Description of reality
Modernization theory visualizes development in terms of a progressive movement towards technologically and institutionally more complex and integrated forms of ‘modern’ society. This process is set in motion and maintained through increasing involvement in commodity markets and through a series of interventions involving the transfer of technology, knowledge, resources and organizational forms from the more developed world or sector of a country to the less developed parts (Long 2001). In this way, traditional society is propelled into the modern world, and gradually, though not without some institutional hiccups, its economy and social patterns acquire the accoutrements of ‘modernity’. If development is supposed to come about through intervention and the restructuring of existing social forms, then development implies discontinuity, not continuity, with the past. The situation chosen for intervention is deemed inadequate or needing change; thus local bodies of knowledge, organizational forms and resources are implicitly de-legitimized; and consequently external inputs are assessed as necessary and indispensable. It is in this way that the normative framework and technical instruments of planned development are validated by interventionists (Long 2001).
Intervention should not be seen solely or perhaps even primarily as consisting of material and organizational inputs, but rather as involving a kind of trade in images which seeks to redefine the nature of state-civic society relations through the promotion of certain normative standards of what development is and should entail. One should recognize the central role played by technology in promoting new social values and ways of organizing society. The construction of these images is sustained by a process of labeling which functions to promote or impose certain interpretative schemata concerned with the diagnosis and solution of development problems (Crush 1995). Given the various persisting conditions, it becomes increasingly difficult to design models to promote clearly delineated development trajectories, identify alternative scenarios, or to predict the side effects of development policies. Indeed the side effects of planned interventions have become a central predicament for international development organizations since they have often exacerbated rather than ameliorated existing socio-political and ethnic conflict or deteriorating ecological imbalances and disasters (Crush 1995). Development should be a good thing. It should uplift the lives of individuals and societies. When used on negative ideas, development causes suffering. One instance on the negative use of development is woman trafficking. A United Nations report mentioned that about 4 million people have experienced trafficking every year. Women trafficking is rampant, more woman are victims of trafficking. Trafficking to women usually comes from a promise of job opportunity. As the victim applies and gets employed to the job they find themselves being employed in prostitution or they experience abuse. Once in such kind of job they get trapped and getting out is a very difficult thing to do. Trafficking in women is a worse kind of development. It was formed from the developed ideals of men and their developed concept of business. Trafficking in woman gave a negative image of development.
Technology and development
Critical theory argues that technology is not a thing in the ordinary sense of the term, but an ambivalent process of development suspended between different possibilities. This ambivalence of technology is distinguished from neutrality by the role it attributes to social values in the design, and not merely the use, of technical systems. On this view, technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle. It is a social battlefield, or perhaps a better metaphor would be a parliament of things in which civilizational alternatives contend (Feenberg 2001). Technology is a two-sided phenomenon: on the one hand, there is the operator; on the other, the object. Where both operator and object are human beings, technical action is an exercise of power. Where, further, society is organized around technology, technological power is the principal form of power in the society. One-dimensionality results from the difficulty of criticizing this form of power in terms of traditional concepts of justice, freedom, equality, and so on. But the exercise of technical power evokes resistances of a new type immanent to the one-dimensional technical system. These resistances implicitly challenge the technically based hierarchy (Feenberg 2001).
Since the locus of technical control influences technological development, new forms of control from below could set development on an original path. This two-sided interpretation of technology opens up a theory of technical politics better able to give insight into the contemporary world than substantivism, which adopts unthinkingly the strategic standpoint on technology and overlooks its role as a life-world. Modern civilization is supposed to be inherently incompatible with mass participation. Certainly, this is the implication of progress in the sphere of production through the relentless replacement of muscular power, manual skills, and, finally, intelligence by advancing technology. Technology provides the material framework of modernity. That framework is no neutral background against which individuals pursue their conception of the good life, but instead informs that conception from beginning to end. Different worlds, flowing from different technical arrangements, privilege some aspects of the human being and marginalize others (Pitt 2002). Technology and development oftentimes are interrelated. Technology causes development, development leads to newer technologies. Technology on the other hand has negative implications for society. Unmanaged/unsupervised use of technology creates problems for society. Unsupervised use of television, the internet and magazines can be considered as the source of the current problems in society. The unsupervised use of media and technology created a radical notion of sex. This created early pregnancies and the evolved sexual orientation or the phenomena of having more than one gender preference. Television/internet/magazines contributed to the unusual raring of children. Some television shows introduced new ways of raising up a child. Not all new ways of raising a child created a better child, some created a rift in the relationship between parent and child. Moreover technologies such as television gave a false hope to people. Advertisements on the luxury experienced by those who work in the US or the UK created a wrong desire for people in poor countries to work in the developed countries.
