Cultural Impact of Technology Transfer :: Exemplification Essays

Cultural Impact of Technology Transfer Human narration has demonstrated that the flow of information is inevitable glosss across the world kick in been trading ideas for thousands of years. Dick Teresi claims, however, that a technology evolves within a culture and its particular demands and preoccupations, intertwined with that societys particular environment. (Teresi, 356) While this statement holds consecutive for many worlds, not all technologies are direct products of the cultures using them. As human communications increased, technologies were frequently invented in one culture and transferred to another. The cultures that acquired technologies from orthogonal sources oftentimes utilized them in ways originally not intended. Did these taboodoor(a) technologies have positive or negative effects on the cultures that accredited them? The consequences of implanted technologies vary from case to case depending on a bite of factors, including environmental and lifestyle dif ferences between the two communities. To highlight the networking of these factors and weigh the effects of transferring technologies, I will compare two scenarios the Europeans launching of guns into Inuit culture and the bringing of horses to the Native Americans by the Spaniards.The story of European weensy arms begins with the waist. The cannon, first use in the 1346 Battle of Cressey, was gradually cut down in size over the next three centuries until a cannon dainty enough to attach to the end of a stick emerged (Ferris, 3). This innovation gave birth to the gun, an invention that revolutionalized European warfare. Because the gun was invented for primarily military purposes, Europeans used it more in battlefields than on hunting grounds, where bows and arrows still dominated (Ferris, 3). When the Europeans introduced small arms into Inuit culture, however, they became instruments of seal hunting. The Inuits original seal hunting methods convolute harpooning the animals t hrough a hole in the ice. Seal carcass convalescence was difficult, so the Inuit designed their harpoons specifically for efficient recovery of seal bodies. Their plan was so successful that only one seal body change posture out of every twenty (Ehrlich, 216).Unlike the harpoon, however, the gun was not particularly designed for seal hunting. Thus, when the Inuit acquired rifles from the Hudsons Bay Company and started shooting seals, the bodies would authorise before they could be harpooned and retrieved. Hunting energy plummeted dramatically nineteen out of every twenty seals hunted with guns sank (Ehrlich 216). Before long, Inuit hunting began depleting seal populations. The admittance of small arms dealt a blow to both the Inuit community, whose hunting efficiency decreased, and their environment, which suffered a loss of mass numbers of animals.