A Contrast of Perspectives: Technological Progress and the Present State of Human Civilization
There is no doubting how drastically different the way of life is now compared to, say, a million years ago. We as a species, are certainly a curious bunch and does not run short on studies about the topic of trying to figure out and answer questions pertaining to human life. From sociology, biology, geology, anthropology and history, all of these subjects suggest that we have just as much questions about the past, the future, and even about the present with regards to how human exsitence developed and has come to its present form today. There are many contrasting studies, opinions and explanations about this topic as well coming from different perspectives; from journalists, to anthropologist, philosophers and scientists. All of which have presented different explanations and certainly contributed to the knowledge and information that we have now about the topic of human life that we can now obtain faster than ever before. This new found power that we have developed and utilize today of being able to get a hold of the simplest to the most complex forms of information so easily is just another stage of development that human civilization have entered. Though, of course, this does not make it any less significant. Lenski, White, and Toffler takes us through the other significant stages that human civilization have gone through that has lead us to reach this current stage that we are experiencing and living in today. With their different experiences and expertise, each presenting their own unique perspective on the causes and effects of technology in shaping human civilization as we know it and also attempts to understand the nature of this technological process.
Starting off with Gerhard Lenski, who suggested that technological progress is the primary source and reason for the development of human civilization. With this statement, he attempt to further explain and simplify this idea by providing us with his four stages of communication and four levels of technological progress. In the four stages of communication, he enumerates t how humans have used the information that we transfer through genetics, shared experiences, logical reasoning and fact based-analysis and the mastery of language and the ability to create symbols and assign meaning to them, as the key to progression and the scause of our development as humans. He did this because he believes that the key to human progress is information and so he gives importance to the way we transfer those information since it is in this way that we are able to broaden our ideas on how to utilize the resources of the natural world. In Lenski’s proposition of the four levels of technological development, he gives emphasis on how humans have evolved their method and technology to obtain food and suggest that we can consider this development of methods as a center of technological progress.
Leslie White, on the other hand, as an anthropologist, focuses …
