The Idea of Progress - Bac

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Introduction :

I'm going to talk about the notion of “The idea of progress”. To start with, I would like to give a definition of this notion : The Idea of Progress is the idea that the different advances in technology, science, and social organization can produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become happier in terms of quality of life, through economic development, and the application of science and technology.
Progress shakes the customs and traditions so that it's often the subject of concern regarding its possible consequences. Throughout history most of the advances have been positive. However over the last few decades some people start to question this progress.
We may wonder, is progress always positive?
My presentation will fall into two parts : First, I will concentrate on positive and negative aspects of progress through social networks and then through media and journalism.

Development :

Firstly, the creation of social networks have advantages and drawbacks as we can see with “A new country”, a press article by India Currents, published in 2011 and “Teens online” a press article by The San Francisco Gate, published in 2009.
In the first press article, the journalist compares Facebook to a new country because people are so engrossed by the world of Facebook that they can't think of everything else, you can feel that they're elsewhere. He's afraid of people forgetting about the real life. That virtual life take over people's real life. In the second press article, instead of talking to his new roommate directly, Maxwell Wallace use Facebook to see which kind of roommate he will have at the University.
Therefore, taking the example of Facebook, on the one hand you can meeting like-minded new friends and rediscovering long-lost friends so it's a great communication tool, you can also use it to relax and escape from real life but on the other hand, it may be a way to avoid facing problems and solving them, you may escape your responsibility and it can become addictive. Also, you mustn’t forget to restrain yourself in order to respect others and protect yourself because information on the Internet can be potential obstacle to your future, they never disappears and are dangerous.

Secondly, according to “Is new media killing journalism ?”, a press article by Charlie Beckett and published in 2008, the progress, the invention of new technologies such as smartphones and tablets have enabled people to become actor in media freedom.
Now, the media are not any more restricted to the circle of the journalists but all citizens can play a role in the media. The author clearly say that we have more information, debate and reporting of our world than ever before. Moreover, thanks to internet, information travels faster than before. News is exponentially faster, fuller and more accessible. For example, the use of camera phones by citizens, allows them to capture news as it happens and sending it to news organizations around the world. This produced the images of demonstrations by monks in Tibet or police beatings in Zimbabwe that would otherwise have been out of the range of the professional photographers' lens. The author say that is media freedom.
But there are drawbacks to new media, there is a lot of false information available or media can focus on one aspect of the news and thus influence the population, it could also be intrusive our private life.

Conclusion :

As a conclusion, we can say that progress is neither all positive or all negative. It has different aspects and different impacts.
In my opinion, to avoid the impact of progress, as the fact of spending too much time on social networks and forget about real world instead of socializing in real life for example, parents should warn their children of Internet dangers and control their use of it.