Technology has rapidly advanced in recent years and has been used to enhance many aspects of life in America; anything from your car giving you a more comfortable commute to work, all the way to medical advances that save millions of lives. Technology is defined as “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes”. While these advances have been used in many beneficial ways, it can sometimes advance so rapidly that society is not properly equipped deal with problems, creating an effect known as “cultural lag.” William Ogburn, a sociologist at Columbia University, first coined this term in 1922.1 While this rapid progress has made interacting with people much more efficient, it has also taken away from social experiences that we used to share with each other. Instances of Cultural Lag begin when societies begin to transfer from non-material culture to material culture. When America first began to industrialize about 170 years ago, many people moved to cities to work in factories, rather than continue in agriculture and our current schooling system still has not compensated for this, as most schools are on a nine-month schedule. This schedule was originally used so that children could help tend to fields during the summer. Instances of cultural lag have only accelerated recently though, due to the fact that technology is advancing much more rapidly than it has in the past.
In only the past 20 years, we as a society have changed in many ways, and simply looking in the average household can prove this. In a study done at Cambridge University, roughly 48% of respondents (out of 1,020 people) said that they spend at least 4 hours a day on their cell phone or another communication device, such as a computer or tablet, and 36.4% of a sample of parents said that they believe technology has disrupted their family life in some way2. It is becoming more common for children to stay isolated in their room, rather than spending time with their family due to cell phones, social media sites like Facebook, and video games. These three devices have caused people to transition from face-to-face communication to using text
