LAS 432 Week 2 DQ 2 Technology and Social Change

This archive of LAS 432 Week 2 DQ 2 Technology and Social Change includes:

In what way (or ways) is the current Knowledge Revolution a child of the industrial revolution? Is this a new revolution or simply an extension of the 18th-century revolution? Given the history, is it perhaps more appropriate to call the current revolution a Communications Revolution?

How important could the 18th century possibly be to our lives in the contemporary world? To answer this question you will need to know something about how the Industrial Revolution changed the world that Europeans lived in. Historians divide up the world history into neat categories: middle Ages, Bronze Age, Cold War etc. Unfortunately real life is a little more complicated and these breaks are helpful but more or less arbitrary. People who lived in these periods generally did not feel them the way we understand them in hindsight. This may affect the way you answer this question.

Were those so-called labor saving devices intended to expand the leisure of women or “free” them so they could enter the market place and keep down wages by expanding the labor market. Do women really work less now or actually work more because they work outside the home and then also inside the home.

you seem to see the “labor-saving” devices for women as liberating. Now free to seek a career sounds very good. But realistically are women “free” to work or are they forced to work outside the home by economic necessity? Who pays for all those “labor saving” devices? Do women work outside the home because they want to or because they need to? What has happened to the marriage/divorce rate since those “labor-saving” devices have been invented?

The “revolution” may appear very fast to use in retrospect but it actually covered 7 generations of people. The key to the “revolutions” are not the machines. Humans have made clever machines since the beginning of time. The key is the adaptation of chemical power to those machines to make the machine do the work using non-human energy. So burning fuel to produce steam to power the machines was the key. Later other fuels were used and then electricity was utilized as a power source..

North Korea and Iran were “allowed” to develop nuclear weapons? You mean we are allowed to have nuclear weapons and they are not? Can you explain that?

Do you think the picture might look very different from Iran and North Korea . There are no Iranian troops next door to us in Canada and no North Korean troops next door to us in Mexico. Just suggesting that our world view is our world view. Do you think we should consider the views of other countries when making policy?

Would all that storage and retrieval of information have been possible without the Industrial revolution? Why is our current development not simply a continuation of the Industrial Revolution. Specialized information jobs increased rapidly as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Clerks, accountants, billing experts etc all developed hundreds of years ago, isn’t our information technology just a bunch of bells and whistles to allow those information people to do it faster and cheaper? Mass circulation newspapers have been in production since the first quarter of the 19th century. Doesn’t the internet just do that faster? That sounds like continued development more than “revolutions” doesen’t it?

Didn’t the “knowledge” revolution begin in the 15th century in the West when Gutenberg made the first mass produced books with the printing press. China did it several centuries earlier.

But do these changes represent a Knowledge Revolution or a Communications Revolution?

Energy is certainly one of our challenges. As we require machines to do more and more for us the energy demand to run the machines grows and grows. Particularly as what we used to call the “third world” developed their own machine applications the demand for energy is shooting up.

The name for people who work to stifle new technology are often called Luddites after John Ludd, an Englishman, a weaver by trade who stimulated an attack on power driven looms in England early in the Industrial Revolution. They failed. Do you think that may have a different outcome sometime in the future.

An important point . Just how does the internet differ from a 19th century newspaper?