Aging and Technological Advances in Telecommunications

Abstract

There is both the temptation and the hazard for casting technology and its promise-,in either a heroic or a villainous role. Whether, for example, the home washing machine is a boon or a bane depends on whether you are a laundry man, laundress or homemaker. Today, more people are washing their own clothes than ever before in the twentieth century. The issue was put somewhat more elegantly in Ellul’s account of the technological phenomenon in our twentieth century society (Ellul, 1964). He urged that modern technology is, or soon would be, completely autonomous, that it had its own imperatives which could only be reconciled with human values with difficulty and that it soon was, or soon would be out of effective human control. Men, he argued, had become slaves of the servant.