In general there are many forces that have social impact such as politics, natural disasters, economics, epidemics and etcetera. All of these aspects could have and most cases do have technology factor. Technology plays role in every social force. It goes so deep that it even effects our personality, our mood, and selection of people we choose to communicate. We become so dependent on technology that sometimes it even blur if we control the technology or it controls us. There is no doubt that technology shapes our society by effecting our culture, our values, and life style.
One of the interesting characteristic of technology is that while it brings the benefits for society and solves the problem it creates other problems and issues simultaneously. For example, it creates the efficiency, but wipes out the jobs, it connects the people but alienates at the sometime, and it gives the opportunity to poor but widens the gap between reach and poor. These are the organic consequences of the technology, but technology also can be viewed as powerful tool that can be used for bad or good things depending on intention. For example finical institutions use technology to make their service more flexible, robots and convenience for their costumers, but hackers could use exactly same technology to create the computer viruses and system frauds. In other words, technology creates the huge risk that it will not be used as intended. As a matter of fact, managing this risk become part of our everyday life.
The big questions when discussing the social effects of technology is if it is possible to find the golden middle ground where the society will be able to harness the benefits of technology while avoiding the side effects and reliably controlling the risk factors.
