Technopolies
I was very interested in reading about technopolies because they truly have a significant impact on our world. As stated in lecture, “Technology neither adds nor subtracts. It is ecological. It changes everything.� I believe that most of society doesn’t realize how technology has changed the way our society works over the years. Just look back at how our parents and grandparents lived their lives and you can see the differences. For example, my mom was one of thirteen kids growing up on a farm with one or two cars, depending on the year. To go out to dinner they fifteen people would have to jam in ten seats, which explains why this rarely happened. Today, many families have a car for every driver living at home, and in some cases an extra car for summer or someone who will become a driver. In my opinion, automobiles as a technopoly have had one of the biggest impacts on our world.
Cars have changed where we live, people were able to move further away from the city and commute to the city to work or to buy things. They have changed the way we consume. We can easily drive to a store anywhere around the cities and deliveries will get to us much faster than before. Automobiles have changed our exercise habits. When we have cars to get everywhere we all walk a lot less and get a lot less exercise. In my opinion, the greatest negative impact that cars have had on our world is the environmental impact.
The amount of smog that has been created by automobiles is significant. At least in the last several years we have realized what a problem this is, what with global warming and the hole in the ozone, and begun the building of hybrid cars.
Building these vehicles will greatly help with this problem, but the issue is, is that it is taking a long time to get these cars out in the market and the first models are expensive. It will still take many years for hybrid cars to really get into many garages around the world. The other reason we need to switch to less fuel dependant on automobiles, they way they are today, is because as a nation we are very dependant on foreign oil. I believe that many of our relations with third world countries is based on oil, and the sooner we become more self-sufficient and less dependant on other countries. Switching to hybrid cars will help to move us in this direction, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
Obviously vehicles have brought many advantages, but just like all technopolies/technological advancements there is a negative side. We should not stop making new advancements in technology, but be aware that they will have a downside and ready to help fix those problems as soon as we see there presence.