There’s growing evidence these digital addictions are promoting depression, loneliness, video-gaming abuse and even suicidal behavior, especially among teens and young adults. While they may be victims of a kind, most consumers are simply in denial about their compulsive use of smartphones and social media, as well as other services designed by their developers to be addictive – a problem that persists even when legal sanctions are in play, as with texting while driving. Its success in doing so has wreaked havoc on personal privacy, online security, social skills and the ability to focus attention, not least in college classrooms. In marketing its services, Silicon Valley is committed to the relentless promotion of convenience and connectedness. The last year alone has seen an outpouring of commentary, including some 20 trade books, arguing that our digital habits are harming individual welfare and tearing up the social fabric. Over the next decade, the majority of North Americans will experience harms of many different kinds thanks to the widespread adoption and use of digital technologies. Leora Lawton, lecturer in demography and sociology and executive director of the Berkeley Population Center at the University of California, Berkeley, shared these reasons digital life is likely to be mostly harmful: “The long-term effects of children growing up with screen time are not well understood but early signs are not encouraging: poor attention spans, anxiety, depression and lack of in-person social connections are some of the correlations already seen, as well as the small number of teens who become addicts and non-functioning adults.”ĭavid Ellis, Ph.D., course director of the department of communication studies at York University in Toronto, said, “Much like a mutating virus, digital services and devices keep churning out new threats along with the new benefits – making mitigation efforts a daunting and open-ended challenge for everyone. Rich Salz, principal engineer at Akamai Technologies, commented, “We have already seen some negative effects, including more isolation, less ability to focus, more ability to be deceived by bad actors (fake news) and so on. All in all, digital life is now threatening our psychological, economic and political well-being.” And finally, the addictive technologies that have captured the attention and mindspace of the youngest generation. And then there are the worries about AI and the technological displacement of labor. I am mainly worried about corporate and governmental power to surveil users (attendant loss of privacy and security), about the degraded public sphere and its new corporate owners that care not much for sustaining democratic governance. The harms have begun to come into view just over the past few years, and the trend line is moving consistently in a negative direction. The massive and undeniable benefits of digital life – access to knowledge and culture – have been mostly realized. Rob Reich, professor of political science at Stanford University, said, “If the baseline for making a projection about the next today is the current level of benefit/harm of digital life, then I am willing to express a confident judgment that the next decade will bring a net harm to people’s well-being.
The technologies that 50 years ago we could only dream of in science fiction novels, which we then actually created with so much faith and hope in their power to unite us and make us freer, have been co-opted into tools of surveillance, behavioral manipulation, radicalization and addiction. All of these voices are represented in this section of the report. In addition, even among those who said they are hopeful that digital life will be more helpful than harmful and among those who said there will not be much change, there were many who also expressed deep concerns about people’s well-being in the future. Roughly a third of respondents predicted that harms to well-being will outweigh the positives overall in the next decade. However, as in all great technological revolutions, digital life has and will continue to have a dark side. About half of the people responding in this study were in substantial agreement that the positives of digital life will continue to outweigh the negatives.
0 kommentar(er)
