Throughout history, there has been an undeniable trend of an increase in comfort and ease of life for the elite class alongside a plummeting of the quality of life of the struggling majority. These new innovations that create more comfort and ease of life come directly from an increase in leisure time due to prior innovations, which create an endless cycle of invention (Johnson, p. 128). From this trend, a multitude of large scale social revolutions have taken place that have challenged both religious and governmental structures as commoners rise up and demand some of the benefits being reaped from the latest advances and progression in the world. As the creation, use of and innovation of technology has hit the extremely steep upward climb of its exponential potential within the last few centuries, this cyclical pattern has become even more frequent and due to a lower/working-class that is more educated than ever before, these demands and expectations of authoritative figures have only become stronger. With these demands, come larger consequences to power structures that are deemed to be failing the populace as leisure time and the ability to participate in political realms for “all” peoples has put a tremendous amount of power in the hands of the populace that has never before been seen and is constantly increasing.
Throughout reading this book, I became aware of the social/political/economic consequences of essentially every invention let alone every human action in the long run, no matter how minute it may seem at the time. Undoubtedly, human cloning/genetic manipulation will have strong social and political consequences tied up with ethics, best-practices and limitations that will be a source of great debate and discontent. As research and invention aimed to take human civilization off of this planet and onto others ramps up, questions of social and political structures will definitely be presented.
Hi! First, I really like the approach you took regarding leisure time. It both explains innovations and added interest in political workings. You do a pretty good job of explaining Johnson’s main points while also adding in thoughts that I can clearly tell are your own. That’s not super easy to do in a paragraph strictly about the text. I also like that you brought modern life into the first paragraph as well. I definitely agree with your example of genetic manipulation in the second paragraph. I think that will definitely become a hot topic issue for the future. I wonder what kind of changes will happen because of new advances in genetics.