Technology and Culture: The Agents of Social Transformation
Photo courtesy of Dialog
Standing at Colombo Fort Railway Station watching morning trains depart for Kandy, Badulla, Galle and Jaffna, it’s easy to forget how the railways represent one of Sri Lanka’s most profound transformations. In 1858, when the first locomotive steamed from Colombo to Ambepussa, it didn’t just move people faster; it fundamentally altered the boundaries of what people knew to be physically possible. A journey from Colombo to Kandy that once took 12 days by bullock cart could suddenly be completed in hours.
The railway was not merely a new technological phenomenon because it didn’t merely transform what was possible. It changed what Sri Lankans could imagine about their country, their relationships with distant communities and their place in a connected world. This illustrates a crucial distinction for navigating today’s rapid changes – the difference between technology as that which changes what is physically possible and culture as that which changes what is imaginable.
Understanding how these twin engines of social transformation interact, where their boundaries lie and when they reinforce or conflict is essential for guiding the post aragalaya transformative agenda. In our current moment of economic recovery and political renewal, getting this balance right could determine whether we achieve genuine innovation or engage in a costly renovation of an existing mess with borrowed ideas.
The physical and the imaginable
Let’s really delve into what culture and technology really mean, how they interact and also how they are two sides of the same coin that drives social and economic change. Let’s take the mobile phone. When Dialog introduced GSM services in 1995, it created new physical possibilities – instant voice communication, text messaging and eventually internet access. The technological capability made it possible for a wealthy few who could afford expensive handsets and costly call rates to make and receive calls mostly from their workplaces and bosses even during their time off. It wasn’t as much a practical convenience as it was a burden but no one rejected it because of its cultural benefits. The exclusivity of mobile phone ownership and use made it a status symbol that announced to the world that you were an important person.
The social scale transformation didn’t begin until the 2000s when competition and improved technology made mobile phones affordable for ordinary Sri Lankans. Again, what drove the innovations wasn’t the technology itself but the way it transformed what people imagined would become possible. It was only when fishermen in Negombo imagined being able to check market prices in real time or a parent in the Middle East realised they could more easily speak with their children and trishaw owners realised they could connect with loyal clients more easily to get more hires that the masses began buying and using mobile phones.
There is a crucial insight here that we shouldn’t miss. Technological change often drives cultural change because they either change the boundaries of people’s imagination or aspirations by shifting what they value and desire. The same GSM network that existed in 1995 had radically different cultural impacts when it was an exclusive toy of the rich and powerful and when they became truly accessible a decade later.
Technology encompasses all human innovations that expand what we can physically accomplish from the wheel to smartphones from irrigation to artificial intelligence. Culture operates in the realm of meaning, values, and imagination, determining not just how we use technologies but what we can conceive as possible, desirable or necessary.
The printing press offers another illustration, revealing why information and communication technologies have disproportionate transformative power. Gutenberg’s innovation dramatically reduced the cost per page while enabling higher volumes of information storage and transmission. But the cultural transformation was more revolutionary and this highlights a crucial pattern. Information and communication technologies amplify their own impact by transforming how knowledge, ideas and cultural practices spread throughout society. They are meta-technologies that enable countless other changes by changing how societies think, learn and coordinate collective action.
Where the boundaries blur
The real world is messier than clean definitional boundaries suggest. A good example of that is the unified bus timetable recently introduced in many parts of Sri Lanka – a coordination system requiring private and state-owned buses to operate according to common schedules rather than chaotic competition.
This organizational innovation represents both technological and cultural transformation. The technological aspect involves GPS tracking, digital scheduling and coordination platforms. But the cultural dimension may be far more profound. For decades, our buses operated purely on market forces, competitive chaos where drivers raced for passengers, creating dangerous driving, poor maintenance and traffic problems.
The unified timetable demands different cultural approaches: drivers must value schedule adherence over passenger competition; passengers must adapt to fixed departure times; and urban rhythms must shift toward predictable patterns. These transportation changes could cascade into broader cultural shifts with greater emphasis on punctuality, increased expectation of orderly conduct and enhanced trust in institutional coordination.
The unified bus timetable will provide us an opportunity to witness in real time, how technological and operational improvements can reshape urban life’s tempo and rhythms with cultural implications extending far beyond transportation.
Historical lessons
The most successful transformations occur when technological capabilities and cultural values reinforce each other. Sri Lanka’s history offers compelling examples of both alignment between culture and technology as well as catastrophic misalignment.
Think about the transformation that the ancient irrigation systems would have had on our society for thousands of years. Massive tanks and canals that made Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa civilizations possible represented extraordinary technological achievements, but succeeded because they aligned with Buddhist cultural values emphasizing collective merit, royal responsibility for public welfare and harmonious relationships with nature. They required a cultural framework of dana and shramadana to organize society in ways that were necessary for renovating and maintaining their complex systems across centuries.
Now contrast that with colonial tea plantations. The technological capabilities that enabled those tea plantations were far more impressive. They required efficient processing machinery and railway transport but their cultural impact devastated local communities through land appropriation, imported labor creating ethnic tensions and transformation of self-sufficient communities into dependent wage laborers. This technology-culture misalignment created problems we still struggle with such as landless populations, ethnic divisions and the imbalance created by export dependency in the agricultural sector while we face significant challenges in our subsistence system in ensuring our food security as a country.
