. This is an interesting offer but it would result not only in laziness but also joblessness for the poor who would never achieve the necessary education level that would allow them to be valued at the job market (Turkle 279). The uniqueness of inventions that come with technological advancement is far beyond the ethical issues. You find that people are currently glued to their screens to an extent that they cannot reconsider their goals and roles within the families. For instance, woman in her late sixties values her phone more that her family affairs; it’s extremely sad and disappointing to discuss such effects of technology on human beings. Some of the misunderstandings within the families are due to the effects of the famous sites like Face Book, for which people have gained passion to an extent they get bored while working on other things. Instead, they opt for the social sites to find solace and break the boredom (Turkle 271). Turkle was perplexed during an thanksgiving ceremony which was organized within a museum. There was a long queue, and he decided to break the boredom through interacting with some of the parents and children; so he broke the silence”. He questioned both the parents and children if they could be scared to find out that the turtle was alive; to his dismay, the young girl replied that “ she would prefer a robotic turtle as aliveness comes with aesthetic inconveniences”, for instance, the water through which a live turtle moves is always dirty and gross. It disbelieved that a young girl was able to argue that it was better to have a robot turtle than a live one due to aesthetic value (Turkle 277). The cyberspace has greatly reduced cases of having contact and communication through voice calls, “most adults engage in computer/cyber communication while the youths prefers to text” their colleagues on their issues instead of making phone calls which would reduce privacy. To some extent when the youths are annoyed they preferred to share information through non-verbal communication which they prefer more. They are able to discuss the information from both sides of the dilemma, so that they would compare different sides of the situation. The social media interfered with family affairs and disintegrated the homes beyond retrospective (Turkle 278). Conclusion Thus, the two articles contain information about technological communication and its influence upon society. It is important to note that the article by Belkin was full of effective and efficient information advocating the use of technology to assist in saving lives. However, in the other article by Arthur Turkle, we found out that the author disbelieves the possibility of technology being used for benefits of society. Read More