Sociology

I think one of the ways of life or cultural norms in our society that people living 100 years in the future will be appalled that we tolerated is our current technology. Our society is relying more and more on technological innovations for our business operations, personal lives, communications, and entertainment. It stands to reason that this trend will continue, meaning that society 100 years in the future will be entirely dependent on technology and have it integrated into every aspect of life. It will be difficult for them to comprehend how we functioned without such a high level of technology to depend on and make our lives easier.

To prove that future societies will be shocked that the current population tolerated and survived the level of technology upon which we currently rely, one needs only to consider life 100 years ago. Most of us can scarcely imagine living daily life in 1910. There were no cars or subways for transportation. There were no phones at all, let alone portable cell phones. There was nothing even remotely close to computers or integrated information systems. Even libraries were inadequate compared to the current facilities. This lack of technology significantly altered the business and commerce that was done, and our current state of technology is changing the world of business again. It is difficult for most of us to imagine heating water for a bath, having to keep fires burning day and night as the sole heating source for a home, or having to rely on walking or horses to get somewhere. This inability to understand how everyday life was lived back then is the same way those future generations will feel about the world we live in, a world before hovercrafts, home-cleaning robots and teleportation travel are a way of daily life.

Children living today have a hard time understanding life without computers, cell phones and DVD players. Its hard for them to believe that people used to have to use home phones or pay phones to communicate, watched movies in theatres, researched information with the card catalog at the library or used typewriters and correction ribbon to write school assignments. This is because the children of today have never known a world without video game systems, laptops, GPS systems, and all the other modern technological conveniences rely on in todays society. For those of us that do remember those days, its hard for us in turn to understand life in the 1940s or 1950s without some of the technological advances we enjoyed in our youth. Every generation has a hard time comprehending social attitudes and ways of life that were experienced by the generation before them simply because they havent lived them. Those days of yesteryear are a history lesson to us, and the technological marvels of today will be a history lesson to people 100 years from now, who will wonder how we ever made it.