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"Stop Googling. Let's Talk." by Sherry Turkle (NY Times)

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"Stop Googling. Let's Talk." by Sherry Turkle (NY Times)

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Stop Googling. Let's Talk - Sherry Turkle - NYT.pdf

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"Students Can't Resist Distraction for Two Minutes...And Neither Can You" by Bob Sullivan (NBC)

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"Students Can't Resist Distraction for Two Minutes...And Neither Can You" by Bob Sullivan (NBC)

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"Students Can’t Resist Distraction for Two Minutes" 

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"The Gr8 Deb8 of Teen Txting" by Cory Howard (KHQ)

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"The Gr8 Deb8 of Teen Txting" by Cory Howard (KHQ)

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SPOKANE, Wash. - OMG, LOL, BRB...sounds like something your kids text message you? What if those texts showed up on your child's homework?

As more and more "textisms" show up on essays and papers, KHQ takes a look at the effects texting has on literacy in the classroom. Is the need to abbreviate undoing all the grammar and spelling students have learned over the years? Or is this language's natural evolution?

In the digital age, teenagers regularly scrap the English dictionary for a new dialect: "Textese" or "Text-speak." Textese drops consonants, vowels, and punctuation, and uses letters and numbers interchangeably.

"Me and my friends have created our own language," On Track Academy student Marie Townsend said. "My texts are mostly just texting language. I do mix some actual words in there but I don't use punctuation."

Shadle High School senior Rebecca Mohr said, "I think its just of a fun thing that people enjoy, the shortness and the quickness."

According to a Nielson study, teens aged 13 to 17 send and receive 3,339 text messages per month. Teenage girls like Townsend and Mohr receive more than 4,000.

"I'm texting all through the day, non-stop until I go to bed," Townsend said. "Sometimes, even right before I go to bed, I'm texting."

Mohr also admitted to texting throughout the day but, for the record, said she spells out all of her texts in complete sentences. At this rate, was it only a matter of time before OMG and IDK replaced English in classrooms?

Or worse: is texting the death of the English language?

Chewelah High School English Literature teacher Mr. Michael Schut said tees "feel like they have clearly separated in their mind when they're texting and when they're writing, and they don't see any problems with it blending or bleeding over. I do."

In his classes of juniors and seniors, Mr. Schut teaches literary classics from Orwell to Shakespeare. But of essays he expects to be rich with literary devices, Schut said 10 percent are red-inked because of Textese.

"I see it probably most prevalent is the absence of punctuation and capitalization," he said. "Often times if I'm looking at rough drafts, all of a sudden there will be spaces of just no punctuation, no capitalization, no commas."

A recent study published in Australia found that texting teens performed faster on tests but were also more prone to error. What's more, Mr. Schut found that constant texting distracts students from developing their formal reading and writing skills.

"My biggest concern is that they could be better writers than they are because they're not using those formal writing skills enough," Schut said.

Others like the author of "Txtng: The Gr8 Db8" argues texting actually makes young people better communicators, not worse. Townsend is proof. For all her texting banter, she is also a published author.

"Just because you're a texter or if you text a lot, it doesn't mean that you can't write well-written essays or you can't, for example, write a book," Townsend said. "You can, as long as you can balance it out, and separate your grammar from the texting."

To most teens, texting is not the death of an old language but the birth of a new one. The key, Townsend believes, is to be fluent in both.

In that case, students will have language skills that could give William and Webster a Rn 4 thr $$.

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The Gr8 Deb8 of Teen Txting: Text Messaging Ruining The English Language?

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SPOKANE, Wash. - OMG, LOL, BRB...sounds like something your kids text message you? What if those texts showed up on your child's homework? As more and more "textisms" show up on essays and papers, KHQ takes a look at the effects texting has on literacy in the classroom.

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"I [heart] the emoji revolution " by Brit Peterson (Boston Globe)

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"I [heart] the emoji revolution " by Brit Peterson (Boston Globe)

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Digital culture is awash in words: a 2010 report from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project showed that US teens used texting more than any other method to stay in touch. But younger Americans are accustomed to exchanging information visually as well. For people growing up on Snapchat, Instagram, GIFs, and the image-heavy pages of Facebook, emoji are the perfect "boundary form," as University of California Irvine cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito describes it, engaging both language and image. It helps that for older readers-i.e., parents-they can be completely indecipherable.

The Japanese mobile company Docomo introduced emoji in 1999 to give curt text messages a layer of expressive complexity-something Japanese letter-writing traditionally accomplished through flowery greetings and long honorifics. In an interview with the online publication The Verge in March, emoji developer Shigetaka Kurita explained, "If someone says 'Wakarimashita,' you don't know whether it's a kind of warm, soft 'I understand' or a 'yeah, I get it' kind of cool, negative feeling. You don't know what's in the writer's head." It took nearly a decade for the images to spread to America, first as a downloadable iPhone app and finally, in 2011, as a standard 840-character set on all US iPhones.

The function of emoji, as Kurita describes it-adding subtle emotional emphasis to a sentence in text-isn't too different from that of emoticons, the frowny and smiley faces that people have been making out of punctuation since the mid-1990s. And most people do use emoji that way. According to the site Emoji Tracker, which follows the emoji used on Twitter, the most popular tend to be smiley faces, frowny faces, and hearts, often placed at the ends of sentences as emphasizers.

Adept emoji-nauts, however, use the pictograms to substitute for words or entire sentences, either one at a time or in long strings. Used this way, emoji can open up a world of linguistic pleasures. The sender uses this insider's code to create a puzzle; the receiver must then crack it.

Ito, who has extensively studied teenage emoji use in Japan, says that trying to read the text logs of teenagers can be impossible: "We would see kids use combinations in creative ways that you wouldn't be able to interpret as an outsider." The beer mug symbol plus the boy and girl symbol, she says, might indicate a coed party. The boy symbol and a down arrow might mean that the boys at a particular party were really lame.

Emoji's explosion in the United States has allowed for similar experimentation. There's a Tumblr called Narratives in Emoji ("Taxi Driver," summarized with taxis, fists, the police, and hearts) and a full "Moby-Dick" translation, " Emoji Dick," overseen by developer Fred Benenson. If the original purpose of emoji was to clarify ambiguous text messages, more complex uses of emoji can do the opposite. Does a man in a tall Russian-style fur hat mean "I support a diplomatic end to the stand-off in Syria" or "Meet me at the Russian Tea Room"? Depends on the context.

Visual-verbal play along these lines is not unique to the digital age. British linguist David Crystal, author of "Txting: The Gr8 Db8," described to me the rebus-like puzzles of his childhood: for example, the numeral 2 + a bee + a rowing implement + a tied-up string + the numeral 2 + the bee again = "To be or not to be." Rebuses, pictographic puzzles in which images are read phonetically (the letter "C" for "sea" or "see"), have been around in English at least since the Victorian era. Queen Victoria and Lewis Carroll played them, and letter-writers achieved a high level of virtuosity, composing epistles in images that look an awful lot like 18th and 19th-century versions of emoji: cherubs, combs, queens, eyes, hearts, and trees.

With emoji, a hat may be either a hat or a symbol for something else; it usually doesn't represent a syllable. But its mostly youthful users enjoy that same rebus-like sense of meaning encoded through a visual puzzle-one that's exclusive to them. American University linguist Naomi Baron, author of "Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World," calls the use of emoji a way to mark "in-group, out-group" status, like picking the perfect Facebook photo.

These social considerations could doom emoji, as early adopters move on to something new. Crystal pointed to the now dated-looking emoticon lexicons created in the 1990s and early 2000s-emoticon Marge and Homer Simpson, and so on-as a sign of where today's emoji galleries are probably headed. But our delight in drawing on visual elements to communicate is far older than the iPhone, and will almost surely survive it, too.

