Technology for Better or Worse

Introduction

Since the beginning of time, the goal of humans was to improve their way of life. Technology helps with this improvement. From the Aztecs to the Egyptians, you can see that both of them, over time, developed into great technological cultures. Both cultures have technological interest. The Aztecs have their great temples and the Egyptians have the marvelous pyramids. Their society and culture flourished, but can ours? It used to be nature that made us follow traditional roles in our everyday lives. Now it is technology. This technological environment forces us to look at everything in a technology based way. Many people today are starting to wonder, Do advances in technology actually make our lives easier? Is too much television affecting us, and how can it help us? Television is good and bad. It is how we look at it that determines if it is actually affecting us in bad ways. Are we saving more time by having lightning fast internet, or are we just on the computer more often? Is technology affecting us and our children? There is no 100% correct answer. Many studies show that technology is good and bad. Where would we be without the computer or the internet? Probably still relying on the old paper and pencil method and doing all our research with books. Books aren't bad by any means, because researching on the internet will give you 5,000,000 hit for a term and more than half will not be relevant. Technology has helped us in certain ways and has made things more complicated in other ways. Many of us know that big businesses, such as Hiram Walker rely on technology to get from day to day. No matter what, technology will keep changing and it's up to us to keep up with it.

The first thing that comes to mind are the big businesses or the companies that strive on technology to survive, are they being affected? Of course and it is much worse than the normal student or person experiences. For example, the exploding Ford Pintos, or Dodge Trucks catching fire, are both very popular cars from popular companies that cannot afford mistakes with technology that does not fit. The cost of productivity and business losses is because of network downtime; and it continues to rise as organizations rely a lot on their networks. Industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that the hourly cost of network downtime is $42,000 (www.epicenterinnovations.com). A typical business experiences about 87 hours of downtime a year (www.masternewmedia.org), which totals a loss of more than $3.6 million (Richard 1997). Businesses like creative Zen are struggling because they cannot keep up with the new technology that Apple keeps creating which caused them to lose 114 million in March alone and 84% decrease in sales. There are countless companies that are just like that and cannot keep up with changing technology. Therefore, start to lose a lot of sales.

Developments related to communication: computer, email, video conferencing, flash memory, ...