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Technology, broadly defined as the use of tools, has a long history. Ever since Erg the caveman first conked an animal with a rock, people have been using technology. For thousands of years, the use of tools allowed people to move ever closer together. Because fields could be cultivated and the technology to store food existed, people would live in cities rather than in small nomadic tribes. Only very lately have Erg’s descendants come to question the benefits of technology. The Industrial Revolution introduced and spread technologies that mechanized many tasks. As a result of the drive toward more efficient production and distribution (so the ever larger cities would be supported), people began to act as cogs in the technological machine. Clothing was no longer produced by groups of women sewing and gossiping together, but by down-trodden automation’s operating machinery in grim factories.

The benefits of the new technology of today, computers and the internet, are particularly ambiguous. They have made work ever more efficient and knit the world together in a web of information and phone lines. Some visionaries speak of a world in which Erg need not check in to his office; he can just dial in from home. He won’t need to go to a bar to pick up women because there are all those chat rooms. Hungry? Erg orders his groceries from an online delivery service. Bored? Download a new game. And yet...

Many people, myself included, are a little queasy about that vision. Erg may be doing work, but is it real work? Are his online friends real friends? Does anything count in a spiritual way if it’s just digital? Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been haunted by the prospect that we are turning into our machines: efficient, productive, souless. The newest technologies, we fear, are making us flat as our screens, turning us into streams of bits of interchangable data. We may know a lot of people, but we have few real friends. We have a lot of things to do, but no reason to do them. In short, the new technology emphasizes a spiritual crisis that has been building for quite some time.

Test2

"The media (books, film, music, television, for example) tend to create rather than reflect the values of a society."

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For our grandparents it occurred through films and books. For the baby boomers it was a result of television and revolutionary music. No matter how the impact took place, it is clear that since its very advent, the media have played a crucial role in not simply being representative of the values of our society but creating them as well.

During the roaring twenties Americans found themselves in a struggle between the old ways of their ancestors and the new ways of the future. The once steadfast beliefs that men and women should not touch while dancing, and that ladies should not drink or smoke were suddenly being challenged. from where was all this rebellion stemming? Partly it was due to the returning doughboys from the shores of Europe bringing home revolutionary ideas they had encountered while at war. Nonetheless, returning soldiers could not be held responsible for the social upheaval that America experienced. There had to be another cause, and there was, the media. Although the films of the era were silent they spoke volumes to the society for which they were created. Women in these movies wore their hemlines a few inches shorter than the decade before them and they wore cosmetics to accentuate their new bobbed haircuts. The movies, as well as the books of that era, demonstrated a new materialistic attitude that America had never before experienced. Films portrayed every character as having the money to buy a new car, drink, smoke and partake in the leisures of life, a philosophy that was soon adopted by the youth of the decade. The use of the media in the twenties was to serve as a catalyst for the revolutionary ideas that were circulating. The films and books of that era sped America along its path of change that eventually led to the greatest social unrest that the United States had ever known.