definition essay topics

definition essay topics

Exploring the Complexity of Modern Technology: A Definition Essay

1. Introduction to Modern Technology

New technology has always been complex. In fact, the social effects of technology have been a concern of thinkers since before the time of Aristotle. Following the scientific revolution of the 17th century, technology from an applied art (or discipline for artisans) became a sort of handmaiden to the sciences and a central feature of the Industrial Revolution. The new machines of the time “improved” many aspects of human life by making easier some human tasks and enabling new ones. Even then, though, the issue of mastery over technology was raised by philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. They argued, inter alia, that industrial and capitalistic civilization, in which machines played a particularly major role, caused a depersonalizing alienation from human community and nature. Other people saw technology as a force for democracy and a new stability that would surely strengthen Western Christianity and human reason.

The new technologies that surround us address a number of different human needs and problems. By presenting us with choices and challenges, these technologies make our lives more interesting and fulfilling. But such technologies can also be confusing, overpowering, and potentially destructive. They can create new problems faster than they solve old ones. They can seem to be out of human control and inscrutable. It is relatively easy for people to master some of the daily complexities of their cars, televisions, or telephones. But how do you cope with a genetic engineer or a satellite TV system or the lava flow of new materials and structures that may soon mean the obsolescence of so much of global architecture and industry?

2. Defining Technology in the 21st Century

Today, the only thing we can be sure about the continuing evolution of modern technology is that we cannot begin to anticipate the many amazing, wonderful and terrifying ways that the world of science, engineering and their implications will develop. The reality of modern technology is too fluid, too multidimensional, too bizarre to defy any but the most trivial descriptions, interpretations, or predictions. That situation seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Instead, the language that we all use to think and talk about modern technology is convoluted, stretched, ambiguous and infuriating. Most of all, we encounter enormous trouble and discomfort in trying to engage in discussions about how to represent, transmit, translate, transform and exchange modern technology with the tools we have available now, and those that we envision for the future.

Not so long ago, advanced technology was little more than a curiosity for the masses. Our lives combined a relatively small number of discrete technologies in a few basic areas of industry, products, and services. These unquestionably advanced far beyond the capabilities of the 18th and 19th century, but they remained within the grasp of popular comprehension. How quaint and simple the situation seems now, from the perspective of the year 2005! Science and technology have been marching steadily and inexorably through history, without any particular reason or restraint. Their progress has transformed the face of the earth in ways that are more and more difficult to anticipate, to understand, to explain or even to accept. Modern technology is a bewildering, confusing and magnificently rich set of ideas, practices, products, services and tools, constantly and rapidly evolving.

3. The Evolution and Impact of Digital Innovation

That control fostered the physical, management, intellectual and political breakdown of an era-corrupting, cost-plus incentive structured, obstacle-ridden and intransigent organization of the management of the American economy’s triumphant constructional and heavy manufacturing infrastructure. The upper and secondary economies based upon expense-accounted parties, land-grabbing credit unions, and bankrupt members residing in spec built communities fell to be replaced by a renting economy, based upon post-event managerial performance created take-home pay. Compliance with the “right” management of the post-war period began migrating to neighboring culture of traditional corporate capitalism by being downloaded from higher education to the basic educational level. The practical teaching of successive generations of American management skill set required for the exploitation of increasingly complex digital innovations has grown hollowed out by the transfer of basic job skills, corporate culture and in-house job training to other economies. These successful and slow-burning efforts have been carried out, with fanfare, under the flag of globalization – the long march of labor study from the disciplines of production, theory, and jurisprudence centered on creatures of their native land, from whom they semi-retired, pulling up the drawbridge behind them, as they slowly had their chips harvested and with a sympathetic pat on the head and a good-humored “parentizing” tweedle-dum and durrthourgh our house diarist started selling them to me from the theft of infrastructure reinvestment-generated growth entitlements the Chinese RMB became too expensive.

From the advent of modern information systems to the birth of the computer technology sector, a close reasoning with a disruptive force challenging the accumulator benefits of “lowest” cost through an increasingly complex array of digital innovations was established. Incepted with the innovations in science and engineering at the turn of World War II by using the technologies of the last great American technological era – the development of applications software requiring cost reductions in order to self-finance the preceding era’s accumulated infrastructure costs, as software – began a revolution in creating a largely automated and advanced understanding of the data produced by the innumerable new paradigms of production linked to the multimedia fulfillment of America’s Great Middle Class. These achievements were rapidly harnessed by managers in order to organize the information produced by cost-sensitive, increasingly standardized, advanced producers into a new group of industries which recognized the ability of the information in the new mid-twentieth century American economy to bear uninterruptible charges – telecommunications through being monitored and controlled by the new digital innovations.

4. Ethical Considerations in the Age of Technology

A number of papers and similar documents, produced by international or supranational bodies like the World Health Organization, the United Nations Organization, the European Council, the European Community, etc., indicate the present interest in such considerations. Classes or seminars are organized in increasing number in all parts of the world and at all academic levels, discussing these ethical problems. At first sight, this may be a reason for satisfaction. There seems, however, to exist some confusion. It concerns moral. The nature of this confusion reinforces the necessity to meet the problem within the context of a particular aspect of human existence, i.e., the education of the young in the age of technology. In the years to come, these young grow to a majority with a determined freedom of choice and increasing power regarding the attitude of man and gospel in the technological-cosmological framework.

As humankind creates, develops, and refines technology, a radar reaches farther and farther out into space, scope, and time. In the process, the consequences of different attitudes to technology become more and more important for our common future. In the Garden of Eden, the ways of the human being with nature did not have a major influence on what happened in the cosmos as a whole. In the world of today, it has. Does the image that now presents itself ask some ethical question concerning the use of the freedom of choice, in the real sense of the word, regarding the role technology plays in the history of man? And if it were the case that the answer to such questions could be given in the affirmative, would that not open new perspectives for rethinking education in a world which in this view is but one out of the many classrooms in which we in fact are to find our job in this universe?

5. Conclusion: Embracing the Diverse Facets of Modern Technology

In the early days, the word “technology” connoted craftsmanship and skill, and so its meaning was very specific and relatively narrow. Over the years, the word has evolved to stand not simply for movie gear, gadgetry, or tools, but rather for a larger concept. Technology represents modern humanity’s effort of mastery. Today, technology is a catch-all term for all human endeavors that bring options from design through manufacture and on until sale to consumers. Invented machine-based saws that are not operated by humans are called technology, even though they are created without any design, production, or sales people. Essentially, today technology encompasses so much that it has become enlarged to the size of the world it references. But by letting the term grow so capacious that it is synonymous with civilization, are we losing something precious?

In conclusion, when we embrace the many diverse facets of modern technology, we discover an unprecedented vastness, depth, and complexity. Our technological universe, the modern technium, offers a vast collection of wonders in which our values and trade-offs are reflected at a resolution so fine that all of us see our own reflection. By inciting new kinds of behavior and intuitions that reshape our norms and social expectations, technology aspires to do more than create products. Technology produces new forms of complexity and variety so that we can rise to address the perennial challenges of an ever-changing planet.