Britt Peterson is a writer in Washington, D.C.

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I [heart] the emoji revolution - The Boston Globe

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Emoji, the Japan-exported digital images that are now widely available on iPhones around the world, present the observer with an endless series of mysteries. What, really, is the difference between "Smiling cat face with open mouth" and "Grinning cat face with smiling eyes" and "Smiling cat face with heart eyes"?

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"We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned" by Laura Sydell (NPR)

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"We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned" by Laura Sydell (NPR)

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A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story - the fake one.

We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously. So we brought in some professional help.

By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. In the interest of real news he helped us track down the owner of Denverguardian.com.

Jansen started by looking at the site's history. "Commonly that's called scraping or crawling websites," he says.

Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. He says that nothing you do on the Web disappears - it just gets buried - like a fossil. But if you do some digging you'll find those fossils and learn a lot of history.

The "Denver Guardian" was built and designed using a pretty common platform - WordPress. It's used by bloggers and people who want to create their own websites. Jansen found that the first entry ever for the site was done by someone with the handle LetTexasSecede.

The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.

"That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything," Jansen says. "I was able to track that through to a bunch of other sites which are where that handle is also present."

The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company. Jansen found an email address on one of those sites and was able to link that address to a name: Jestin Coler.

Online, Coler was listed as the founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia. Coler's LinkedIn profile said he once sold magazine subscriptions, worked as a database administrator and as a freelance writer for among others, International Yachtsman magazine. And, using his name, we found a home address.

On a warm, sunny afternoon I set out with a producer for a suburb of Los Angeles. Coler lived in a middle-class neighborhood of pastel-colored one-story beach bungalows. His home had an unwatered lawn - probably the result of California's ongoing drought. There was a black minivan in the driveway and a large prominent American flag.

We rang the front doorbell and a man answered, his face obscured by a heavy mesh steel screen. I asked for Jestin Coler. The man indicated that's who he was. But when I asked about Disinfomedia, he said, "I don't know what to tell you guys. Have a good day."

We left Coler our contact information thinking he wasn't likely to talk. But a couple of hours later he had a change of heart. He sent us an email and we set up an interview.

Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

"The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.

During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says. "It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election."

Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals - but they just never take the bait.

Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites - he won't say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the "Denver Guardian" that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.

"The people wanted to hear this," he says. "So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then ... our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire."

And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.

However, Coler insists this is not about money. It's about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was "correct."

Coler says he has tried to shine a light on the problem of fake news. He has spoken to the media about it. But those organizations didn't know who he actually was. He gave them a fake name: Allen Montgomery.

Coler, a registered Democrat, says he has no regrets about his fake news empire. He doesn't think fake news swayed the election.

"There are many factors as to why Trump won that don't involve fake news," he says. "As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage."

Coler doesn't think fake news is going away. One of his sites - NationalReport.net - was flagged as fake news under a new Google policy, and Google stopped running ads on it. But Coler had other options.

"There are literally hundreds of ad networks," he says. "Early last week, my inbox was just filled every day with people because they knew that Google was cracking down - hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites."

Coler says he has been talking it over with his wife and may be getting out of the fake-news racket. But, he says, dozens, maybe hundreds of entrepreneurs will be ready to take his place. And he thinks it will only get harder to tell their websites from real news sites. They know now that fake news sells and they will only be in it for the money.

Below are highlights of NPR's interview with Coler.

Interview Highlights
Tell me a little about why you started Disinfomedia?
Late 2012, early 2013 I was spending a lot of time researching what is now being referred to as the alt-right. I identified a problem with the news that they were spreading and created Disinfomedia as a response to that. The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.
What got you engaged in this?
My educational background is in political science. I've always enjoyed the ideas of propaganda and misinformation. Then I coupled that with an interest in what makes things go viral. So that led me to finding those groups and ultimately to finding contributors. But it was just something I had an interest in that I wanted to pursue.
When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?
Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin's famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn't something that started with Trump. This is something that's been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it's always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.

We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
How many domains do you own and run?
Well, I would say there's somewhere around 25 domains that I am currently managing. National Report has been my bread and butter, where I've spent most of my time. I have people who work with me and for me in developing and maintaining the other sites and social media kind of stuff. [Coler later said not all his sites are fake news.] So I, for the most part, focus on National Report, and a lot of the other stuff is run by other folks on the team.
So, you're the publisher of an empire.
Well I wouldn't go so far as to call it an empire but, yes, it's several sites [chuckle].
How many people do you have writing for you?
It comes and goes, and as for actual employed writers, again these guys sort of make their own money through ad code. So I don't say, 'Hey, you have to write 10 stories this week' and this and that. Really, we have a more free-form idea where people, when their creativity strikes them then they can write something. And if they're in a slump then they just go dormant for a while. With that said, at any given time there's probably 20, 25 contributors all over the country. ...
Talk about the "Denver Guardian."
Well, it's kind of a side project. We have some people working on next steps in the fake-news industry, and that came from that whole discussion. We had purchased several domain names that sounded legitimate. ... More local news sort of stories. The idea was to make the sites look as legit as possible so the home page is going to be local news and local forecast, local sports, some obituaries and things of that nature, and then the actual fake news stories were going to be buried off the home page.

We've tried lots of things in the past. The dot-com-dot-co domains were something I toyed in for a while. Those I quickly got away from because you don't get away long with borrowing someone's copyright or trademark. That was something that worked very well from a fake-news perspective. People were fooled into the domain name, but that wasn't so much what we were after. So again, the next step was to go after more city-type sites. And the "Denver Guardian" was one of those sites.
You're talking about the future of this (fake-news business) which looks more insidious because it's more real?
That's the way that it's going to be. Not just from where I am. I mean, this is probably going to be my last run in the fake-news biz, but I can promise you that it's not going to go away. It's even going to grow bigger and it's going to be harder to identify as it kind of evolves through these steps. ...
Do you know who wrote the actual FBI Clinton story?
I do know who wrote the story, but only through an anonymous pen name. Privacy is something that we take very seriously in our writers group. The actual reasonings behind that story ... it's one of hundreds that have been written about mysterious deaths of Clinton associates or political foes. This one kind of took off more than others, I believe, just because of the nature of the story. The people wanted to hear this. So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional. The town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. Then, we had our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.
Why hide your identity?
This isn't the safest business to be in, to be honest. Just the number of death threats I've received. I have a beautiful family, a beautiful life.

