Poised motionless near the back door of the twentieth-century, we ponder memories of the past with a daydreaming stare. Before we turn off the lights and lock the doors of the twentieth-century, we take one last look through the century in which we were nurtured and our world lived for so long. The deep engraved scratches upon the walls of the twentieth century serve to jog our national memory to painful events as well as amazing accomplishments. After much reflective thought, we began to grasp how much our world has changed from when we first entered the front door of the twentieth century over ninety-nine years ago.
America and much of the world have been industrialized, modernized, urbanized, commercialized and de-christianized. We have thrown out perennial philosophies, centuries old, which reveal timeless insights into the ultimate meaning of life. Noble pursuits of the changeless purpose of life have been lost among a passionate desire to be like the pop cultural icons of our times. Our attitudes toward religious faith have surrounded our nation with a mordant atmosphere. While our technological ingenuity has made our technologies the envy of the world; and the phenomenon of our pop culture has created lucrative markets and has made our nation a capitalist wonderland; our inconsequential attitude toward religious faith has demoralized us and has lead to psychological and sociological degradation, and the embrace by our nation of psychosexual behavior. The one thing that remains constant in our ever-evolving society is the law of the farm. The technological advances of the twentieth-century are astounding. From the primitive tools of antiquity to the most complex large-scale technological systems of the twentieth-century, our technology has affected global societies and has impacted the history of our culture right down to the present.
The Essay on Western Society World Culture Nations
Upon flipping to the business section of the New York Times an Ohio University student saw a startling headline glaring back at her "American Corporations Suspected In Millions of Third World Deaths." As she read the article it became apparent that international corporations many of which were based in the United States exploit the poorest of the poor. These companies paid workers extremely low ...
Technology has characterized humankind since his earliest days when it yielded only objects of art. There was no orientation toward experimental sciences in the modern sense, nor were there any scientific production methods. For the most part, mechanical inventions were devised to illustrate science, to show the power of scientific demonstrations, or to amaze the public with little or no cultural impact. The progress of medieval technology was constrained. The craftsman was hidebound, working exactly as his forefathers had, using their experience as a guide. Fearful of competition, innovations and inventions were opposed. They were viewed as repugnant or as encroaching. Inventors were persecuted and their inventions were banned along with the products based on them, as well as advertising for them, especially if they promised goods for prices lower than those set by the guilds of that day. One example is a declaration of a municipal council in Cologne, France in 1412: “Let it be known that a Walter Kesenger came to us with a proposal to build a wheel for spinning silk threads. After deliberation and discussion with their friends, the council has found that many people in our city who spin silk for a living would be ruined. It has therefore been declared that no spinning wheel shall be built and installed, now or at any time hereafter,” (unknown).
We thank God that technology eventually came to be a possibility in the Renaissance. Technology eventually joined craftsman, scientist and engineer and it became common for an inventor to claim rights.
The Essay on Systems Development Lifecycle
SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE SYSTEM INVESTIGATION Problem Statement XYZ Ceramic Supply is a growing company in the arts and craft supply industry, which consist of three stores located in Northern California. XYZ Ceramic Supply is a small company with a limited budget, and is growing fast, they are eager to rectify their existing problems through the use of automation. Problem with Existing ...
At the end of the twentieth-century, we see technology as something without which, we can not live. Through highly sophisticated technological systems, humankind is not only able to create new realities, but our technology has taken on a life of itself and is recreating humankind. Technology has joined forces with experimental science and through this joint venture, we are able, willing, and even excited to manipulate nature. We have developed all kinds of advanced technologies, which we will take with us into the twenty-first century. Our social technology involves the organizational design of societies, from the local to the global. It is so powerful that we must be aware of the limits of designing a culture to avoid social engineering because a society cannot be totally artificial. Then there is information technology, which include the use of Artificial Intelligence to produce new sorts of information systems designs. The Internet is one of those designs. This technology will undoubtedly conquer the twenty-first century before we will know what hit us. The Internet is probably the most powerful weapon of neocolonialism since television. Then there is biotechnology, which has created a special need for a new sort of engineering ethics to emphasize the limits of technological development imposed by the biological nature of human beings.
