Technology in the Modern Age

Technology in the Modern Age Technology's Attempts to Address the Human Need in the Modern and Post-Modern Ages Literary Grouping One: The crisis of World War I and the lie of a technology's ability to sustain the human body and soul Gas!" With this one word, Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" encompasses the sense of failure that many soldiers felt, regarding the promise of technology, throughout the duration of the First World War and during its immediate aftermath.

In the previous era of capitalist industrialization, technology was seen, as part of the progressive movement and mechanized progress, as life giving and life-sustaining. However, the lie, in Owen's poem, of the value of technology, runs just as deep as the lie that it is sweet to die for one's country. The innovations of technology simply yield new ways for humanity to destroy other humans, based on arbitrary national groupings.

The soldiers live only with the aid of their gas masks -- and one of Owen's number of comrades dies, because he cannot even manage to get his mask on in time. The arbitrary nature of national groupings during mechanized, technological warfare is especially instructive when one compares Owen's short poem with Erich Maria Remarque's longer prose work All Quiet on the Western Front. The same wartime experience of ordinary soldiers is treated from the German perspective in Remarque's novel, but with numerous similar resonances.

At the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldier is shot by a sniper while reaching for the one element of the natural world, rather than the technological world, he can access on the battlefield -- a butterfly. Technology mows down the young man and the beauty of the world it is purporting to save and sustain. The solider-protagonist of Remarque's tale is initially impressed to conscript himself into the army after being exhorted to do so by his teacher.

More poetically, the Latin of Owen's poem underlines the importance of Latin in the schoolboy education typical of members of Owen's class. Thus technology and its new lie of a better tomorrow, and the beauty and glory of the heroic, classical past are thus condemned in both works regarding the Great War.

The promise of progress Henry Adams contrasted in his turn-of the century autobiography, in his chapter on "The Dynamo and the Virgin" the figure of the Virgin Mary, which he identifies as the unifying ideology image of the European Middle Age, with "the dynamo." For Adams, rather than religion, technology and industry would create the civilization of the early 20th century.

Adam's work shows in many ways what the later, dispirited works of Owen and Remarque were reacting to -- the lie of technology's promise to provide a moral, shaping hand of history as religion had in ages past. Despite the bitterness of what technology has caused in terms of human destruction, its impact of course, has not absented itself from modern life, even when the final horrors of the First World War were eclipsed by the horrors of the Second World War.

Technology has only become even more omnipresent in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sherry Turkle's work on Thinking of Yourself as a Machine, stresses that even the human body has become dominated in the late modern era by a mechanized understanding of the world. Rather than having relationships with human beings, or with God, as Adams discussed at the beginning of this century, individuals have relationships with machines, with things that are not themselves, but not humans either.

Machines have become the oxygen that sustains our lives, like the air transmitted by the masks of Owen's poem. The incursion of the Internet and computer-based communication has made the ability of individuals to communicate with machines even more striking. Individuals can meet with other individuals through a keyboard, and engage in a sense of connection to the lives of individuals whom they have never somatically experienced.

The soldiers of World War I were killed by men they never met or saw after they had killed men they never met or saw. Now individuals have friendships and love relationships through computers -- as men were once killed through the faceless medium of trench warfare. Grouping Three: In a technological World, who is the 'I' that is writing this paper? Samuel Lilley's 1914 text Past, Present and Future stressed the need that those who forget the past will have to repeat the past, until they learn its lessons.