Discuss the relationship between technology and cultural lag with examples.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Some parts of culture change more rapidly than others. Cultural lag refers to the gap that occurs when material culture changes faster than nonmaterial culture. There are numerous examples of cultural lag in modern society because people's nonmaterial culture (e.g., norms, values, and laws) has not kept up with material culture (e.g., technological advances). Texting while driving has resulted in thousands of fatal car crashes, but many states have neither banned this practice nor enforced the laws they have passed.Because technology is moving faster than laws to regulate and ensure Internet-based communication privacy, there are many breaches. The National Security Agency (NSA), one of the largest U.S. intelligence organizations, has secretly collected phone records of millions of Americans, and spied on leading U.S. technology companies (e.g., Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo) as well as European political heads of state who are allies (Timberg and Nakashima, 2013).Cultural lags can create confusion, ambiguity about what is right and wrong, conflict, and a feeling of helplessness. They also expose contradictory values and behavior. U.S. technology executives have railed against the NSA's mass compilation of data, but the companies themselves collect information on users that they sell to advertisers (Miller, 2013; Sengupta, 2013). Some consumers complain that retailers track their behavior, but have no problem with cookies, profiles, apps, and other online tools that let e-commerce sites know who they are, how they shop, and what they purchase (Clifford and Hardy, 2013). Even when mores, values, and laws catch up with technological innovations and inventions, they can create unexpected problems like pollution, drug shortages, and high medical costs.