Technology, development and health
A complex interrelationship exists between health and development; it is certainly not a one-way relationship, and there are surely reciprocal and synergistic elements to it. It has long been acknowledged that the health status of the population in any particular place or country influences development. It can be a limiting factor, as generally poor individual health can lower work capacity and productivity; in aggregate in a population, this can severely restrict the growth of economies (Phillips & Verhasselt 1994). On the other hand, economic development can make it possible to finance good environmental health, sanitation and public health campaigns on education, immunization, screening and health promotion and to provide broader-based social care for needy groups. General social development, particularly education and literacy, has almost invariably been associated with improved health status via improved nutrition, hygiene and reproductive health. Socio-economic development, particularly if equitably spread through the population also enables housing and related services to improve. The classical cycle of poverty can be broken by development. Employing scientific method both to investigate and to categorize disease; helped in changing a holistic model to a fundamentally biomedical and reductionist one (Phillips & Verhasselt 1994).
As a consequence, the paradigms of health promotion and medicine effectively became separate processes for the first time, with the mantle of the former being instead taken up by non-medical sections of society, with shortcomings in institutional medical provisions. With the growth of medicine and its effectiveness, the public health movement went into slow decline, as science indeed began to deliver the promised land of health and prosperity. Health and prosperity were not, of course, for all, and even in wealthy Europe, significant differences remained between rich and poor (Macdonald 2003). In the empires of the European nations, ironically enough, the source of much of this wealth, disease and premature death remained endemic, though through science and civilization, such empires would, of course, deliver release for its grateful subjects. The weaknesses of health promotion in relation to its medical and nursing partners leaves a concern that, following the mainstreaming of the health promotion philosophy, the latter groups have reemerged to claim the tradition and territory as their own, with the subsequent lessening and even sidelining of the role of health promotion specialists. It remains to be seen what distinctiveness and influence remain for health promotion if and when the proposals for a unified and single collegiate structure for the public health workforce are implemented. In a similar vein, the interchangeable employment of the terms public health and health improvement is a regrettable development, especially where the latter term has been adopted as a functional description (Macdonald 2003).
Free from the baggage of politics or alignment with a specific functional or occupational grouping, health improvement had the opportunity of becoming an umbrella term defining the collective mission of all of those working towards the improvement of health, including those in public health medicine, dentistry and nursing, and health promotion, as well as those from housing, environmental health, and the myriad others engaged within a multidisciplinary public health workforce. When considering the ways globalization may be changing the nature of the policy context for health, it is important to bear in mind that the concept of globalization represents a set of processes, rather than a fixed endpoint. These complex processes are subject to varied and sometimes contradictory forces. Consequently, the costs and benefits of globalization will be experienced differently by different individuals, socio-economic classes, genders, communities, countries, and ecological and economic regions ((Buse, Fustukian & Lee 2002). Indeed, the current phase of globalization of recent decades has witnessed a profound. Globalization, therefore, impacts variably on individuals and population groups, with many excluded from its benefits and vulnerable to its costs. The differentiated and multifaceted impacts that globalization is having, therefore, pose a conceptual challenge in attempting to ascribe changes to the policy context (Buse, Fustukian & Lee 2002). Health achieved development through the advancement of technologies. But the advancement of technologies did not assure that health care would reach all people. There is still an ongoing problem in the delivery of health service to those who really needs it. Health care are only received by those who can pay for it. If one is poor then no health care or health service will be provided. The advanced technology in health care has not reached poor countries. This is one of the reasons why most poor countries have a high rate of epidemics and mortality.
Globalization and development
Globalization is not seen as the exclusive interaction of economic actors on the world scene, but as the implementation of socio-economic policies which give priority to market forces at the expense of social sectors and groups such as labor, minorities, and the marginalized. Globalization may be formulated in terms of economic tendencies, financial deregulation, or technological and cultural change, as a description of a process or as a project. However it is defined, the analysis of differentiated impacts on national realities and the possibility, or lack of possibility, for specific types of political intervention are, on the one hand, deeply rooted historical trends and, on the other hand, a function of more immediate political developments (Hersh & Schmidt 2000). Science is central to globalization, providing both a knowledge base for new products, as well as a cornerstone for the ideologies of positivism, scientism, and modernism which have helped to legitimize the destruction of other forms of knowledge. It has been in the name of science that a myth of progress has been constructed and upheld, according to which the diverse array of non-scientific human knowledges have come to be labeled traditional with all the negative and derogatory connotations that the term has come to imply (Hersh & Schmidt 2000).
