Technology And Its Impact On Society - 1828 Words

Introduction Technology has played a pivotal role in the socioeconomic development of virtually every modern country. Technology allows humanity to do more with less, thereby speeding up the pace of production and accomplishment. It changes the perception of the nation-state, giving significantly more power to emerging multinational corporations. As a result, governments no longer have as much control over their citizens, whose jobs, households, and futures are controlled by these large companies. With the rise of technology has come the birth of the technological disaster. This happens when any one of our innovations, created completely from a human mind, is no longer under our control. Chemicals explode, reactors fail, and equipment†¦show more content†¦Traditionally, with natural disasters, the effects were seen as no one’s fault, but simply as a God-given fate, with consequences credited to the stories of parable, myth or legend. However, a technical disaster stops being a God-sanctioned action, and, thus allows the decision-making of the people in charge of the situation to be questioned. When we must blame ourselves, the healing process can be both especially long and poignantly painful. This paper will focus on two of the most infamous, atrocious, and devastating technical disasters: the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident disaster in 1986. Not all of the minutiae of these disasters will be covered here as numerous c redible sources that have already accomplished that task. Instead, this paper will attempt to highlight similarities and differences between Bhopal and Chernobyl on a broad, sociopolitical scale. The bulk of the material dissected for this paper is rooted in seminal work written about each disaster: Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun and Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl by Adriana Petryna. India and Ukraine, formerly of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, were nation-states with vastly different frameworks at the time of their respective disaster. India was grappling with globalization, a skyrocketing population, and