Is there an inherent counter-productive trend with technology focusing on youth and social networking?

[Poyzin]

We used to focus our technology on real, tangible things that we manufactured. The Germans and Japanese still do this, which is why they build the best cars, electronics, household appliances, etc.
America seems to make the best Social Networking websites, best cutting edge Youth Culture software and gadgets, and similar stuff from Silicon Valley, and of course we make the best weapons of war.
But in between this trivial crap and the weapons of war there is a huge gap that we utterly suck at
Why did this happen?

[Bert K]

Technology is applied science. Science is applied according to demand. We develop and manufacture things which we believe have a market. Engineers and others who can apply technology work for a living, and go where we are in demand ourselves.

Hence, the gap at which we utterly suck does not have a large enough market demand to cause monetary and manufacturing resources to employ enough people who can apply technology in that gap to prevent us from sucking at it.

Youth and social networking have the money. That's it.

Are you asking how that happened? One reason is that government takes a very large share of the public's disposable income and spends it in areas which bring it the most votes, and that involves social considerations of voting blocs. Another reason is that youth has a very large share of our remaining disposable income, perhaps because their parents give them whatever they ask for in order to keep them from bothering the parents thus freeing the parents to work to make the money to give them whatever they ask for.

To this must be added that the power of factors involving the production process is in the hands of groups that are not primarily concerned with quality or productivity, such as unions. One might say they are a part of Social Networking.

Engineering is probably not the most knowledgable Forum for your question, you should probably go to different Fora such as politics and/or government and/or social studies etc.

One encouraging thing about this situation is that pure basic science, the source that feeds the roots of technological capability (as opposed to applied technology) has been enormously enriched by the energies expended in developing weapons of war, and other popular areas of public interest such as space exploration. One hopes that, if these are continued, so will science advance. If these are discontinued, one does not know what to hope, for continued scientific and technological improvement.

As I said, we engineers are not good at explaining this sort of thing, we are basically just worker bees, a part of the greater hive.

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