Breaking down the question
The statement makes a deliberately double-edged claim: technology has accelerated both development and dependency. The command word "discuss" asks you to examine this paradox from both sides rather than argue a single position. The examiner wants you to recognise that the same technological forces which raise productivity, incomes and welfare can also deepen the reliance of some societies, regions and groups on others.
Technology here means more than machines; it covers the knowledge, techniques and organisational forms through which societies transform their material conditions. Development refers to sustained improvement in productivity, living standards and human capabilities, while dependency describes a structural relationship in which the growth of one society or class is conditioned by, and subordinated to, another. The task is to show how technology drives both movements at once, and then to weigh which tendency prevails and under what conditions.
A strong answer treats "acceleration" as the key idea. Technology does not merely cause development or dependency; it speeds up both processes, compressing changes that once took generations into a few decades. The relationship between the two is examined more fully in our notes on development and dependency.
How to approach it
Open by defining technology, development and dependency, and by flagging the paradox that the statement contains. Signal early that you will treat technology as a double movement rather than an unqualified good.
Devote the first substantive block to how technology accelerates development — the Green Revolution, industrialisation, communications, medicine and the productivity gains that lift societies out of subsistence. Then turn to how the same technology accelerates dependency, drawing on dependency theory, technology transfer, intellectual property, the digital divide and the concentration of technological ownership.
Close by moving beyond a simple balance sheet. Argue that whether technology develops or subordinates depends on the social relations within which it is embedded — who owns it, who controls it, and on what terms it is transferred. A synthesis grounded in this insight scores higher than a list of pros and cons.
Model answer
Technology — the body of knowledge, techniques and tools through which human beings act upon nature — has been the central engine of social change in the modern era. The statement rightly captures its dual character: the same technological revolutions that have accelerated development have also accelerated new forms of dependency. A satisfactory sociological response must hold both truths together.
On the side of development, the evidence for technological acceleration is overwhelming. The Industrial Revolution multiplied productive capacity through mechanisation, and later waves of technology — electricity, the internal combustion engine, chemical fertilisers, antibiotics and the microprocessor — transformed agriculture, industry, health and communication. In post-colonial societies, the Green Revolution raised agricultural yields sharply, converting food-deficit economies into surplus producers within a generation. Advances in medicine cut mortality and raised life expectancy, while information and communication technologies have widened access to knowledge, banking, markets and public services. Technology compresses time: changes that once unfolded across centuries now occur within decades, allowing late-developing societies to leapfrog stages, as the spread of mobile telephony and digital payments in India illustrates.
Yet the same technological dynamism accelerates dependency. Dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank argued that the growth of the developed "metropolis" has historically produced the underdevelopment of the "satellite", and technology is a central mechanism of this relationship. Because advanced technology is designed, owned and controlled largely in the industrialised core, developing societies must import it, often on unfavourable terms. Technology transfer frequently arrives as a package tied to foreign capital, patents, spare parts and expertise, creating a continuing reliance on external suppliers. Intellectual property regimes lock essential technologies — in pharmaceuticals, seeds and software — behind patents that poorer societies cannot easily afford, reproducing subordination in a new form. Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis similarly locates technological monopoly at the heart of the core's dominance over periphery and semi-periphery.
Dependency also operates within societies, not only between them. The Green Revolution, while raising output, deepened the dependence of small farmers on purchased seeds, fertilisers, pumps and credit, widening rural inequality and tying cultivators to input and output markets they did not control. Mechanisation displaced agricultural labour, and the capital-intensive character of new technology concentrated its benefits among those already able to invest. In the digital sphere, the "digital divide" — unequal access to devices, connectivity and skills — means that technology can entrench rather than dissolve inequality, so that the connected advance while the excluded fall further behind.
Manuel Castells captures the ambivalence of the contemporary "network society", in which those integrated into global information networks prosper while whole regions and populations are switched off and rendered structurally irrelevant. Technology, in this view, simultaneously integrates and excludes, empowering some nodes while marginalising others. Dependency in the information age thus takes the form of unequal control over data, platforms and technical standards, concentrated in a handful of corporations and states.
The resolution of the paradox lies in recognising that technology is not autonomous. It has no fixed social consequence of its own; its effects depend on the social relations of ownership, control and distribution within which it is deployed. Where technology is domestically developed, adapted and diffused with attention to equity — as in the deliberate building of indigenous capacity in some East Asian economies — it becomes a lever of genuine development. Where it is imported, monopolised and captured by dominant classes and nations, it accelerates dependency. Technology is therefore best understood as an amplifier of existing power relations, deepening whichever tendency the surrounding social structure favours.
In conclusion, the statement is accurate but incomplete. Technology has indeed accelerated both development and dependency, and the two frequently advance together rather than as alternatives. The decisive sociological question is not whether technology develops or subordinates, but under what social conditions each outcome prevails — a question that returns us to ownership, control and the political economy of technological change.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward candidates who treat the statement as a genuine paradox rather than defending technology or condemning it. The strongest scripts organise the answer into a clear two-sided structure — acceleration of development, acceleration of dependency — and then transcend it with a synthesis that ties outcomes to social relations of ownership and control.
Concrete illustration lifts an answer here. References to the Green Revolution, the digital divide, technology transfer and intellectual property show applied understanding, while the theoretical anchoring in Frank, Wallerstein and Castells signals conceptual command. The common weakness is a vague celebration of technological progress with dependency added as an afterthought; because the question weights the two equally, both must be developed, and the closing synthesis is where the higher band is secured.