The post-independence Green Revolution offers a more positive example. High yield rice varieties and chemical fertilizers dramatically increased food production, succeeding because they aligned with existing cultural emphasis on rice cultivation, strong agricultural extension services, Buddhist values supporting innovations promising collective benefit and a real need of subsistence.
When technologies fail
The Northern railway provides a stark example that would help us understand how technology can fail. It is perhaps of critical importance in an age where we seem too quick or driven by intuition to place too much faith and emphasis and investment in technology for its own sake. Completed in 1905, this engineering marvel connected Jaffna to the rest of the island for 85 years. But technological infrastructure cannot survive sustained cultural-political conflict. Ethnic tensions that exploded into civil war made the railway a strategic target, leading to complete destruction by 1990, not through technical failure but through breakdown of the cultural-political framework that supported it.
What this demonstrates is that technology always exists within a cultural context. The most advanced infrastructure will become vulnerable or a vulnerability if either the cultural consensus supporting it or the foundations they are built upon breaks down.
Contemporary challenges
Today’s digital technologies present new forms of the age-old interaction between technology and culture. Rapid smartphone and social media spread has created unprecedented communication and economic possibilities but also new inequalities and social tensions.
Social media illustrates this duality. The same platforms enabling beautiful cultural exchanges, social connection and interaction can also spread hate speech and organized communal violence. The technology is neutral. What determines their impact is the cultural context in which they are used. This is why technological solutions alone cannot solve problems rooted in deeper cultural divisions.
The digital divide on the other hand is neither a purely technological nor cultural issue but a result of a multitude of factors ranging from language barriers, educational gaps, gender restrictions and economic constraints. These limitations that result in the unequal or unfair terms of access to technology can in turn create cultural inequalities as much as technological ones.
Strategic alignment
Given these complex interactions, how can we align technology and culture for positive social transformation?
Perhaps a good place to start would be with cultural assets, not problems. Successful innovations in technology will likely be those that understand our culture and build on its existing strengths rather than either exploiting its weaknesses or viewing culture as a constraint. For example, some of the foundational requirements for improving access to, adoption and usage of technology would be to lower the language barriers both from the dominant English to accommodating both Sinhala and Tamil only users as well as between Sinhala and Tamil users.
We must also take care in sequence changes thoughtfully. Abrupt technological disruption can provoke cultural backlash while gradual introduction allows adaptation.
Investing in cultural bridge building will likely have better payoffs than technological flooding. Successful adoption occurs when cultural leaders such as teachers, religious figures, community elders and politicians become advocates through genuine consultation and participation. Developing solutions in isolation, deploying them before proving their effectiveness in diverse settings through a broad and inclusive pilot program and merely running post-implementation awareness campaigns will likely create opponents rather than allies.
Design for cultural diversity. Sri Lanka’s linguistic, religious and regional diversity is a strength. Technology initiatives working in Sinhala, Tamil and English respecting different religious sensitivities and accommodating urban and rural contexts will succeed over one size fits all approaches.
Most importantly, think through the cultural consequences not just about operational benefits. While the bus timetable shows how innovations can strengthen social coordination, we must recognize that some technologies despite improving efficiency may atomize populations or weaken social bonds sustained by reciprocity and interdependence. Strategic adoption should not be the metric by which we measure innovation and technological advancement but rather by the overall social good they are able to generate and sustain. This will require a mindset that prompts us to ask not just “Does this work?” but “What kind of society does this create?”
Technology, culture and the future
As Sri Lanka emerges from our worst economic crisis, we face unprecedented opportunities to reshape our society but that requires a deeper understanding of two of the most important drivers of social change: technology, culture and the spiral of interactions between them. The cultural transformation created by the aragalaya and the political transformation reflected in 2024 election results creates space for new development approaches.
But transformation requires understanding that technological solutions and cultural change must work together. Building smart cities is pointless without addressing cultural factors driving rural-urban migration. Promoting digital entrepreneurship won’t succeed without cultural support for innovation and risk taking. Expanding renewable energy requires cultural shifts in consumption patterns alongside technical infrastructure.
If we treat technology and culture as separate domains, it will most certainly lead to misalignments that have plagued our development for decades and caused greater nations than ours to fail or collapse. If we can understand them however and guide technological innovation and adoption in step with our cultural evolution, we will be able to create virtuous cycles where technological capabilities and cultural wisdom will reinforce each other in building a more prosperous, equitable and harmonious country.
Perhaps the most crucial insight we can gain from understanding the role of technology and culture in driving social change and transformation is that our education system is the cradle that nourishes both cultural as well as technological progress. In fact, our capacity for technological and cultural progress as well as our ability to choreograph the dance between them is a lagging indicator of the strengths and weaknesses of our education system. Even if we are able to achieve significant advances or attract investments in technology, we must also critically examine whether we have an education system that is strong enough to sustain it and provide the cultural scaffolding to support it.
There is still more ground to cover before we can arrive at a meaningful juncture for a deep and meaningful conversation about the educational reforms that we need to make in order to ensure we build a society that can not only guide the technological and cultural transformations to come but one that can particularly withstand the technological shocks that will surely come from without as well as within. In our next exploration, we will examine how nations worldwide are navigated this challenge, or not, to learn from others’ experiences and look for opportunities that others may have missed. The concept of leapfrogging – using technological advancement to bypass costly developmental stages – offers particular promise for countries like ours. But successful leapfrogging requires as much cultural preparation as technological capability.
The train is leaving the station. The question is whether we will be ready to board it together.
This article is the first in a three part series exploring technology, culture and social transformation.