Some of these people that we ... bait is probably the right word - are often - let's call them the deplorables, right? They're not the safest crowd. Some of them I would consider domestic terrorists. So they're just not people that I want to be knocking on my door.
It seems like National Report is getting spoofier.
If you went to National Report today, it's specifically satire. "Chris Christie nominated to Supreme Food Court." "Sarah Palin Banning Muslims from Entering Bristol Palin." They're a little bit more offensive than some people care for their satire. I mean fat-shaming and slut-shaming isn't something that is normally met with applause. But again, it's a lot more fun in nature.
Do you make serious money?
It depends on what you would call serious money. I think I do pretty well.
Can you say how well?
I would rather not. There have been some people who have been reported on recently. The folks in Long Beach that were doing just all right stuff. They were reporting $10,000 to $30,000 a month; I think that's probably a relative ballpark.
So you're doing as well as those?
Yes.
You're making money through the ads?
Yes.
Who do you work with?
We have several advertisers. Google was one, although they shut down my account last week. We've replaced them with other advertisers.
Can I ask who?
There are literally hundreds of ad networks. Literally hundreds. Last week my inbox was just filled everyday with people, because they knew that Google was cracking down - hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites. I kind of applaud Google for their steps, although I think what they're doing is kind of random. They don't really have a process in place for identifying these things. I happen to know a very successful site that, as of today, of this morning is still serving Google ads. So it seems to be a kind of arbitrary step that they're taking either based on, I don't know if it was my reputation within the industry or specifically the "Denver Guardian" site that angered them, or I don't know what it is, but back to your question, there's hundreds of people that will work with me.
What can be done about fake news?
Some of this has to fall on the readers themselves. The consumers of content have to be better at identifying this stuff. We have a whole nation of media-illiterate people. Really, there needs to be something done.
Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
Sure.
Are you one of the biggest in the fake-news biz?
If you look at someone who has specifically sometimes peddled in fictional news then I think that I would probably be considered one of the larger sites.
As a liberal, do you have any regrets?
I don't. Again, this is something that I've been crying about for a while. But outside of that, there are many factors as to why Trump won that don't involve fake news, right? As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.
You don't feel responsible.
I do not.
Do you think you would have kept doing it if it wasn't so lucrative?
Really, the financial part of it isn't the only motivator for me. I do enjoy making a mess of the people that share the content that comes out of our site. It's not just the financial incentive for me. I still enjoy the game I guess.
Would you do this all over again?
Well, I guess it came to a head here and we're talking about it. It'll be interesting to see what happens moving forward. If I had to, if I knew specifically the "Denver Guardian" situation, that would have been handled differently. But everything else, as far as the work I've done with National Report, I'm very proud of, and I'm going to continue doing it.

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We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned

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A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

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"Zoom fatigue is taxing the brain. Here is why that happens" by Julia Sklar (National Geographic)

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"Zoom fatigue is taxing the brain. Here is why that happens" by Julia Sklar (National Geographic)

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Jodi Eichler-Levine finished teaching a class over Zoom on April 15, and she immediately fell asleep in the guest bedroom doubling as her office. The religion studies professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania says that while teaching is always exhausting, she has never "conked out" like that before.

Until recently, Eichler-Levine was leading live classes full of people whose emotions she could easily gauge, even as they navigated difficult topics-such as slavery and the Holocaust-that demand a high level of conversational nuance and empathy. Now, like countless people around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrust her life into a virtual space. In addition to teaching remotely, she's been attending a weekly department happy hour, an arts-and-crafts night with friends, and a Passover seder-all over the videoconferencing app Zoom. The experience is taking a toll.

"It's almost like you're emoting more because you're just a little box on a screen," Eichler-Levine says. "I'm just so tired."

So many people are reporting similar experiences that it's earned its own slang term, Zoom fatigue, though this exhaustion also applies if you're using Google Hangouts, Skype, FaceTime, or any other video-calling interface. The unprecedented explosion of their use in response to the pandemic has launched an unofficial social experiment, showing at a population scale what's always been true: virtual interactions can be extremely hard on the brain.

"There's a lot of research that shows we actually really struggle with this," says Andrew Franklin, an assistant professor of cyberpsychology at Virginia's Norfolk State University. He thinks people may be surprised at how difficult they're finding video calls given that the medium seems neatly confined to a small screen and presents few obvious distractions.

Zoom gloom

Humans communicate even when they're quiet. During an in-person conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they're fidgeting while you talk, or if they inhale quickly in preparation to interrupt.

These cues help paint a holistic picture of what is being conveyed and what's expected in response from the listener. Since humans evolved as social animals, perceiving these cues comes naturally to most of us, takes little conscious effort to parse, and can lay the groundwork for emotional intimacy.

However, a typical video call impairs these ingrained abilities, and requires sustained and intense attention to words instead. If a person is framed only from the shoulders up, the possibility of viewing hand gestures or other body language is eliminated. If the video quality is poor, any hope of gleaning something from minute facial expressions is dashed.

"For somebody who's really dependent on those non-verbal cues, it can be a big drain not to have them," Franklin says. Prolonged eye contact has become the strongest facial cue readily available, and it can feel threatening or overly intimate if held too long.

Multi-person screens magnify this exhausting problem. Gallery view-where all meeting participants appear Brady Bunch-style-challenges the brain's central vision, forcing it to decode so many people at once that no one comes through meaningfully, not even the speaker.

"We're engaged in numerous activities, but never fully devoting ourselves to focus on anything in particular," says Franklin. Psychologists call this continuous partial attention, and it applies as much to virtual environments as it does to real ones. Think of how hard it would be to cook and read at the same time. That's the kind of multi-tasking your brain is trying, and often failing, to navigate in a group video chat.

This leads to problems in which group video chats become less collaborative and more like siloed panels, in which only two people at a time talk while the rest listen. Because each participant is using one audio stream and is aware of all the other voices, parallel conversations are impossible. If you view a single speaker at a time, you can't recognize how non-active participants are behaving-something you would normally pick up with peripheral vision.

For some people, the prolonged split in attention creates a perplexing sense of being drained while having accomplished nothing. The brain becomes overwhelmed by unfamiliar excess stimuli while being hyper-focused on searching for non-verbal cues that it can't find.

That's why a traditional phone call may be less taxing on the brain, Franklin says, because it delivers on a small promise: to convey only a voice.

Zoom boon

By contrast, the sudden shift to video calls has been a boon for people who have neurological difficulty with in-person exchanges, such as those with autism who can become overwhelmed by multiple people talking.

John Upton, an editor at the New Jersey-based news outlet Climate Central, recently found out he is autistic. Late last year, he was struggling with the mental load of attending packed conferences, engaging during in-person meetings, and navigating the small-talk that's common in work places. He says these experiences caused "an ambiguous tension, a form of anxiety."

As a result, he suffered a bout of autistic burnout and struggled to process complicated information-which he says is normally his strength-leading to feelings of helplessness and futility. To combat the issue, he began transitioning to working mostly from home and stacking all in-person meetings on Thursdays, to get them out of the way.

Now that the pandemic has pushed his coworkers to be remote as well, he has observed their video calls lead to fewer people talking and less filler conversation at the beginning and end of each meeting. Upton says his sense of tension and anxiety has been reduced to the point of being negligible.

This outcome is supported by research, says the University of Québec Outaouais's Claude Normand, who studies how people with developmental and intellectual disabilities socialize online. People with autism tend to have difficulty understanding when it's their turn to speak in live conversations, she notes. That's why the frequent lag between speakers on video calls may actually help some autistic people. "When you're Zooming online, it's clear whose turn it is to talk," Normand says.

However, other people on the autism spectrum may still struggle with video chatting, as it can exacerbate sensory triggers such as loud noise and bright lights, she adds.

On the whole, video chatting has allowed human connections to flourish in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago. These tools enable us to maintain long-distance relationships, connect workrooms remotely, and even now, in spite of the mental exhaustion they can generate, foster some sense of togetherness during a pandemic.

It's even possible Zoom fatigue will abate once people learn to navigate the mental tangle video chatting can cause. If you're feeling self-conscious or overstimulated, Normand recommends you turn off your camera. Save your energy for when you absolutely want to perceive the few non-verbal cues that do come through, such as during the taxing chats with people you don't know very well, or for when you want the warm fuzzies you get from seeing someone you love. Or if it's a work meeting that can be done by phone, try walking at the same time.

"Walking meetings are known to improve creativity, and probably reduce stress as well," Normand says.

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'Zoom fatigue' is taxing the brain. Here's why that happens.

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Video calls seemed an elegant solution to remote work, but they wear on the psyche in complicated ways.

