Technology and Social Change

Broadly defined technology may be defined as a body of applied knowledge and its material embodiments designed to enhance man’s mastery over social and natural environment. Together with values, music etc, technology makes up the totality known as culture of all aspects of socio-cultural existence, technology has been already force of change.  It was technology, which force man away from the rest of the biological species within the evolutionary continuum, and put him into the course of the peculiarly human process of socio cultural evolution.

Many of the changes that we are witnessing today have been due to the application of technology to a variety of problems.  We are not exaggerating when we say that human history began with the use of simple tools to master nature.  But in doing so, as Marx and Engles have pointed out, human beings exchanged themselves – by changing their physical constitution, especially the brain and social organization.  The pervasive use of technology in every aspect of life has prompted a good deal of soul searching directed at as certainness the degree to which technology has    acquired an existence of its own independent of its chairman creators.

One of the most extreme expressions of the concern over the independence of technology is found in Jacques Ellul’s ‘the technological society’.  Ellul claims that in modern industrial societies technologism has engulfed every aspect of social existence in much the same way Catholicism did in the middle ages. To date, the loss of human freedom and the large-scale destruction of human beings through the use of technology, has not been due to the fact that man thinks like marry with socially situated motives, values and class interests.  However, whatever the motivation of human action, the increasing use of certain types of technology has begun to threaten the life support systems of the earth as a whole.  This applies as much to the depletion of certain fishing sites as to the escape of radioactive substances into the environment.