8 - Technology and Population

Summary

Chapter One introduced the basic themes of the book: tragedy, hope, optimism, progress, mimicry, and the challenges of culture, money, and terror that were based on the narratives of power, authority, and legitimacy structures. This chapter is concerned with technology and population under such conditions.

The chapter examines developments in technology and population in globalization. Technology and population are critical to any understanding of globalization because these concepts cut across society, economics, culture, and politics. However, the most recently published works on globalization tend to assume that the relationship between these concepts is implicitly ready in theory as it is clearly apparent in life. This chapter hopes to redress this research lacuna and to help begin making these connections finite. The first assumption in this chapter is that the concept of population precedes the concept of technology like the master-slave dialectic in modernity. The second assumption is that technology is capable of existing autonomously without direct human intervention as seen in nanotechnology, space exploration, and robotics.

Emergent technologies develop a life of their own once produced by the international neoliberal economic world order. This leads to the adjustments to suit various social, economic, cultural, and political demands. The power of neoliberal capital flows against the lowering of protectionist barriers to trade has afforded easier access to measurement by academic social theorists, social scientists, and private sector business risk analysts in the Far East, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. The chapter has been organized into five sections: (1) design and manufacturing; (2) technology, society, and population; (3) technology and addiction; (4) technology and global standards; and (5) technology, the state, and power in the age of globalization.

Definitions

The official U.S. Census Bureau defines population as all the people living in a geographic area. This is the same for European and Asian definitions of population. In this book, population is specifically defined as a discrete community of persons engaged in a particular activity and possessing crosscutting ideas, values, skills, and technologies within a given paradigm. Some examples include the intelligence community, the security community, the cultural community, and the InfoTech community. While social demographers are interested in analysing absolute numbers of a given population, social theorists and scientists often assume populations are more abstract and difficult to enumerate than ordinarily recognized.