Our environmental technology continues to demand sustainable development, for setting limits on other technological developments by emphasizing the place of human kind within the biosphere. On the one hand, one may argue that technology is ‘neutral’ (neither good nor bad in itself), and that what counts is not our technology but the way in which we are using it. As the folk saying has it, ‘A good worker doesn’t blame the tools’. So if we choose to use technologies for repressive rather than liberating purposes we have only ourselves to blame. On the other hand, one may insist on the non-neutrality of technology, arguing that we cannot merely ‘use’ technology without also, to some extent, being influenced or ‘used by’ the technologies we created. We have become conditioned by our technological systems and their environmental by-products. Our technologies are ‘alive’ they are not neutral and their use contribute to shaping our purposes. Winston Churchill wisely declared that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’ (Dubos 1970, p. 171), and John Culkin declared that ‘we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us’ (Stearn 1968, p. 60).
The Essay on Technology Vs. Culture
Technology and Culture have both influenced each other equally. Technology has been directed as an improvement in our lives, but on the other hand, Culture has been present in every invention, noticeable or not, and advancement in our evolving society. Technology is becoming focused upon more and more everyday, but culture is the determining factor that decides if there is a necessity for an ...
Technologies that brought us the printing press, the computer, and television are not simply technological systems which convey information, they are scratched mirrors through which we try to conceptualize our physical existence in one way or another. Technology is reclassifying the world for us. It has, sequenced, framed, enlarged, and reduced, our world until we are no longer sure of anything. Through these ‘media metaphors,’ we no longer see the world as it is, but in the images recreated by our technologies and their awesome power. It appears that the last quarter of the twentieth-century will end with popular culture winning over every other culture of the planet. Pop culture continues to dominate every other culture: from high culture, with its artifacts of classical music, fine art, literature and philosophy, to folk culture with its diverse ethnic artifacts. In our pop culture, the religious ethics, which usually counter the common place evils of lust, materialism, pride, ET, no longer apply.
Pop culture has virtually overcome the natural counterculture effect of Christianity. Today indulgences and short-term pleasures have pride of life. Advertising messages are in all environments from grocery stores and streets to hospitals, bedrooms, classrooms and churches. Then there are movies, television, music videos and the like, which all add unprecedented commercial and symbolic saturation to our lives. Secularism, humanism, materialism, commercialism, and consumerism are the forces enabling pop cultural trends to successfully resist the positive counterculture pressures of Christian ethics that once preserved our national values. Nothing is sacred anymore. Insofar as our religious faith is concerned, we now require explanations as to why we should have faith in God. Particularly for those, young Americans who were raised up in a highly commercialized pop culture with no feudal historic memory to remind them that religious faith was once hailed as an important value.
Our religious faith “?is an imaginative ‘cultural system’,” a collection of symbols, images and stories organized to give meaning to religious phenomena impinging our national consciousness. These artifacts and stories provide answers to the issues of the ultimate meaning of life and explain what the world is. It used to be that the majority of us parented within American society were brought up as a Protestant or Catholic with strong religious faith. Our religious faith, with its symbols, images, and stories, provided us with templates for shaping human response to the world at large and to ultimately shape the world in which we lived. For Protestant’s, religious faith was that of an individualist, because of an imagination of society as “sinful and God-forsaken.” For the Catholic, religious faith was that of a communitarian because of an imagination of society as sacramental, that is, revelatory of God.
The Essay on Cultures of the new world
When the New World was discovered, Native American peoples had spread throughout North and South America. Often they were hunter/gatherers, but they had established various civilizations. The Europeans considered themselves far superior to these natives, and European arrival invariably led to native peoples being subjected to European rule. The Europeans brought superior weapons such as fire-arms, ...