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"Social Distancing Could Change Our Relationship With FaceTime" by Marina Koren (The Atlantic)

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"Social Distancing Could Change Our Relationship With FaceTime" by Marina Koren (The Atlantic)

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As public-health experts urge Americans to stay away from one another, video tech seems poised to take on a new cultural significance.

Ace03 / Shutterstock / The Atlantic

Karen Wright loves to sing to her three-month-old grandson, August. She croons Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song": "Day-o, day-o, daylight come and me wan' go home." Sometimes she throws in a little Bob Marley, and dances along. Wright loves seeing August's eyes light up at the sound of her voice.

Wright does this from more than 1,000 miles away. She lives in Tallahassee, and her grandson is in Toronto. Wright's daughter was supposed to visit her mom in Florida in early April so that August could finally meet his grandma. But the family has decided that they shouldn't travel, because of the coronavirus outbreak, which continues to spread quickly across the United States and around the world. More than 70 people have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, in Florida so far, and Wright, a certified nursing assistant who works with elderly patients, knows well the precautions people must take to stem the spread of the disease.

So for now, Wright and her family spend time together through their phones on Duo, the Google videochatting app. It's the next best thing.

"I cannot be that selfish grandma- I really want to see my grandson! " Wright told me this week. "Why jeopardize everything? You just gotta wait it out and see what happens, and pray and hope for the best."

Recommended Reading

As more employers and schools encourage people to stay home, people across the country find themselves videochatting more than they usually might: going to meetings on Zoom, catching up with clients on Skype, FaceTiming with therapists, even hosting virtual bar mitzvahs. Warnings about the increased risk of exposure during travel present a special predicament for people like Wright who live hundreds or thousands of miles away from their families and friends. Many families today are like their own little diasporas, scattered across states, countries, and continents in search of better education and career opportunities. The system works because loved ones remain, for the most part, reachable, and you could hop on a bus or train or plane to see them-without, until recently, the threat of becoming exposed to a new infectious illness, for which no vaccine exists.

Along with recommendations against air travel, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people practice "social distancing" in everyday life, an effort to minimize close physical contact between people to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus. Experts now advise that not only should you avoid crowded public places and stay six to 10 feet away from other people, you should also think carefully about dining out, going to the gym, and attending social gatherings. In other words, it would behoove Americans, especially in areas where the virus has been spreading, to spend as much time at home as possible. And with less face time, there's no better time for FaceTime.
Read: The dos and don'ts of 'social distancing'
"For many people, it's what they do anyway," says Anna Lomanowska, a psychology professor and the director of the Digital Well-Being Lab, where she studies interpersonal contact in virtual settings. "So it feels like, in a sense, we're pretty prepared for this."

For the siblings Emily and Evan Seegmiller, both in their 20s, FaceTiming with their parents is a weekly habit. Evan is a social-media coordinator in Wisconsin, Emily is in graduate school in Indiana, and their parents live in their hometown in Illinois. They're finding a new appreciation for the tech, especially because their plans for future visits are now up in the air. "We are a very close family, so FaceTime is a go-to no matter what, but with this pandemic it makes it much more important," Emily told me over Twitter DM. The siblings were hoping to join their mother on a trip to visit their grandparents in Arizona at the end of the month, but during their last FaceTime session, they decided they should cancel. Their grandparents are in their 70s, and coronavirus infection is more dangerous to the elderly.

But social isolation, too, can be especially unhealthy for older adults. While public-health experts agree that social distancing is the most effective way to keep people healthy when vaccines and tests are lacking, staying away from loved ones can be dangerous in its own way. That's especially true for at-risk groups who may face lengthy quarantines, self-imposed or otherwise, says Alan Teo, a physician who teaches at Oregon Health and Science University's School of Medicine. Research has shown links between social isolation and health problems, including depression, at every stage of life. In a 2018 study, Teo found that the use of videochatting helped reduce the risk of depression in people aged 60 and older, a group that is more likely to be socially isolated than younger people. Videochatting was more effective than email, social media, and instant messaging.

"That's something that's been missing in the conversation here, is what are the dangers of missing out on social contact and connection with other people?" Teo says. "It's hard for me to think of a downside to hand-washing. I can deal with dry, chapped hands. But it is very easy for me to conjure consequences of social distancing that we're not going to like, especially if we think about having to do that over an extended period of time."
Read: What you need to know about the coronavirus
Some facilities that support senior citizens are taking action to mitigate the harmful consequences of isolation. Aegis Living, which runs 32 senior communities in Washington State, California, and Nevada, has started limiting visitors and "in some cases enacting community-wide isolation," so staff has started encouraging its residents to spend time with their families virtually. "Finding new ways to connect families regularly is more important than ever," Nandi Butcher, a spokesperson for Aegis Living, told me. "We are helping our residents connect with loved ones via FaceTime, Skype, and phone calls and have gotten great response so far."

Most children don't need to be introduced to the idea of videochatting, but the role it plays in their life could change if they stop socializing in class. María Helena Carey, a photographer and substitute teacher in Washington, D.C., says her 11-year-old son, Brandon, already FaceTimes with his friends on his iPod, even after they've spent the day together at school. She's especially grateful for his love of videochatting now that the local government has decided to close schools for two weeks starting on Monday. Because Brandon will be forced to stay home, he'll probably use videochat even more to keep in touch, even about the latest developments on the outbreak. It was the first thing Brandon did after Carey told him about a confirmed case in the nation's capital last weekend (there are now 10).

"I wasn't even done reading all the stuff from the mayor's press conference when all of a sudden, I see him just firing up his iPod, doing a three-way chat with his friends-'Did you hear?'" she told me. Her son wanted to see his friends' reactions.

Of course, videochat is not a perfect substitute for real face-to-face interaction. Virtual quality time lacks many of the benefits of physical proximity and human touch. "Our nonverbal behavior or body language is not being transmitted as easily," says Lomanowska, the psychology professor. Spending time together over Skype is unlikely to feel as satisfying as being in the same room. But it's better than nothing.
Read: You already live in quarantine
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, Gabrielle Autry didn't FaceTime with her parents very often, maybe once a month or less. But a lot changed after Autry and her partner spent two months under quarantine this year, in Zhejiang, in eastern China, where she is in graduate school. Now Autry videochats with family in the United States nearly every other day, and her partner with his family in Shanxi, China, hundreds of miles to the north. The regular calls provide a welcome dose of sanity in a strange new reality. "It's helped break up the days and remind me life is still going on outside the walls of my apartment," Autry told me over Twitter DM. "When you're stuck inside for so long it feels like you're in a vacuum and time is frozen or something. The days kind of blend together and 'real life' feels distant and surreal. So the connection to people outside that vacuum is a good reminder of what waits at the end of this crisis period."

Besides helping to stave off Autry's stir-craziness, videochatting has quelled some of the anxieties of her parents in Georgia. "For my mom, I know it's been a huge relief to be able to FaceTime me regularly," Autry said. "She can see that we are healthy and well and that makes her feel better about the distance between us during this situation."

Even though videochatting has already infiltrated nearly every kind of modern relationship, it has yet to be tested on such a large scale, over months, in a period of global anxiety-an outcome that seems to be getting likelier as the virus continues to spread. While the thought of indefinite social distancing is stressful, the new reality might even spur people to engage in more frequent and meaningful conversations than they had, when the next visit was certain to be only a few weeks or months away. "With everyone sort of stuck in this situation, there's a chance to explore new ways of communicating or focusing on improving the way we communicate," Lomanowska says. Last night, inspired by a new trend in Japan, I went to happy hour with my friends in New York and Chicago-from the comfort of our separate living rooms.

