Hope for Technological Future
by: Mark Edward D.R. Bayle
“This will help you, this will ease your work, and it will make you better.” This phrase is very inviting and can easily catch one’s attention and we usually hear these phrases when some advertisements are inviting us to buy technological gadgets. We will often hear good and sweet-sounding words from them to convince us. We may accept or reject the things or experiences that are happening to us, but we must accept the fact and face our reality that nowadays, most of us are being invaded or influenced by a lot of technological gadgets and it is continuously developing through different experiments and researches conducted by several experts in science. These different developments help in various tasks easily. Multitasking is one of the best help or things that technology teaches. It is doing one thing and at the same time doing another thing. Like, cooking while watching television and there are many other helpful things that technology gave to us. But the effects of these different technological gadgets depend on us who is the one using them. It can be either bad or good.
One of the worst things that can happen to a man is not knowing himself. There are many factors that we can consider why such things as this can happen to a man. For example Family, Friends, and Society. Society specifically the famous “netizens” or those people who are actively using social media in order to voice out their different opinions and to communicate with others. A man who will depend on these social norms in using different technological gadgets especially social media as means of communication will in turn be conditioned that using social media is better than chatting face to face with someone. The effect of all these factors and unceasing developments to a man who is not well developing is the brokenness of life specifically in terms of his virtue and conscience development. Moreover, the person might be like a puppet operated by somebody else; no decision for his own and always depend on his life on what others say about him.
Just like a child who is full of hopes and dreams for her life and for the world, she faces now the reality of life that is run by chronological gadgets, and through its continuous development who knows one day, we cannot anymore distinguish a man between and a robot. God is dead. This is one of the famous lines of the Contemporary philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He explains “The death of God is not just the death of a deity: it is also the death of all the so-called higher values that we have inherited”[1] This is where I want to emphasize my point. Just like a kid having her own inherited set of values and the need for the continuous development of it. Yet, the world that she has stepped into and facing is run by technology. Technology wants to focus people only on the development and comfort that it brings and in turn, it weakens people’s internal development to be specific in virtue and conscience development. Our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal once said “Ang kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan” (Our youth is the hope of our country). But how can the statement of Dr. Rizal be true if we are the ones destroying our youth’s hope and hindering their development in terms of virtue and conscience through our irresponsibility in using the technology and lack of guidance to them in using it? We kill the values by not developing them.
To sum up, Technology makes our tasks more easy and more light for us. We cannot wipe away this fact. But, all things have their advantages and disadvantages. So I think the disadvantage of technology is that it wants to catch all the man’s attention and in turn, the man will have no time for himself causing him to not develop the virtue and conscience that he has. Nevertheless, all the good and bad effects of technology only depend on the one who is using it. So the responsibility is in our own hands.
[1]Will Buckingham, Douglas Burnham, Clive Hill, et. al., The Philosophy Book, (Great Britain: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2011), 1.
