Cultural Impact of Technology Transfer :: Exemplification Essays

Cultural Impact of Technology Transfer Human recital has demonstrated that the flow of information is inevitable socializations across the world contract 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 neat for many transitions, 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 turn outdoor(a) sources oftentimes utilized them in ways originally not intended. Did these outdoor(a) technologies have positive or negative set up on the cultures that authentic them? The consequences of implanted technologies vary from case to case depending on a exit of factors, including environmental and lifest yle differences 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 entryway of guns into Inuit culture and the bringing of horses to the Native Americans by the Spaniards.The story of European low-spirited arms begins with the carom. The cannon, first utilize in the 1346 Battle of Cressey, was gradually trim down in size over the next three centuries until a cannon teentsy 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 tangled harpooni ng the animals through a hole in the ice. Seal carcass recovery was difficult, so the Inuit designed their harpoons specifically for efficient recovery of seal bodies. Their engineer was so successful that only one seal body drop down out of every twenty (Ehrlich, 216).Unlike the harpoon, however, the gun was not curiously designed for seal hunting. Thus, when the Inuit acquired rifles from the Hudsons Bay Company and started shooting seals, the bodies would go down before they could be harpooned and retrieved. Hunting power plummeted dramatically nineteen out of every twenty seals hunted with guns sank (Ehrlich 216). Before long, Inuit hunting began depleting seal populations. The induction 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.