Technological/cultural determinism

I think that this reading truly shows that you can’t be completely connected to one of the polar ends of the argument between technological determinism and cultural determinism.  We, as humans, make decisions everyday to create new technologies and to adapt and “improve” the ones we have.  But!  This choice is not part of the equation when we say guns kill people or people kill people.  Guns already exist, we can’t choose for them to exist or not.  The technology is here and being used to kill every day.  People make decisions to kill and you can base that decision on technology as well.  It could be argued that televisions, video games, and the internet lead people to kill as much as a gun does.  The choice that we have comes down to the individual and the price of losing our individuality is what keeps us pushing for new technologies and new uses for them.  Only in a world where everyone thought the same and acted the same could there be a way to completely control the use of technology. 

It is similar to Murphy’s law, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”  Any use that can be thought of for a new technology will tempt someone in the world to use it for that purpose.  By "nature", technologies will be used for and modified to complete almost any task someone can think of whether it is good or bad.  Technology and its rewards, be it power, money, safety, etc make them irresistible.  It only takes one person to make the decision to take the next step, to take things to the next level, and to fuel something like the weapons races.  When one person makes the next best thing, someone else will show them up.  Cultural determinism can then step in by altering the way we view a technology.  This could stop the use of technology before it happens by raising our children to view the world in such a way that that use would never be needed or conceived.  The problem is seeing these uses and technologies emerging before they do.  All we can do is focus on what we believe is truly right and sticking to the morals we have whether they come from religion, family, or anywhere else.  We may not be able to fathom a different use for a known technology but someone who is born ten, twenty, thirty years down the road will find another use or another way to change things to benefit life as we know it or benefit themselves. 

Technology can be an awful thing that causes us to lose loved one but it can save them too.  We can’t focus on the fact that bad things are possible and we can’t focus on the existence of things that can hurt us.  Every person has a choice and because of that someone will choose to do what we don’t want them to.  The very nature of technology fits into the world of both technological determinism and cultural determinism.  As a culture we need to make the decision to create world we want to live it, which includes being aware of the technologies that we create and what use they may have down the road.