Week 8

Reading Response: Technology, Survival

Kranzberg is known for his laws of technology, the first of which states

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

I was astonished when reading this line in Chapter 8, Artful Design. Especially, nor is it neutral. Growing up in mainland China after the millennium, I witnessed and was hugely influenced by the rapid growth of new economy that brings new technology. People's life changed so much that stagnation feels weird and almost immoral. My grandparents of both sides are all farmers who would be categorized as proletarians during the revolutional era. My grandmom went to middle school, and she and another girl are the only two reaching that level of education in her village. My mom went to a normal college to become a teacher. She needed to help with farming on vacations and take care of the growing family. After my birth, my dad bought a television, a camera, a CD/DVD player, and later a personal computer. I have grown up with digital technology. All the farming labor my parents did in the fields are distant to me. My parents developed different habits from my grandparents, and so did I. The first complete sentence I said to my dad was "dad, I wanna play the phone". And I remember how astonished he was when I figured out how to operate the computer by myself when I was about 5. It would be hard to tell how technology shapes my generation, but neutral would be the least creative description. My generation seems more sensitive, more adaptive to new things, and always craving more.

Being a user of new technology, I hardly thought about whether it's good or bad. It was after I went to college and majored in computer science that I gradually learned how to "judge". Most Chinese people, like me, are super adaptive to new things. We excel at going with the flow after thousands of years of wars and changing of dynasties -- we actually don't have the power to choose. Chinese people know this, accept this, and live with this. We can perhaps make an analogy between the recent dozens of years in China and the Age of Enlightenment in the Europe. Suddenly we realized that technology is the thing we can choose and control. We can design and manufacture things to really make a difference. While postmodernism prevails in the Europe and America, China seems still holding its modernistic optimism. Frankenstein's tragedy is still not well-known by developing countries.

It is thus sarcastic that Principle 8.12 states

Worthiness of survival is a stronger notion than survival itself.

Survival is the most important thing for ordinary Chinese people all the time. Only the ones that own a good living have this sweet philosophical worry. I agreed with Sartre very much on his "existence precedes essence", since essence won't even show up when existence is still a problem. However, Ge's observation makes sense in its own way. It's funny that we seldomly care about an ordinary householder's life back in Qin Dynasty, but instead always fanatic on the great emperor's deeds. It is the worthiness of survival (only eminent people possessed) that outshines the survival itself (ordinary people strived to make).

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