Sociologists who have studies this issue point out that the problem is not one of humans being dominated by machines but, rather, one of depending on technology to meet a wide and growing range of human needs. The Three Mile Island power plant provided electricity for thousands of homes and businesses; the Bhopal facility produced a pesticide that made possible larger harvests of much needed grain. The result of our dependence on the benefits of complex technologies is an increasingly complex set of organizations and procedures for putting those technologies to work. This requires more human effort and skill, and the chances of error and breakdown are greater. The point is not that technology is out of control but that often there is a lag between the introduction of new technologies and the development of adequate controls over the application of those technologies.
One of the main issues that concerns social scientists in this regard is why such lags occur. Consider the problem known as wind shear. In recent years numerous major plane crashes have been caused by sudden downdrafts associated with severe thunderstorms on the approaches to airport runways. These downdrafts literally slam large aircraft to the ground. Industry and government officials have known about the wind-shear problem since at least 1975, when an Eastern Airlines jet crashed at New York’s Kennedy Airport under such conditions. But not until a similar crash occurred in New Orleans in 1984 were airports ordered to install instruments that could predict such conditions. Why the delay? Some sociologists have argued that the pressure on corporations to show a profit causes them to neglect spending on safety measures. Others, taking a more functionalist view, tend to explain such lags in terms of the time required for organizations to recognize the causes of the problem and develop new statuses and roles to cope with them.
9. Technology and Social Change
The obvious importance of technology to human cultural and social evolution has led some sociologists to view technology as a basic principle of social change. The classic statement of this view is that of William Fielding Ogburn. Ogburn hypothesized that inventions affect the size of populations, which in turn influences the course of history. (For example, overpopulation often leads to wars and migrations.) Some inventions affect population directly: Improvement in sanitation, the development of cures for fatal illnesses, and more effective contraceptive techniques are examples. But inventions can also have indirect effects on population. For example, techniques that improve crop yields or permit long-term storage of food surpluses make it possible to support a larger population with a given amount of farmland. And improvement in military technology (e.g., the use of horses in warfare, the invention of gunpowder, and the development of the armored tank) have had dramatic effects on the conduct of war and hence on population size.
Ogburn also proposed the theory known as cultural leg. In his words, “A cultural lag occurs when one of two parts of culture which are correlated changes before or in greater degree than the other part does, thereby causing less adjustment between the two parts than existed previously”. This theory is most often applied to the adaptation of social institutions to changing technologies. For example, the industrial revolution gave birth to too many kinds of machines, often with moving parts that made them dangerous to use. The rates of injury and death resulting from industrial accidents climbed rapidly in the decades following the introduction of the new machines to the United States around 1870. Such accidents spelled disaster for workers and their families, since it was hard to prove that the employer was responsible for the accident. It was not until around 1910 that the concepts of employer liability and worker’s compensation were adopted, a lag of about forty years. 感谢您阅读《ScienceandTechnolo 》一文，出国留学网(liuxue86.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。
