Technology: Boon or Bane? by Joyce W. Miller [Forwarded]
Just as flood-swollen currents carve new paths for a river, so technology has changed the course of our culture. If our culture includes moral and ethical issues and technology has changed our culture, then technology has changed our moral and ethical issues. As these raging waters changed the landscape of our lives, it has changed the ways we process the concepts of good and bad. Have all of those changes been for the good of society? Or have some of them created even more difficult moral and ethical questions?
I come from a time when technology was called "progress" and it was considered heretical to doubt its benefits. We tend to forget the years before antibiotics when people died from pneumonia and infections. We take for granted the warnings about kidney failure, liver damage and replacement therapy for intestinal flora that accompany today's "bigger and better" medications. The terror felt by parents, in the days prior to polio vaccines, has been forgotten. The days are past when a car owner could get a manual from the library, some parts from Pep Boys and fix his own car. Now the computerized automobile requires a trip to the dealer for parts as well as labor billed at $50 or $60 an hour! Research papers required a dictionary, an encyclopedia and a trip to the card catalog at the library instead of a computer capable of web-browsing. Referring to research on the Internet, David Rothenberg states: "Search engines . . . are closer to slot machines than library catalogues . . . You may get 234,468 supposed references . . . one in a thousand may help you." He describes this as "the hunt-and-peck method of writing a paper" (A44).
I do not subscribe to the cynicism of Swiss playwright Max Frisch who is quoted as saying that "technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it" (qtd. in Gup, A52). In common with many of my sources, literary and personal, I believe we must find a way to make technology
I come from a time when technology was called "progress" and it was considered heretical to doubt its benefits. We tend to forget the years before antibiotics when people died from pneumonia and infections. We take for granted the warnings about kidney failure, liver damage and replacement therapy for intestinal flora that accompany today's "bigger and better" medications. The terror felt by parents, in the days prior to polio vaccines, has been forgotten. The days are past when a car owner could get a manual from the library, some parts from Pep Boys and fix his own car. Now the computerized automobile requires a trip to the dealer for parts as well as labor billed at $50 or $60 an hour! Research papers required a dictionary, an encyclopedia and a trip to the card catalog at the library instead of a computer capable of web-browsing. Referring to research on the Internet, David Rothenberg states: "Search engines . . . are closer to slot machines than library catalogues . . . You may get 234,468 supposed references . . . one in a thousand may help you." He describes this as "the hunt-and-peck method of writing a paper" (A44).
I do not subscribe to the cynicism of Swiss playwright Max Frisch who is quoted as saying that "technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it" (qtd. in Gup, A52). In common with many of my sources, literary and personal, I believe we must find a way to make technology