Technology is on the Run

I was recently talking to my grandfather for the Sociology assignment that’s due next week, and he said something that really caught my attention. He said that when computers first started coming into the picture, it was like every year that a new one came out, and the old ones became obsolete and out-of-date. If you think how far we have come in just 50 years, it’s absolutely astonishing. Thinking 50 years back, we didn’t have computers, or cell phones, or ipods, or video games. They used radios and record players and shared phone lines and no computers at all.

As we continue into the future and our technology continues to grow, where do we go from here? Think 50 years from today and what do you have? It’s almost unconceivable. Now with our touch screen ipods and phones and laptops that can either be tiny little things, or huge, blow you away moniters, what comes next? How will society change with these advances? How will we adapt to it?

Down the road, will we still look at society the same? If we think back to how we used to perceive society, compared to how we study it today, it has made changes. Sociologists have come up with new ideas and perspectives to break down society to understand it a little better. Now in time, we look at the sociological perspective that show us that society functions because of the social strata. Structural Functionalism says that we need people in poverty because it stablizes the rest of society. The upper class makes money from creating jobs for the lower classes and the lower classes do the work that the upper classes won’t necessarily do.

But what happens if one day society changes, like technology, and the poor find a way to work their way up the ladder? It’s true that we will always have social classes and some people will be on the bottom of the chain and others on the top. However, in time, I think that the lower class will have a new definition and it will require us to look at society in a new light, with new ideas. The point is, like technology, society changes and this means that in the future, we will have unconceivable technologies as well as ideas and ways of defining a society.

Lauren Downs

This entry was posted on 12. November 2009 at 22:59 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.