Today, as the twentieth-century winds down, the developed world prepares to take with them into the twenty-first century an era of secular humanism and materialism and a skepticism where matters of religious faith have become a vexatious notion. Case in point: in Spain, the Church was once viewed as an important ally of the Spanish government. The alliance between the sword and the cross gave birth to a clerical power exercised through dogmatic teaching, which in Spain’s traditional society became an efficient instrument of social control. Later, the natural counter cultural characteristics of religion countered certain moral aspects of Spain’s modernization and thus provoked the development of a widely anticlerical culture. As religious skepticism prevailed throughout Spain, decline of clericalism was and is associated with the rise of modernization processes throughout the country. Some argue that the relationship between forces of clericalism and anticlericalism shaped both institutions of church and state in indelible ways. It is interesting; however, to note that as clerical power was ending in Spain, in that same decade they registered the highest number of priest resignations. While at the same time the number of practicing Catholics began to decline sharply. So it is not surprising that as clerical control diminished, the religious socialization of Spain’s young people also declined. Moreover, among the younger generations, they observed a rise of a basic religious culture that plays down religious faith issues and enables the young to share in the pop culture of the West as a whole. One must admit that it is widely accepted that democratic rule can only work if economy, culture, social relationships, and policy making are free from religious, and particularly clerical control, (that is, only if all these become really autonomous domains).
The Research paper on United Kingdom and Modern British Culture
Each contributor looks at the language through which culture is formed and expressed, at the political and institutional trends that shape culture and at the role of culture in daily life. This interesting and informative account of modern British culture embraces controversy and debate and never loses sight of the fact that Britain and Britishness must always be understood in relation to the ...
However, it is most disturbing that the tragedy of our skepticism will roll over into the twenty-first century and will continue to influence our institutions with an uncertain ending.
The permanencies of life, like our religious values and ethics, have been all but abandoned for the immediate and contemporary elements of our pop culture, which are often subject to rapid changes. It seems the only permanency of life that remains is the farm. It stands alone as an antediluvian landmark contrasting the contemporary component of pop culture and reminding us of the rewards of hard work. Neither our technological prowess nor the wonder of our pop culture can prevail on the farm. On the farm the ground will reward only those who have worked its soil. Therefore, no matter how great your technological systems, you can only reap if you have planted and your harvest will require of you a good strong work ethic. If we ponder natural systems of the farm, we learn that we can not fake the harvest. The bible reads, “While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease,” (Geneses 8:22).
You reap only what you have sown through your labor and hard work. Today our technology not only makes it possible to fake the harvest but it enables us to manipulate nature so that we are able to reap a harvest of genetically engineered produce that are incapable of reproduction.
A casual visit to the university and college campuses across America will reveal the prevailing states of mind of our young people. Their mindset falls short of visionary or creative thinker. They simply want to go to school, to make the grades, to get the degree, to get the job, to make the money, so they can buy the things, that will make them can look successful. They have learned to fake the harvest. It should be a requirement for graduation that our young people have to work the farm for one year. America’s young people seem to be puppets of our pop culture, victims of our technological ingenuity, religious renegades, and now for the scary part, the future leaders of our great institutions. In conclusion, one enters the twenty-first century pondering many questions. Will we regain traditional religious faith, will it persist throughout the twenty-first century, and will it have some positive influence on our world-view? Will our technologies eventually be the cause of the demise of our nation? Will our pop culture eventually destroy our creative ability and innate survival skills and make us numb to the real purpose of life? One can only pray that pride in our technological prowess, our worldly desires for the immediate and contemporary elements of our pop culture, and our infidelity does not negatively influence our world-view and lead our nation to a path of self-termination. To be sure, the writer does not suffer from melancholia; these are the most exciting of all times recorded within the historical archives. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, we are privileged with life, technologies, and a wealth of experience and opportunities, to create a finer world for our posterity and ourselves.
Started University Time Work Make
I never realised how important time is until I started university. Getting the best out of you studies in university is forgoing one thing for another. (opportunity cost). When I first started university I was working full time. As time went by I realised that I just could not cope, so I decided to work part-time while studying. I can now cope better with my school work load and can produce a ...