Wright isn't sure when she will meet her new grandson for the first time. Until then, she'll keep singing to him. The screen time brings her comfort, even though she knows it might be the safest way she can watch her grandson grow for the foreseeable future.

"You wish you were there," Wright told me. "But in this way, you are."

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Social Distancing Could Change Our Relationship With FaceTime

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As public-health experts urge Americans to stay away from one another, video tech seems poised to take on a new cultural significance. Karen Wright loves to sing to her three-month-old grandson, August. She croons Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song": "Day-o, day-o, daylight come and me wan' go home."

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"Technology that is accessible to everyone: Three ways we’re building for people with disabilities" by Eve Andersson (Google Director of Inclusive Machine Learning & Accessibility Engineering)

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"Technology that is accessible to everyone: Three ways we’re building for people with disabilities" by Eve Andersson (Google Director of Inclusive Machine Learning & Accessibility Engineering)

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A few months ago, I received a note from a recipient of a scholarship that Google funds through the National Federation of the Blind. She had dropped out of college 20 years ago. "I quite literally failed out of college," she wrote.

But now she was back in school-and succeeding-thanks to advances in technology over the past two decades that made it easier for her to participate in the classroom. Features like text-to-speech capabilities, screen readers that allow people to "read" the screen with synthesized speech or braille, and keyboard shortcuts that make it easy to quickly navigate complex sites and apps are all examples of technology that has made it possible for people with disabilities to have greater access to education and other opportunities.

This story was particularly moving to me because it summed up why I became an advocate for building more accessible technology in the first place. Every person in the world deserves a level playing field. And technology can play a huge role in making that happen.

As the head of the Central Accessibility Team at Google, it's my job to make sure that we make our products accessible for the one billion people in the world living with a range of disabilities. And on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I'd like to take the opportunity to share how we're going about achieving that goal through greater understanding, increased training and evolving technology.

Truly understand people's challenges

To build technology that is accessible to everyone, we have to understand what makes certain products inaccessible in the first place. That starts with connecting with people who use the products on a regular basis, so we can see firsthand what challenges exist and how we can begin to chip away at them.

So we've built connections with people with disabilities through advocacy groups, conferences and our own employees' personal experiences. Through these connections we came to realize that there was a need for a dedicated disability support helpdesk where people could receive one-on-one support to better understand how to use our products, and share feedback on how they could be more accessible. That direct user feedback has shaped our products ever since-including the inception of the helpdesk itself, the introduction of wheelchair-accessible routes in transit navigation and improvements to our ChromeVox screen reader. By growing an understanding of the barriers that exist, we can build technology that removes them.

Think about accessibility from the very beginning

There are multiple teams and individuals across Google who influence and contribute to making our products accessible every day-whether it's part of their job description or not. So providing learning opportunities and educational resources is a crucial first step.

The Central Accessibility Team facilitates training for new hires in software engineering, product management and user experience functions. And every employee has access to more than a dozen accessibility courses on an ongoing basis. Trainings cover everything from inclusive design to a technical overview of web accessibility techniques.

Accessibility can't be an afterthought: It needs to be considered from the beginning of the product development cycle. And along the way you have to pause and ask, "Is this accessible to everyone?" We help both internal and external developers answer this question by providing tools to test their software for Android, iOS, and the web. We also help connect our internal teams to users with disabilities who are willing to participate in user research and trusted tester programs.

The result? Apps and products that are truly built to make people's lives easier-like our new Accessibility Menu shortcuts in Android. We worked alongside people living with reduced dexterity as a result of conditions like muscular dystrophy or spinal cord injuries. With their input, we were able to understand what smartphone functions they used the most or caused them the greatest difficulty, and created an Accessibility Menu that could help make daily smartphone use a little bit more manageable.

Our responsibility to make accessible technology goes beyond our own walls. With help from our users we can make our apps and products even more accessible. For example, last September, Local Guides from around the world gathered at 200 global meet-ups to answer accessibility questions about more than 12 million places-like whether a restaurant had a step-free entrance or an accessible restroom. Just last week at I/O, we introduced new features for developers so they can create more accessible app experiences for users with disabilities, including new accessibility testing, best practices and guidelines for Android P. And today we're launching updates to Primer, a resource for businesses, to help them build more accessible websites and products-because we know that a more inclusive web is better for people and better for business.

Lean into the latest technologies

The possibilities for accessible technology are greater than they were 20 years ago in part because of the advancement of technologies like AI.

Building products with AI allows us to constantly iterate and adapt our features and tools to the ever-changing world around us. As more content goes online every minute and as the physical world constantly changes, we need ways to bring that information to everyone faster, including those with disabilities. Tools like YouTube live captioning and Lookout-our new Android app that gives auditory cues about objects, text and people around them-are all possible thanks to AI. Similarly, AI-driven predictions make things like Morse code on Gboard a reality.

Our hope is that by building more accessible products, we can make a meaningful difference in the lives of people around the world who have a disability. Whether it's as simple as making it easier for someone to use their smartphone to make a phone call, or as big as helping someone go back to college, we're always looking for ways to level the playing field and give everyone the chance to participate more fully in their world.

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Technology that is accessible to everyone: Three ways we're building for people with disabilities

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A few months ago, I received a note from a recipient of a scholarship that Google funds through the National Federation of the Blind. She had dropped out of college 20 years ago. "I quite literally failed out of college," she wrote.

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Have you had any experience with dating? Have you ever used dating apps? If so, what has it been like for you? If not, why not?

In " You Up? College in the Age of Tinder," Phoebe Lett writes:

It may not be on any syllabus, but college has always been a time for young people to learn about relationships and sex. But as the internet increasingly influences the ways we interact, it also transforms how students date and find partners. We asked students at nine colleges and universities how technology affects the campus dating scene.

In "No One Wants to Be Known as Tinder Girl," Madeline Apple from the University of Michigan, Class of 2018, shares this experience:

Dating apps may have killed the college dating scene. Because it's so easy to swipe left or right on a seemingly endless pile of potential partners, it's become harder to actually meet anyone. As students, we are told over and over that college is a time for us to expand our social groups, to meet new people and grow into adults. But the indecisiveness that is built into dating app culture can stunt us - we're trapped in an endless cycle of swipes! Commitment, already a scary concept to many, becomes even more difficult with the false illusion that the dating possibilities are endless.

Frankly, dating apps can also just make things incredibly awkward. My freshman year I swiped through hundreds of people. At one of the last tailgates of the year, a random man walked by me and yelled: "Hey! We matched on Tinder! You are Tinder girl!"

In "I Found My First Date on an App," Caleb Keyes from Otterbein University, Class of 2018, writes:

In high school I had always wanted to date but struggled to believe anyone would want to date me. When I got to college those fears were compounded by a feeling of trepidation that if I tried to date someone and we broke up, it would be hard to see them around campus. A friend encouraged me to download Coffee Meets Bagel, which was described as a dating app for people who are easily overwhelmed.

I got a date and she suggested we get ice cream, even though it was snowing outside. It was old-school romantic in a way I hadn't expected. She looked beautiful with snowflakes falling on her hair and her cheeks red from the cold.

Though college is often depicted as a place of sexual exploration, and dating apps seem to encourage passing from one relationship to another, my generation defies that. A study in the journal Child Development found that 18-year-olds today are less likely to have dated than 15-year-olds in the 1990s. The good news is, even if we're dating later, it's no less magical to stand in the snow with someone you like, as the world seems to stop.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

- What have your experiences - or those of your friends and peers - with technology and dating been like?

- How do you think technology - like apps, Netflix, social media and texting - affects dating and relationships? In your opinion, does it improve or worsen romantic interactions? How so?

