Jarábik Barbara talking about culture and technology synergy today : Nowadays, whenever we look around us in our home, in public spheres, we will definitely see a tool of technology. Modern technology occupies an important position in our daily life by providing a sense of independence and connectedness. Human societies and their technology have become inseparable from one another, they have a co-dependent relationship manifested in co-influence and co-production. Technology influences socio-culture as much as socio-culture influences technology production.
The culture of a society is reflected in values, norms and practices. Culture observes itself through individuals to reflect their perception, practices, values and in transfer of technology. Technology has a crucial impact on fundamental aspects of all our cultures including language, art, mobility, education and religion. Culture of a community acts as a standard for perceiving, judging and evaluating the technology. As technology affects all the components of culture, it determines the direction of cultural development. To occupy the larger cultural dimension, technology should be in harmony with social and cultural conditions of community else there exists a friction between technological development and preservation of cultural values. A rational balance allows people to exercise freedom of expression in technical world which is beyond one’s ethnicity, age, or level of education. People use it for fulfilling their fantasies but a cultural downfall may occur due to lack of restrictions, regulation and/or consequences.
People normally react to new technology in a very strange way and say that there is something wrong, but in due course of time people start adapting that technology, and then technology starts getting inspired by the way a person, community or culture thinks (Rip, 1995). Initially, when Walkman was launched we saw that many people argued that it would make an individual away from the social world and give them time to concentrate on his own pleasure, which would make him or her away from the society. Later we observe that people adapted a Walkman (Gay, 1997) and further new solutions like I pod & mp3 players were made.
Socio-Culture is a focus of study in anthropology. The term is a combination of society and their cultural aspects. Every society has a set of values, beliefs, traditions, and habits known as their sociocultural values. These values shape how people engage and interact with their environment in everyday life. They are inherited and passed from a generation to another. Although the sociocultural values are bounded, they can be changed and influenced by the development and creations of each era. Just like the development and use of technology in our modern era has radically influenced our socio-culture. Discover even more info on Barbara Jarabik.
Technology is slowly getting integrated into various cultures. For example, in the ancient culture, people used to light their houses by using candles, or reflecting mirrors (Schivelbusch, 1995) but with the advent of technology like a fluorescent bulb we see that initially it was spread to some section of the society, but in a period of time, many cultures have got used to it and integrated the use of bulbs for light. The basic technology would have advanced from fluorescent to LED, this can even be seen in the source of energy from coal to diesel to Hydro to other nonrenewable sources of energy, but the basic technology has integrated into many cultures and society.