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Culture and Technology: Who’s In the Driving Seat?

28th September 2012 Print

The relationship between culture and technology is one of the longest debated and hotly contested in the modern research sphere. However, it’s a debate that has raged for centuries as every new technological advance made by the human race brings the question anew as it fundamentally changes our spheres of interaction, or lifestyles and our lives. For researchers it is a pivotal question we want to understand as it has wide ramifications for partnership marketing and research practice. If culture drives technology we can create new technologies based on emerging culture. If technology drives culture then culture is incidental and the technology itself is the most important indicator of market trends and cultural network development. Here we are going to look at some of the most common arguments from each side of the debate and try to form a consensus as to what we can reasonably ascertain.

Culture drives technology

The most common argument for culture driving technology is that we respond to gaps and needs within culture in order to develop new technological solutions to fill desires, wants and needs. This entails research that develops new potential paradigms in order to develop, at the base line, products. An argument for this can be seen in the extension of the internet into Smartphones, Tablets and other internet enabled device. The technology is an advance in itself but the cultural rise of internet social networking and communications has driven the platform. Without social networks and in fact the internet tablets would be redundant. At the same time the majority of users of these platforms are primarily using them for cultural interactions rather than inherent utility available in the technology.

Technology drives culture

However the obvious counterargument to this is that without the technological innovation of the internet we wouldn’t be able to interact online, look up information online or socialise online. This means that technology drives culture. We wouldn’t have internet memes without the internet; we wouldn’t have viral videos or social networking without social technology platforms. However, there is some discrepancy between technology driving culture and vice versa. Technology does not become assimilated into culture unless culture deems the technology useful or worthwhile.

So what does this mean for research?

These two arguments suggest most clearly that there exists reciprocity between culture and technology and that no single cause can be said to drive technology or culture. New technology appropriates and adapts culture but it does not change its fundamental constructs. The telegraph and the letter may have been replaced by the email and the text message to an extent but the basic need for communication and a social networking sphere has remained almost exactly the same.  Technology changes the method and the means but not the activity itself.

For researchers we need to realise that the underlying social constructs are not changed by new technology. They are adapted but not changed. We also need to realise that the paradigmatic shifts in technology do create new means and that new technology has the potential to drive new shifts in these means. For researchers we need to be analysing current trends but also predicting how and where new shifts can take place.  Current cultural interactions and networks provide data on how future technologies will be received, spread and appropriated. The fundamental principles of society and our relationship with technology is unlikely to change. In turn, new technology can show us new research avenues, open up new spheres of communication and networking and influence a cultures development. If we are to make progress in our research endeavours we need to take a holistic view which develops the relationship between the two spheres without subsuming one sphere over the other.