Culture and Technology: A Symbiotic Relationship :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

Culture and Technology: A Symbiotic Relationship Throughout human history the fundamental driving force behind any change culturally or technologically is the human goal. The innate human ability for abstract thought has made us able to project a plan for our own future. Originally our foresight directly pertained to our own survival, making our way to the next meal, and perpetually intertwined with our interaction with and relationship to our own environment. The living environments that we experience include the places where we live, those that we visit, and anything else that constitutes what we may see or do. Therefore our relationship to the environment which we experience is very location-dependant in terms of resources and environmental factors. For example, nomadic people who live in the desert lead drastically different lives to those who live in the rainforest or those who live in cities. In this way many different human cultures developed all over earth, and have had varying effects on the development of culture and tech nology. I believe that these different cultures provided different goals for each society that motivated technological innovations at different time and for different reasons. As we all, no doubt, see everyday the advent of technology has greatly affected our living environment. Twenty years ago hardly anyone had heard of the internet, and now it’s a worldwide information superhighway. People have made their lives revolve solely around the internet; fortunes have been won and lost on the computer industry. But there are countless other examples of how technology has molded and changed cultures, and so I also believe that technology and culture have a symbiotic relationship; they feed off of and grow from one another similar to what we have dubbed a feedback loop in our class discussions. There are many examples where cultural needs drive technological change, and inspire innovation. In many cases the most fundamental need of any human culture is the need to know what happens after we die, or the need to answer questions about things that happen outside of our control. Humans have used religion to help allay some of their fears of the unknown, and to help to explain why things are the way they are. â€Å"Religion is sort of like love—it’s difficult to define, yet everyone thinks he or she knows what it means. †¦Religious or spiritual belief is clearly both a product and a critical part of most human natures.