Technology brings together culture. Culture embodies technology. But how does embodiment take place?

Filipinos’ pastoral way of tilling lands became the remarkable condition to ignite advanced mechanisms. From the inhumane use of carabaos to mechanical plowing, culture has set a new dimension of workability. Because of the underlying social changes, culture needs to integrate new technology.

In the context of the historical account of technology in the first industrial revolution, it was assumed as a harmless tool for the improvement of work and to end exhaustions in the work of unskilled laborers. However, the second industrial revolution or during the Machine Age, technology had been addressed as a threat to human life and values. As debate evolved, technophiles admissibly put a demarcation that technology is neither good nor bad. Technology only becomes a threat or a nonthreatening agent depending on how it is put to use.

For Filipinos, the problem of development goes with the very nature of how the social institutions react to the speedy transformation of technology. When institutions are lagged behind, the tendency is a total twist and makeshift of facing technological mobility which comes to an unprepared end.

With the global era spearheading the use of technology, the ability of the nation-states to develop depends upon the creation of a broad-based social capability to master the forces useful for development. For Peter Drucker, a knowledge society is an indispensable factor of production. Hence, the role of education is always a demand to creating knowledgeable human resources. With the transfer of obligation from a non-resonant society to a knowledge society, another great undertaking is the transformation of universities and other educational institutions into competitive sectors to produce the knowledge society. But, the bigger threat is on when this transformation can occur because modernizing the educational system and broadening its reach is both a matter of economic and industrial necessity.

Culture is seen as a mode of life. Culture is underpinned by its basis in social structure. However, modernity and globalization are characterized by widening gaps and cleavages in peoples’ modes of life. Increasingly, a diverse range of social structures obliges their members to enter into ‘meaningful’ interactions’ with each other (Pertierra, 2003). It is very tantamount to say that the nature of a society’s acceptance to culture is seldom adaptive due to the sufficiency of people’s understanding and support. In a struggling economy like ours, it is on this idea that “a technological lag would mean an economic lag.” Economy, to be subservient, must be dependent on the very need of producing egalitarian individuals coping with the equality in resources.

Baark and Jamison (1986) in Patricia Backer’s paper describe the first phase of cultural critique of technology in the early 19th century. The crucial cause was the widespread mechanization of the workplace, the depersonalization of productive work, and the subsequent replacement of the worker with a machine. The machines were attacked directly (Luddites - Ned Ludd, 18th century farm worker in Leicestershire, England, who destroyed machinery), both as physical objects and as symbols of social development. For Berg (1980) in the same paper, the machine was not an impersonal achievement to those living through the Industrial Revolution, it was an issue. In the uncertainty of the times, it still seemed possible to halt the process of rapid technological change. While technology is fast-paced, the Filipino culture does not take much of the interest due to the string attached to it which is the monetary condition. How the Filipino culture accepts technology is very detrimental to the need of time. As Javier noted, leapfrog would be intensified so as to meet the demand of technological change.

In Pertierra’s (2003) study, he pointed that there are many historical, economic and political reasons for the lack of interest in science and technology in the Philippines. The relatively low salaries and social status of scientists as well as their lack of influence in public life, discourages the pursuit of scientific competence. There are also non-cultural factors affecting science and technology. Among them are the lack of a political interest in funding science, the undeveloped nature of an economy requiring low-level rather than high-level technical skills and the absence of institutions specializing in research which prevent a scientific-technical orientation from establishing local roots.

The rapprochement between technology and culture is certainly a fight for goodness to remain a viable economic journey and, as Javier pointed, will redound to the development of humankind. #