- What lessons have you learned from dating? Is there any advice you can take from these college students' stories?

- If you could date in a different time period, would you? If so, what era would it be and why? If not, why not?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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How Do You Think Technology Affects Dating? (Published 2018)

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Have you had any experience with dating? Have you ever used dating apps? If so, what has it been like for you? If not, why not? In " You Up? College in the Age of Tinder," Phoebe Lett writes: It may not be on any syllabus, but college has always been a time for young people to learn about relationships and sex.

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"Online Communication and Misunderstanding" by Grese Sermaxhaj (Youth Times Magazine)

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"Online Communication and Misunderstanding" by Grese Sermaxhaj (Youth Times Magazine)

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How good is your communication?

People have found ways to communicate since the very beginning of time. The human race has constantly developed new forms of conveying messages from one person to another.

Mutually understood symbols, signs or a set of specific rules have connected people within a common space of language, understandable and acceptable to all. Nevertheless, with communication comes also the possibility of misunderstanding.

The relevant discussion on the flaws of online communication

Nowadays, most of our interactions are made possible through online platforms and social media. We communicate with work colleagues, with family, as well as with friends through email, Facebook, or other common social media platforms.

Personally, I am not one of those who express themselves much through social media (nothing wrong with that). However, I have been criticized for this and misunderstood more than once.

In the beginning of this article, I am emphasizing that I appreciate all this real-time communication. I was once in a long-distance relationship, and I understand all the benefits stemming from social media. Yet, on the other hand, I find it important to discuss and understand its flaws.

Saying something through text messages is a lot different from saying it in person. The latter lacks the body language, the eye contact, and the emotional connection in the face-to-face moment.

Experts of communication in this article speak to Youth Time to describe if/to what extent online communication is having an impact on causing misunderstanding among us, why this form of communicating is becoming more and more common, how the advance of technology (i.e. online communication) intensifies the existing state and form of misunderstanding between people in various capacities of communicating.

In addition to this, this article will shed some light on the biggest benefit and the biggest downfall of many online communication opportunities, and the differences between online communication and face-to-face communication.

Many misunderstandings that occur online are very similar to those that happen face-to-face

Renee Edwards, PhD, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Louisiana State University initially explains that misunderstanding and miscommunication occur in all forms of interaction.
"It is actually impossible to have perfect understanding, because each person enters a conversation with different experiences, backgrounds, values, and personalities. We communicate with other people using language and nonverbal behaviors or gestures (including emojis). A person who receives a message must decode or interpret meaning from the message in light of their own background, which will always be different from that of the person who created the message. This process can get even more complicated in online communication such as email and text messaging, because features such as vocal intonation, facial expression, and hand gestures are not available.
In our studies, participants report that misunderstanding is much more common in computer-mediated communication (CMC) than in face-to-face (FTF) communication." she states.

Taking into account that Edwards's interest is Message Interpretation and Misunderstanding in Interpersonal Communication, including the factors that influence the ways that individuals interpret messages and the consequences of misunderstanding and Risk Communication, she further elaborates on how all these above-mentioned factors are impacted by today's technological advances.
"Although CMC misunderstandings are more common than FTF misunderstandings, our research suggests that they are not as serious. Their effects or consequences on relationships are not as negative. Why? One reason could be that people realize that CMC is a more limited form of communication, and therefore they have lower expectations for it. Another possibility is that people use CMC (especially text messaging) for less important topics, so any misunderstandings that occur are less serious."

"the tone or relational meaning is the basis of the misunderstanding"

Responding to Youth Time's question about how people tend to interpret the online messages they receive, she notes as follows:
"Interestingly, many misunderstandings that occur online are very similar to those that happen face-to-face. They can be about the content or surface meaning of what a person says. For example, to say "see you at 9" could mean (at least in the U.S.) 9:00 in the morning or 9:00 in the evening. A single message can have two "content" meanings. Misunderstandings can also be about the tone or relational meaning of a message. Our participants report that a text message of "k" or "ok" is thought to be rude or dismissive when it was not intended to carry that emotional meaning. Maybe the sender was at work and just too busy to send a longer acknowledgement. In this case, the tone or relational meaning is the basis of the misunderstanding."
Edwards shares with Youth Time why online communication is becoming more and more common and preferable for some people (i.e. young adults).

" Being able to see a situation from the vantage of another person is called perspective-taking. Our research has shown that it can help humanize the communication process that occurs with misunderstandings.
Perspective-taking is the idea that some individuals are more likely to look at every side of a disagreement or imagine how someone else would feel in a situation. Individuals who do so are less likely to have misunderstandings and have more positive communication following those that occur. It is also valuable for parties to communicate perspective-taking by saying things like "I see what you are saying" when a misunderstanding occurs."
When we are face-to-face, we barely take time to think about what we say. But, in online communication, we tend to take a step back and refine our words

Gentianë Paçarizi, teaching assistant at the University of Prishtina "Hasan Prishtina", Department of Journalism, media and information literacy consultant, is of the opinion that technology advances haven't really intensified the pre-existing stage and form of misunderstanding among people.

" I belong to the group of people who don't tend to blame technology for the extent of misunderstanding among people. While it is true that technology developments have changed communication at large, to some extent, the lack of understanding (decoding) of a certain message from a sender to a receiver depends more on the shared system of codes people operate with.

People are quick to pick communication codes when the system alters, thus the online landscape has been there long enough for people to become familiar with it. This means that if we want to foster understanding among each other, we have to put more effort into ensuring that the person we're speaking to shares the same codes as we do or vice-versa." Paçarizi says.

"we tend to create an echo-chamber where we filter people in our circle based on how similar their preferences, attitudes, and beliefs are to ours"

" The biggest benefit of online communication in interpersonal terms is that our chances of socializing, networking and self-expression are increased in countless ways. You don't always have time to meet people for coffee as life is really dynamic, but you can sit on your couch to rest and talk to your loved ones online.
Other than that, some of barriers are removed.[...] Talking and discussing with someone online reduces levels of anxiety in face-to-face interaction, leaves room to engage in human relations, and allows people to express themselves freely.
On the other hand, the biggest downfall of online communication, in my opinion, is that we tend to create an echo-chamber where we filter people in our circle based on how similar their preferences, attitudes, and beliefs are to ours."

She further elaborates some differences between the two forms of communication.

" Non-verbal communication, if emojis are excluded, is out of calculation. In face-to-face communication, we don't really rely only on spoken words. Non-verbal communication such as our stature and gestures are communication codes as well.
We convey messages by the way we look, the tone of our voice or simply how we place our legs. Online communication puts too much emphasis on words. Well thought out words, I would add. When we are face-to-face with someone, we barely take time to think of what we say or reply, it is only natural. But, in online communication, we tend to take a step back and refine our words." "Nevertheless, you could see the online landscape mastering its own non-verbal codes, though very slowly. When somebody keeps us on 'seen' for some time, isn't it the same as when somebody ignores us when we're standing right in front of them? The same applies to the time people take to reply online. Another form of non-verbal communication deriving from digital space consists of the immense amount of visuals we put out there on a daily basis. For example, while youngsters use Snapchat for exchanging pictures, Instagram relies mostly on the visual aspect. We communicate a lot of our world to our virtual friends by choosing which pictures to post.
Is it a picture of us enjoying an expensive dinner or a picture of us reading a book? They are not merely pictures rather than codes that communicate our social position or preferences."

Paçarizi adds that both forms of communication leave room for misunderstanding. Nevertheless, she thinks that chances for solving a misunderstanding rely mostly on the willingness of both sides to do so.

