Blog 9

One of the things we covered in class this week was cultural transmission.  Cultural transmission is the process of passing on culture and cultural norms from one generation to the next.  One of the areas we see cultural transmission is in social skills.  With the use of technology  these days our generation is loosing important social skills.  In the generations before ours no one had cell phones with texting or computers to communicate.  If you wanted to talk to someone you either saw them some place, wrote them letters, or called them on a land line.  People in these generations had good communication skills and knew how to talk to people in person.  They had good "people skills".  Now days everyone is behind a screen when they talk to people.  People in this present day generation rarely call people.  Everyone texts, snap chats, or messages on Facebook.  Through these types of communication people are loosing their ability to actually talk to people and when they see people in person their communication skills suck.  This is one example to where cultural transmission is not happening.  Cultural transmission is being affected by technology in many ways.  Another way cultural transmission isn't happening due to technology is with reading materials.  Generations before ours didn't have technology to use to look things up they had to actually get a hard copy and read it.  Older generations had to obtain books and hard materials to read if they wanted to learn about something.  Now days people just go a device and Google everything to find stuff out.  Hard copies of News Papers are starting to become less and less available because no body is reading the hard copies.  Everyone uses electronic versions to read stuff.  I myself can't remember the last time I actually read a hard copy because it is just more convenient to look on line.  Cultural transmission is starting to become a statement of the pass.  The more technology involves the fewer things are going to be transferred from generations to generations. 

Below I have attached a link of an article that is describing exactly what I stated above.  The article is about how the wildly spread of technology use is decreasing peoples social skills.  I encourage you to read it as I found it very interesting.

http://thebottomline.as.ucsb.edu/2012/01/technology-is-destroying-the-quality-of-human-interaction