Technology has accelerated the process of development and dependency. Discuss. (2020)
The statement’s force lies in holding both halves together. Technology is at once the instrument that compresses the time a society needs to develop and the channel through which its subordination to others is renewed. Sociologically, the two are not opposites but the same process seen from different ends of a chain.
Technology as accelerator of development
- Modernisation theory made technology the motor. W. W. Rostow (The Stages of Economic Growth, 1960) held that take-off requires investment above roughly a tenth of national income plus a leading sector, and the remedy for backwardness is the diffusion of Western capital, technique and attitudes. Daniel Lerner added mass media as the spreader of “empathy”, the mobile personality’s key trait.
- William F. Ogburn supplied the mechanism — invention, accumulation, diffusion, adjustment — and neo-evolutionists made control over energy the measure of adaptive capacity.
- India shows genuine leapfrogging: mobile telephony bypassed a landline stage that never arrived, and digital public infrastructure now carries welfare transfers at a scale no paper system could. The Green Revolution turned a food-importing country into a surplus producer within two decades.
Technology as the carrier of dependency
- Andre Gunder Frank (Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, 1967) argued that underdevelopment is produced, not inherited: a chain of metropolis–satellite relations expropriates surplus upward at every link. Technology enters the satellite as a rented input, never as an owned capability.
- Theotonio Dos Santos named the contemporary form precisely — after colonial and financial-industrial dependence comes technological-industrial dependence, in which multinational corporations control the patents, standards and machinery that peripheral industry must buy.
- Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer explain why this is costly: the terms of trade move against primary exporters, so value is transferred without coercion. Samir Amin called the resulting pattern extraverted accumulation.
- Immanuel Wallerstein places such economies in the semi-periphery — exploited by the core while exploiting the periphery, which is exactly where a country that assembles electronics it does not design sits.
Both at once: the decisive formulation
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto rejected Frank’s flat pessimism with associated dependent development: foreign capital and technology can genuinely industrialise a periphery while keeping it structurally subordinate. That is the question’s claim in theoretical form, and it explains why growth and dependence rise together.
The newest illustration is informational. Manuel Castells argues that the informational mode of development reorganises production around networks, while those without a valued contribution are not exploited but excluded. Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias (The Costs of Connection, 2019) call the appropriation of human life as data a new data colonialism, since the value created by users accrues to platforms located elsewhere. India’s own platform labour illustrates the domestic face: the NITI Aayog report of 2022 estimated about 77 lakh gig workers, rising to 2.35 crore by 2029-30, managed by algorithms they neither see nor own.
Conclusion
Technology accelerates both processes because it travels as a commodity while capability stays where it was made. Whether a society ends in Rostow’s take-off or Frank’s satellite position is decided not by access to the artefact but by ownership of the knowledge that produces it — which is why indigenous research capacity, not import volume, is the real test of development.