Moreover, she gives an interesting perspective while contributing to this discussion. "[...] Bullies at school can only bully their fellow classmates. But bullies online can bully all their fellow online-mates.

Therefore, I insist that in order for us to contribute to a better positive online space, we shouldn't focus on digital space itself, rather than on people using it. People who lack empathy and ethics will always be unethical users of any communication channel."

Technological revolution increased both understanding and misunderstanding

Pascal van Opzeeland, Marketing Director at Userlike.com in his "8 Causes of Miscommunication and Misunderstanding" discusses eight common failures to communicate effectively. In his conversation with the author of this article, he additionally describes how advances in technology have changed the existing stage and form of misunderstanding between people, in various capacities of communicating.

"Advances in communication technologies have brought us great things, but they've also destabilized our societies in a variety of ways - just as previous revolutions like the printing press have done. They've increased both understanding and misunderstanding." Pascal van Opzeeland notes, while adding that this is how the internet has changed communication:

Reach. This is the most obvious one. Your words can now reach the far ends of the world with just a click.

Democratization of production. Before, producing and sharing information required significant infrastructure (think newspapers, book publishers). Now, everyone with an internet connection has the potential of reaching millions of people.

Comfort of consumption. Already with the printing press, the consumption of information was decoupled from its production. Radio and television extended this to the mediums of hearing and vision. The internet has taken this even a step further, by making everything accessible on demand. There's no need to watch something when it airs; you can watch it when it suits you.

According to him, this has led to an explosion in communication, so you would think it would have led to an explosion of increased understanding as well. But it hasn't been so straightforward. A few phenomena are working against understanding:

Implicit vs. explicit communication. In face-to-face communication, most of what we convey goes through body language or tone of voice (implicit). When you're talking on the phone, you lack the implicit visual cues. When you're communicating through writing - which is the medium of 99% of the internet, you also lack the implicit voice cues. It therefore becomes much easier to misunderstand the implicit meaning of a message.

Negativity bias. This related phenomenon is our mind's tendency to interpret ambiguity as negative. The negativity bias is a major cause of miscommunication as well. With multiple possible interpretations, we orient towards the negative. Your boyfriend's "seen" your last message but hasn't replied yet? Probably he's too busy cheating on you. The negativity bias is especially pervasive in written channels because the receiver has to do the implicit interpretation.

Our tribal nature. What few people had predicted was how our human tribal nature would latch upon these information technologies. Humans are tribal in nature, and we group on the basis of our value systems - on the basis of moral systems. Online forums tend to work without issues when they are centered around 'unemotional' topics like, say, SEO or plumbing. Online discussions tend to go haywire, however, when they cover 'moral' topics like politics, religion, or ethics.

Online road rage. When you see how online discussions escalate, it reminds one of road rage. Safe behind our windshield or safe behind our computer screen - many of us turn into different people. Those who cross our paths turn from fellow human beings into objects. Our tribal nature already dehumanizes those from another group.

Outrage bias. The algorithms of the biggest social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter) favor posts with an outrageous nature. Those are the ones that lead to the most engagement and that keep people on their platform the longest.

Debate format. There is a difference between conversing with someone in a private chat, and conversing with that person in a public forum. Lose the discussion, and you lose face. It turns into a debate - and a debate is no format for getting closer to truth and understanding.

Echo chambers. We humans, we're wired to want to know everything that's happening in our tribe. We tend to look down on gossip nowadays, but our stone age ancestors' survival depended on it.

With the advance of the internet, though, our tribe has grown too large. We're not wired to deal with so much information. To simplify and escape the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, it makes sense to organize ourselves in digital groups with people who see things the same way.

Yet when everybody does this, then this brings people within the group closer together (within a given group, differences get smaller), but it pushes groups further apart (between groups, differences get larger).

Now, if we mix these related phenomena together, we will have one heck of a toxic cocktail that can explain how a technology that was supposed to bring more understanding actually also brought about polarization and misunderstanding.

He explains the pros and cons of many online communication opportunities.

They facilitate production, reach, and consumption.

They connect and disconnect us.

They bring us closer to those who are similar to us, and push us further away from those who are different.

They offer many benefits for non-emotionally loaded uses (e.g. customer support; technical topics) but things go wayside when it comes to 'emotional' topics like politics, religion, and ethics. Or tribal topics like sports discussion forums.

" What makes online communication different from face-to-face communication? Which one causes more misunderstanding, and which one leads to more chances of solving that misunderstanding?" is the next Youth Time question, for which van Opzeeland lists responses as follows:

Implicit vs. implicit miscommunication

Negativity effect

Face-to-face leaves more chances of solving misunderstanding. The negativity effect is much lower. And there is a type of 'emotional syncing' that tends to kick in. Whether it's empathy or the threat of physical violence, face-to-face discussions tend not to escalate as much as online discussions.

He shares his opinion as to whether online communication 'de-humanizes' communication itself, by forcing us to see only screens. If yes, how so or to what extent?

Definitely, it is similar to online road rage.

The conversation is robbed of empathy.

Especially when combined with a 'debate setting', which turns a conversation competitive, this leads to a 'destroy or be destroyed' attitude.

Although we may not be able to arrive at a clear judgment as a conclusion for this matter, yet this article serves at least as a tiny assist toward treating the topic; decisive for our digital awareness. Merging these two topics, please find below my article "Digital Awareness, as Part of Today's Survival Kit".

More about how to approach healthy communication, you can find here.

Title Photo: Shutterstock

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Online Communication and Misunderstanding - Youth Time Magazine

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People have found ways to communicate since the very beginning of time. The human race has constantly developed new forms of conveying messages from one person to another. Mutually understood symbols, signs or a set of specific rules have connected people within a common space of language, understandable and acceptable to all.

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Examining the Effects of Technology on Face to Face Communication.

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Examining the Effects of Technology on Face to Face Communication.

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Trina L. Rogers
(Marshall University)

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"How Has Technology Made Communication Better?"

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"How Has Technology Made Communication Better?"

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Elizabeth Smith (Stillworks)

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For people who remember a time before cell phones and tablets, it can be mind-boggling to consider how communication has changed. In less than two decades, the development of technology like wireless Internet, text messaging and smartphones have wildly transformed the way people connect with each other. Whether or not you embrace the multitude of new communication devices on the market, there is no getting around the fact that technology has made communication better.

Overcoming Barriers

In a world where people are increasingly physically isolated from friends and family due to finances, distance or a packed schedule, technology makes it easier to stay in touch. Instead of taking the time to write and mail a letter, you can touch base with a simple Facebook comment. Chances are, a significant percent of your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances are on Facebook; as of October 2012, the site had one billion monthly active users. According to the Pew Research Center, social networking among people between the ages of 18 and 29 has increased from nine percent in 2005 to 92 percent in 2012. Since 2006, the numbers have been rising steadily for all age groups, making it increasingly easier to communicate.

Wide Access

With modern communication technology, it is possible to reach hundreds of people instantly. With a single tweet or Facebook post, you can get the opinions of all of your friends and followers. Whether you're looking for an opinion on a first date outfit or wondering about which logo works better for your new business, technology allows you to crowdsource opinions. The scope of crowdsourcing goes far beyond personal opinion. After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, a crowdsourcing platform called CloudFlower was used to help translate the emergency text messages coming in from stranded, injured and trapped citizens. Volunteers and workers translated the messages and provided accurate location information. As a result, relief workers and emergency personnel were better able to prioritize and respond to distress calls. Before the widespread Internet availability, such a task would have been impossible to achieve in such a short time and with such accuracy.

