Republic of the Philippines

Ilocos Sur Polytechnic State College

North Cluster, Sta.Maria , Ilocos Sur

Camille Grace C. Ramos Miss Cherie B. Orpia

Master of Arts in Education First Semester

Discussion 1: The Cultural Context of Modernization

There are tendencies within discourses of technology and culture to claim either
technology is a neutral tool or it is an independent and powerful cause of cultural change.
Discuss critically at least two major positions on the question of technology that provides
alternative critical framework for understanding the relationship between technological
change and socio-cultural transformation.

Technology is sometimes thought of as a domain with a logic of its own -- an

inevitable trend towards the development of the most efficient artifacts, given the
potential represented by a novel scientific or technical insight. The most important shift
that has occurred in the ways in which historians conceptualize the history of technology
in the past thirty years is the clear recognition that technology is a social product, all the
way down. And, as a corollary, historians of technology have increasingly come to
recognize the deep contingency that characterizes the development of specific instances
or families of technologies.
Technology is advantageous and has improved culture. Here are two salient points
to support the claim :

 Technology has the ability to pass knowledge from one generation to another

Today, the creation and application of new knowledge is essential to the survival
of almost all . Large global or even small geographically dispersed organisations do not
know what they know. Expertise learnt and applied in one part of the organisation is not
leveraged in another.

Accelerating change - technology, business and especially social. Paper , books ,

newspapers and magazines where cultural remains and traces of races are embedded
are prone to vanishment due to its frafility while storing it on a database brought about
by technology can maintain its uniqueness and essence. It can preserve body of
knowledge about one’s culture which shall be retrieved by the generations of today.

Culture is widely understood as a set of shared values, beliefs, customs, practices,

principles and routines that underpin the behaviour of an organisation and its members,
usually cultivated steadily over a long period (Arnott 2000, McDermott and O’Dell 2001).
Among the various components of organisational culture suggested to be important to
knowledge sharing are: trust, common sub-cultures, vocabularies, frames of reference,
meeting times and places, broad ideas about work, absorptive capacity, belief that
knowledge is a common advantage, openness to other people’s views, tolerance for
mistakes and need for help. Other aspects of the organisational culture relevant to
promoting informal knowledge sharing include knowledge fairs, open forums and chat
rooms (Ford and Chan, 2003; Handzic and Agahari, 2003).

To create a knowledge sharing culture you need to encourage people to work

together more effectively, to collaborate and to share - ultimately to make organisational
knowledge more productive.
We are talking about sharing knowledge and information – not just information.
Also, the purpose of knowledge sharing is to help an organisation as a whole to meet its
business objectives. We are not doing it for its own sake.
Further, learning to make knowledge productive is as important if not more important
than sharing knowledge. Michael Schrage in a recent interview said that he thinks,
“knowledge management is a bullshit issue” as “most people in most organisations do
not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess”.

 Technology has the ability to develop an extended cultural research

The use of technology has improved the researches on culture. Through a wide known
collection of data stored over internet researches on culture has been improved. There
has always been a connection between technology and culture. From the first use of
stone tools to the development of handheld Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), technology
has influenced human culture just as much as culture has sparked advancements in
technology. It is a complex relationship that forms a figurative circle of influence.