How Culture and Technology Create One Another

How is culture changing due to technology?

In researching articles and videos that explicitly speak about technology and how technology’s advancement in mass media has changed society’s expectations and culture, I came across this interesting video that explained how culture and technology created one another. The speaker is Ramesh Srinivasan, an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Department of Information Studies. Srinivasan is actively involved and studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage.“We really need to think about the world in which we live and assume and understand that not every person in the world engages with technology in the same way” (TEDx Talks, 2012).

“It’s not just technology creating and shaping culture it’s also culture creating and shaping technology” (TEDx Talks, 2012). Srinivasan believes that technology and culture can exist and can mix and mingle and grow from one another. In layman's terms, Srinivasan agrees that technology and culture pretty much piggyback off of one another. He poses questions such as how can we marry the two ideas? Noting that “the truth of really empowering cultural voices around technology is allowing those different voices to exist in parallel and speak to and inform one another” (TEDx Talks, 2012). He speaks about the diverse people and cultures who now have access to technology and are looking to have their turn at the digital table. How does one encourage digital revolution amongst cultures? This is still to be determined.

References

TEDx Talks. (2012, December 13). How Culture and Technology Create One Another: Ramesh Srinivasan at TEDxUCLA. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/Eo8iNn2CCE4