Technopolies
After reading through the text our blog was supposed to be on, the idea of technology (being what it is, if it is good or bad, and all sorts of questions), lead me to the idea of a Technopoly. Its a term Ive never heard before, but in my mind it gets split in two. "Techno" coming from the word technology and "poly" which is commonly known as many. Technology would be that which something is made to improve or change something else and often deals with modern ideas of computers due to the massive change they have made upon our society.
Monopoly, split up Mono and poly, deals with a market being run by a single dominate company. When we split up the word Technopoly, the idea seems to come to "many technologies" or even possibly playing a commonality with the term Monopoly, which then it would mean more closely to "a single available technology".
Dealing with my first idea, the idea of it being "many technologies", brings along the ideas of our acceptance of new and numerous technologies all the time without looking at possible problems with that certain technology. This seems to go more hand in hand with what we were to read for our blog than my second possible idea of what a technopoly meant.
Continuing with my first idea, the one which seems to look more correct, and understanding how it relates with technology as an order of nature, technology is a great tool in assisting people to do things quicker and better, but sometimes at a cost. This cost is what we have to weight to decide whether its worth using the technological advancement or not. This is where morals comes in, and people begin disagreeing.
The problem here becomes that which technology begins to try and solve other problems caused by technology, and that new technology creates a new problem, sometimes worse than the original problem.
Its before this happens that we have to think about these problems in advance, and how quickly we can correct them if they were to occur, and at what cost. Unfortunately, in our society we tend to do now, and think later, because otherwise, someone else will have already done it first.
All of this becomes a giant problem, and things end up getting solved as we progress along accepting these new technologies right away. Whether this is the best way to handle things or not, many people disagree, but as long as our society stays the way it is, I dont think it will change very much as long as the rewards are there.
(Unfortunately, no pictures today. I guess I couldnt figure out how to turn these thoughts into visual form.)