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IDEA OF PROGRESS

I’m going to talk about the idea of progress. Progress can be defined into two ways. On the one hand there is technological progress which means progress created by the new technologies as internet, robots. It is essentially a progress through tools. On the other hand there is social progress concerning humans, like for instance progress for Black, gay rights or equality between men and women. I’ve decided to discuss more precisely about technological progress and more particularly about new technologies in daily life. My key question is : to what extent have new technologies a good impact on society ? First I will show how the communication have been improved through history. Then I will explain how some objects have changed our life. Finally I will focus on e-commerce.

Communication has always been central in all societies. The cavemen used to shout to communicate together but it was very limited at a distance. During the Ancient Times, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans had developed other ways to communicate : writing on stones (but it was not very practical), sending messengers ( but they can have been killed). Afterwards pigeons were used to communicate but it was not very trustful. However Graham Bell invented the telephone and thus communication was faster and better. Today the telephone has evolved with the rise of internet and other technological devices. So it is easier to have an open door to the world. The distance between people seems to be smaller and smaller. But even if we can see an evolution for more practicability we can also say that the price to pay for it is to have opened doors to other problems as we are all under control and because internet is more or less dangerous, it enables some people to do very bad actions, which are difficult to control as cyberbullying, hacking.

Progress is not only in communication but also in the objects which have evolved to make our life easier and better. For instance, there is more and more drones today which are used to go and film in dangerous places but also to deliver items to people, as Amazon has tried to experiment. It seems a great progress in terms of delay delivery but it can also be an open door to less jobs and then can create unemployment. Besides, the creation of VR-Goggles ( which are glasses used to see virtual life in 3D) seems to be very insteresting in games. However this wonderful progress can also create more isolation because people will travel less and will stay at home more often. Even in medecine robots are more and more used to help the operations. They are more precise and better to accomplish more complicated tasks. But once again they will never be able to replace humans concerning medecine. So by considering new technological objects we can be fascinated by all the advances but we have to keep in mind that there a limit to put in order to preserve humanity.

Because technological progress seems to be used to make our life more comfortable and easier, we can also talk about e-commerce. E-commerce is a new way of doing shopping or of buying items. More and more companies have created websites to suggest their products. It has advantages as a greater storage, more choices, better conditions of buying ( for instance not to have to face with too many people in shops and bad moods of shop assistants) and we can have what we want when we want. However there are also traps in which we have to be careful. For instance we have to be careful with our credit cards and if we pay by internet we have to go only on secure sites, secure payment system as Paypal. Another is also that we can receive the bad items ( colour, size) and it is more difficult to change and for clothes we don’t know if they suit well. (We have created a website company and our advices are…..)

As a conclusion we can say that technological progress can be positive if we see how it helps the society to evolve for the best, but we also have to accept the limits and the dangers. That is why education is important not to be cheated.
Progress is not only technological but also social and most of the time they are linked together. If there is equality between men/women, Black/White or Gay rights, it is also because we have access to more information, more tools and more connections to understand better.