How Technology Is Changing Human Behavior: Issues and Benefits

How Technology Is Changing Human Behavior How Technology Is Changing Human Behavior Issues and Benefits C. G. Prado, Editor Foreword by Rossana Pasquino Copyright © 2019 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Prado, C. G., editor. Title: How technology is changing human behavior : issues and benefits / C. G. Prado, editor ; foreword by Rossana Pasquino. Description: Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO, [2019] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018057360 | ISBN 9781440869518 (hardcopy) | ISBN 9781440869525 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Information technology—Social aspects. | Social media—Social aspects. | Identity (Psychology) | Human behavior. Classification: LCC HM851 .H689 2019 | DDC 303.48/33—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057360 ISBN: 978-1-4408-6951-8 (print) 978-1-4408-6952-5 (ebook) 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO ABC-CLIO, LLC 147 Castilian Drive Santa Barbara, California 93117 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America Contents Foreword vii Rossana Pasquino Introduction: Technology Is Changing Us ix C. G. Prado Chapter 1 The Robotization of Everything 1 Lawrie McFarlane Chapter 2 On Passing as Human and Robot Love 17 Babette Babich Chapter 3 Who Is Responsible for a Self-Driving Car? 27 Chris Beeman Chapter 4 Who’s Your Mama? Assisted Reproductive Technology and the Meaning of Motherhood 43 Jennifer Parks Chapter 5 Screen Autism, Cell Phone Zombies, and GPS Mutes 65 Babette Babich Chapter 6 Technology in the Hands of Children: Helpful Tools or Harmful Distractions? 73 Lisa Menard Chapter 7 Learning in an Age of Digital Distraction: Education versus Consumption 85 Chris Beeman vi Contents Chapter 8 The Kids Are All Right: Lessons from the March for Our Lives 101 Jason Hannan Chapter 9 Anonymity and (Mis)representation on Social Media Are Changing Who We Are and How We Think About Identity 119 Jessica Lowell Mason Chapter 10 Deep Fakes and Computer Vision: The Paradox of New Images 139 Lisa Portmess About the Editor and Contributors 151 Index 155 Foreword Rossana Pasquino There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. —Marshall McLuhan I have lived through a period in which fervor for technology widely changed teaching, learning, sport, and, in general, entertainment. I wrote my master’s thesis using a personal computer that occupied my whole writing desk and was connected to an old-fashioned printer only capable of producing 100 black-and-white pages in a couple of hours. As a gift for my master’s degree, I received from my parents a mobile telephone able only to call and to send 100 free text messages per month, with limited characters per message. Today, 13 years later, everyone has a smartphone able to Google, pay bills, and “like” pages and the “status” of unknown people overseas. I can print hundreds of pages per minute using a superthin and light laptop, or so-called ultrabook, or via Bluetooth with my smartphone. As a professor—or, more generally, as one of the knowledge holders—I feel the need to improve the learning experience for everyone by using methods alternative to traditional chalk and blackboard. In our athe- naeum, active learning is spreading out, both to impart crucial knowledge and to assess understanding. We need to keep student audiences alert during lessons, and to gain their approval of our teaching—a sort of instant “like.” At the end of a lesson, for example, many professors are using the “kahoot” method (www.kahoot.com). With a private account, professors can create on an online platform different learning games (known as kahoots) with multiple-choice questions regarding the topic of the lesson. The format and number of questions are entirely up to the viii Foreword professor, who has to indicate, when the kahoot is created, the right answers to the posed questions. Students answer the questions on their own smartphones (after having subscribed to the specific kahoot with their personal student pins) while the quiz is displayed on a shared screen. No worries about how many students have a smartphone; 100 percent of them do, and a very high percentage of them have power banks to be sure not to run out of battery power. When the kahoot is finished, the answer statistics can be projected immediately on the screen, and the discussion between professor and students can begin. Professors can download the answers in an Excel file and can record and analyze them any time in the future. They can even assign kahoots as mandatory homework. The best students receive a bonus for their kahoots performance, which will increase their final exam scores. In this “learning gamification,” everyone seems to receive his or her own recompense. I also started wheelchair fencing five years ago, using an electrical saber. Thanks to weapon electrification, it is possible to register touches to a valid target with a light through an electric circuit. The referee has to indicate which fencer scores the point when both signals of the players light up by analyzing the movements that composed the last fencing phase. The decision is based on the concept of Right of Way, which gives the point to the fencer who had priority, and this can be gained in different ways. Of course, the referee could make the wrong decision, particu- larly when there were no lights to highlight the hits (while both fencers yell to acknowledge the point). Very recently, video refereeing has been introduced, with the same principle of the Video Assistant Referee in football. A video consultant is able to support or not support referees’ decisions by video analysis, retracing the actions at issue. In this “gaming scientification,” the fencer’s rights are protected and suspense and tense atmosphere abolished. Given my personal experience of this continuous trade-off between benefits provided by technological advancement in our lives and issues these improvements create in our approach to education, communication, sport, and human behavior, in general, I deeply appreciate the concerns this collection addresses. Introduction: Technology Is Changing Us C. G. Prado Of all of technology’s newly enabled devices, the one that seems to have the greatest impact on people is the smartphone. Replacing the highly useful but limited cell phone, the smartphone not only provides ready telephonic connectivity but also affords access to the Internet and has the capacity to run numerous “apps” that perform various tasks. The problem is that the use of smartphones has proven addictive, and like any addic- tion, it is affecting people in profound ways. The smartphone, though, is only one of many devices and capacities shaping and reshaping our behavior and, by doing so, shaping and reshaping us. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have seen technology advance impressively, and as its new procedures and devices are applied and employed, technology has not only improved life for many but has also increasingly influenced people by fostering practices that alter their lives and even their characters. A striking instance is the use of smartphones. No one who knows the amount of time spent by teenagers on their smartphones can doubt that use of some of the devices technological advancement has enabled affects people in significant ways, especially to the extent that using those devices engenders habitual behavior. The most worrying aspect of engendered habitual behavior is its psych- ological impact. Habitual behavior regarding smartphones has received a good deal of attention. Many media and scholarly articles have been devoted to young people’s excessive use of smartphones due to obsessive participation in social media sites and relentless texting. But there are less x Introduction well-recognized instances of how use of smartphones, as well as tablets and laptops, is affecting people. One that I observed as a university professor, and deplore enough to have discussed in a radio interview, has to do with the reconception—or, perhaps better, the misconception—of learning and knowing.1 Ready access to the Internet and search engines on smartphones, tablets, and laptops has resulted in many students reductively identifying knowledge with information. The outcome of this identification is a failure to understand why extensive instruction in subjects like history and geography is necessary when the data is readily available through use of Internet search engines. This consequence con- stitutes a serious failure on the part of students to grasp the difference between learning and comprehension, on the one hand, and mere acqui- sition and possession of data on the other. Because of this failure, students are impatient with and easily distracted from instructors’ efforts to have them assimilate and integrate the material covered in lectures and coursework. Students have come to see that material as just so much data, as data far more easily accessed on the Internet than through what they now think of as tedious lectures and dreary textbooks. The result is that education is failing to edify them. Education is failing to give students assimilated understanding of conveyed material due to their perception and acceptance of the Internet as the repository of data they need not keep in their heads. We are living in a time when technological advancement is not only outstripping the pace of its progression in previous eras but is also affecting many more aspects of our lives than ever before.

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