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The Myth Defined: “The myth of progress implies that technology is beneficent or neutral and, as Dickson observed, it “disguises the exploitative and alienating role technology plays within industrialized capitalist societies, and leads us to accept a particular mode of technological development as being a unique, inevitable, and politically neutral process. A crucial part of the notion of progress is the idea that technological developments operate independently of their social contexts. This conveniently masks questions of power and who makes the decisions.” |
Contrary to popular belief... “Although many cultures associate progress primarily as a feature of society as a whole, it is characteristically Western to think of progress primarily as a feature of society as whole.”
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“The public is optimistic about this technology, and those with higher incomes and more education tend to be the most favorable.”
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| “Public faith in technology, despite a lack of knowledge about it, is compelling evidence of the existence of a powerful cultural belief system that portrays technology as progressive and which minimizes, if not ignores, evidence to the contrary...But it is difficult to imagine a more undemocratic recipe for technological development than this mix of myth, ignorance, and abdication of public control.” |