Modern science is a composite form of knowledge production, which links curiosity to production, or the most basic scientific research to commercial technological applications. In regard to globalization, it is especially the scientist belief in the intrinsic superiority of scientific-technological rationality over all other forms of thought, as well as the centrality of “instrumental rationality” in the global political economy that is most significant. Traditional knowledge is programmatically rejected by both the theorists and practitioners of globalization, even though, in many areas of production and everyday life, the modern science of transnational firms and globally oriented academic institutions is increasingly being challenged by other modes of inquiry and practice. The later part of the twentieth century saw the advanced capitalist societies undergoing a fundamental transformation due to globalization, with far-reaching effects on domestic politics as well as international relations (Qin-Hilliard & Suárez-Orozco, MM 2004). Globalization is an economic process, which extends economic networks across the whole world and integrates them into a synchronized economic system, destroying indigenous economies, shaking up domestic political orders, and creating regional economic blocks at the same time. Globalization was initiated by multinational corporations in the core countries (Qin-Hilliard & Suárez-Orozco, MM 2004).
The increasing interconnectedness of the international economy has been accelerated by the development of the technology of micro-electronics, the communication industry, and the increase in trade among nations. However, the local response to the global changes differs from country to country according to the position within the world-system and local political dynamics. Thus, globalization has become a politically contested concept rather than a concept to capture the formation of the global economy. It also has not been free from political ideology because social classes and social groups advocate particular features of globalization for their own interests. Globalization must not come to mean the Death of Politics or the Death of Social Ideals. On the contrary, people must insist that societies and social forces have the inherent right to protect themselves and to choose meaningful ways of politically constituting their actions to this end. This includes the right of society and social forces within it to protection from the destructive vagaries of the unregulated or self-regulated market (McBride & Wiseman 2000). Other social rights such as globalization that could be enumerated would include the right of individuals, families and communities to employment, welfare, social stability and social justice; the right of the poor, dispossessed and marginalized, wherever they exist, to resist the imposition of poverty and the intensification of social polarization (McBride & Wiseman 2000). Globalization has created various changes in almost all aspects. Globalization has not proven its worth to the third world countries. It has not helped in improving the plight of people in the third world countries. Although the third world countries usually have bad leaders who contribute to the economic problems, globalization doesn’t help in solving their problems. Globalization creates an opportunity for rich countries to manipulate the poor countries. The plight of people in the third world country forces them to engage in unacceptable activities like trafficking. A woman who wants to move away from their poor state turns unwilling victims of traffickers. This cannot be stopped, as long as there are patrons to such kind of trade. The current state of treatment of women adds to the doubt of how globalization brings development to the third world countries.
Judgment
At the beginning of the twenty-first century development geographers need to examine some of the striking contradictions in the nature of international institutions of governance, to think critically about the ways in which international development agencies invent, construct and name poor countries, places and peoples. Post-development perspective holds out the possibility of radically rethinking the power, place and spatiality of development in the contemporary world. In this sense there may be lessons to be learned from the coalitions that are being formed across cultural and political differences in and through a global protest caravan that is explicitly linking struggles at various spatial scales. Rethinking development means reconsidering the categories people have used in development geography, and unpacking the power relations that shape them. This question of the power of development and the unpacking of the power relations that are inscribed in development practices is a crucial one. In some ways polymorphous notions of the nature of power and power relations in development in different spaces and places are also needed (Power 2003).
The poor are seen to be trapped in the obsolete ways of the past, to be part of dysfunctional cultures or are simply pitiful beggars. In turn this comes back to the vision of development outlined in the imperial encounter, where non-western peoples were seen as trapped in the outdated coordinates of the past, as noble beggars with dysfunctional societies. The poor already have capital however, and the value of their savings can be much higher than is often assumed, but the problem is that this capital is seen to be held in defective forms. Thus people lack the capacity to represent their capital, the titles to their homes or land, the formality of recognition for their business enterprises, crops not deeds, businesses but not statuses of incorporation (Power 2003). Development should be a good thing but due to issues such as poverty, trafficking, and improper use of technology it seems that it has not achieved its goal. All can be blamed for the various issues mentioned. The media cannot blame the problem sorely on the government. Poverty, trafficking and improper use of technology are not really problems, they are symptoms of a much bigger problem. The problem is the society refusing to use development in a good manner. The society has been program to make use of development to gain an upper hand against another. The society needs to discuss and take some action on such issues. The society need to use the positive concepts of development to reduce poverty, eradicate human trafficking and manage the use of technology.
Conclusion
Development, health care, globalization, technology can be used by society to improve their life. The different issues that the world face; can be easily fixed if there would be a careful use of principles of development, technology, health care and globalization. Society needs to play their part in solving issues such as trafficking and the troubled youth. The governments must exert more effort to improve the lives of more people. The governments need to make sure that the policies they create are for the common good.
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