sexta-feira, 15 de setembro de 2017

Culture and technology, tradition and innovation


A few years ago I had the opportunity to travel with a group of Amish families in an Amtrack train carriage during something like a full day. It was when travelling from Austin to Tucson. The group of Amish families was travelling together - I understood they were travelling to holiday time in Mexico and really they left in El Paso station.
I was perplexed by the strange mixture of old and new, the old look of dressing and the obvious differences in culture and tradition of their family life. But also by the contrast between Amish tradition of "no use of modern technology" and the obvious use they were doing of modern technology in daily life - not only using modern trains to travel to holiday time abroad, but also using modern processed foods and even portable phones.
Today, The New York Times publishes an interesting piece of journalism about Amish and their "new" technologies use in business and at home: see here.
Amish changing relationships of refusal and acceptance of technologies can be an interesting field of research about technology and culture studies as well as philosophy of technology and diffusion of innovation. An unsual "experiment" ...



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