Facilitate Face-to-Face Contact

With communication technology, you can improve the content and quality of in-person contact. Cell phones, text messages and email make it easy and quick to arrange meetings, even at the last minute. There's no need to sit at home waiting for the phone to ring or worry about missing a call - with a single text, you can find a friend nearby and arrange a get-together. Once you're in the same place, you can get right down to serious matters instead of wasting time on the mundane details of day-to-day life. Although some may worry about texting taking over actual communication, a study by the Pew Research Center found that the use of text messages and phone calls has leveled out among adult users. The average number of daily text messages and phone calls stayed the same between 2010 and 2012. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that approximately 85 percent of American adults had mobile phones as of December 2012.

Customer Service

In an era when time is money, technology helps businesses improve communication with customers and cut customer service costs. In most cases, customers no longer have to trek to a store or spend hours on hold to get an answer to a question or complaint. Instead, they can send an email, search an online database or exchange instant messages with an employee. According to Inc. magazine, technology like customer relationship management software also helps with data management and analytics, so companies of all sizes can tailor their communication approach. Social media technology is particularly useful for customer service, both for business owners and consumers. When a customer posts a question or complaint on a company's Facebook page or Twitter account, the correct employee can respond quickly. Both parties save time and money on long phone calls, and other online users can see the conversation in real time. The visibility and transparency of social media pressure a company to improve its response time and communication style, which improves the customer experience.

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How Has Technology Made Communication Better?

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For people who remember a time before cell phones and tablets, it can be mind-boggling to consider how communication has changed. In less than two decades, the development of technology like wireless Internet, text messaging and smartphones have wildly transformed the way people connect with each other. Whether or not ...

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Public think technology impacts the political environment in both positive and negative ways by Aaron Smith, Laura Silver, Courtney Johnson, and JingJing Jiang(Pew Research Center)

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Public think technology impacts the political environment in both positive and negative ways by Aaron Smith, Laura Silver, Courtney Johnson, and JingJing Jiang(Pew Research Center)

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Beyond their views of the personal impact of various technologies, publics in these countries are divided over how the internet in general has impacted politics in their societies. An 11-country median of 44% say the increasing use of the internet has had a good impact on politics, but 28% feel that impact has been largely bad - and this balance of opinion is most negative in Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon.

Adults in these countries also feel access to technology has had a variety of both positive and negative impacts on their fellow citizens. On the positive side of the ledger, a median of 78% say access to the internet, mobile phones and social media has made people more informed about current events. And when asked about the impact of social media on the broader political process, majorities in nine of these 11 countries say they have increased the ability for ordinary citizens to take part in the political process.

At the same time, an 11-country median of 72% say these technologies have made people easier to manipulate with rumors and false information. And majorities in eight countries say social media have increased the risk that citizens might be manipulated by domestic politicians.

Mixed attitudes about the internet's overall impact on politics

Adults in these countries express mixed views about the overall influence of the internet on politics. In most countries, larger shares say the internet has had a good impact on politics than say the same about issues such as children or morality. But notably smaller shares say the internet has had a good impact on politics than say this about its effect on issues such as education, the economy or local culture (for more, see the first report in this series).

Adults in these countries also make little distinction between the impact of the internet and mobile phones when it comes to politics. Nearly identical shares say the internet and mobile phones have had a good, bad or negligible impact on politics.

People who themselves use the internet are somewhat more upbeat than non-users about its effect on politics. And in most of these countries there are only modest to nonexistent differences in attitudes between older and younger adults. But those who describe social media as a very important source of political news for them, personally, are more likely to say the internet has had a good impact on politics relative to those who say social media are less important, or to those who do not use social media at all.

Across these 11 countries, public opinion about the internet's impact on politics is most negative in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. In Lebanon, nearly twice as many say the internet has had a bad (42%) rather than good (23%) influence on politics. And in Jordan and Tunisia, the shares saying the internet's impact on politics has been good are comparable to the shares saying it has been bad.

In addition to having a comparably negative balance of sentiment relative to the other countries in this survey, publics in these three countries have also turned somewhat less upbeat in recent years in their assessments of the internet's impact on politics. From 2014 to 2018, the share of adults in these countries saying the internet has had a good influence on politics has declined by 11 percentage points in Jordan, 9 points in Lebanon and 6 points in Tunisia. By contrast, sentiment in the other seven countries for which trends are available either grew more positive or stayed largely the same over that time. This positive shift has been most pronounced in Mexico, South Africa and Venezuela.

Many think technology has made people better informed - but also easier to manipulate

When asked about the impact of mobile phones, the internet and social media on various political behaviors and attitudes, people in these nations tend to express seemingly dual views of how technology has brought "more" to society: that it has made people more informed, yet more manipulatable; more divided, yet sometimes more accepting of others.

At one level, publics in these countries believe that technology simultaneously makes people more informed and more gullible. Majorities in every country - and an 11-country median of 78% - say access to technology has made people more informed about current events. At the same time, majorities in every country except for Vietnam - and an 11-country median of 72% - say technology has made it easier to manipulate people with false information and rumors.

We become numb to the news, like the presidential campaigns in Mexico. A term ago, we were struggling to get more political awareness, and now everything is made a meme and laughed at. It defeats the purpose of the internet. MAN, 28, MEXICO

The survey highlights similar tensions over whether these technologies make people more divided or more accepting of others. A median of 58% say access to mobile phones, the internet and social media has made people more divided in their political opinions. At the same time, a median of 52% say these technologies have made people more accepting of those who have different views than they do. And a median of 55% say they have generally made people more willing to engage in political debates.

These positive and negative views of technology's impact on political attitudes are often related. In 10 of the 11 countries surveyed, those who believe technology has made people more informed are more likely than others to say technology has also made people easier to manipulate.

Similarly, in most countries those who say technology has made people more accepting of diverse viewpoints are simultaneously more likely to say it has made people more divided in their political opinions.

Through our mobile phones, since there is that social media, it has really led to the spread of hatred and tribalism amongst ourselves. MAN, 38, KENYA

These same costs and benefits are visible when it comes to technology's impact on political news and discussion. For instance, people in these countries overwhelmingly feel mobile phones have improved people's ability to obtain news. Yet an 11-country median of 64% say people should be very concerned about exposure to false information when using their mobile devices.

People in some countries stand out for their views on the influence of technology on politics

Especially large shares of Jordanians feel technology has made people more receptive to most of the political impacts measured in the survey, and this is especially true of the notion that technology makes people more informed but also easier to manipulate. Around nine-in-ten Jordanians say access to mobile phones, the internet and social media has made people more informed about current events, but a similar share says this access makes them more vulnerable to being manipulated with rumors and false information. And roughly three-quarters of Jordanians say technology has made people more divided in their political opinions, but also more willing to engage in political debates.

By contrast, Vietnamese adults are relatively likely to say access to these technologies hasn't changed much compared with those in the other countries surveyed. One-third or more Vietnamese say these technologies haven't had much impact on people's willingness to engage in political debates (33%), how divided they are in their political opinions (35%) or how accepting they are of those with different views (35%), while 26% say they haven't had much impact on how easy people are to manipulate. In each instance, these represent the largest shares among the 11 countries surveyed.

Meanwhile, Mexicans stand out for their assessment of the impact of technologies on people's tolerance of different viewpoints. Some 35% of Mexicans say technology has made people more accepting of people who have different views than they do, but a nearly identical share (36%) says technology has had a negative impact in this regard. Younger Mexicans are especially likely to say technologies have made people less tolerant to people who hold different views: 41% hold this view, compared with 30% of Mexicans ages 50 and older.

Social media users, those affiliated with a political party and the more educated are more likely to see both positive and negative political impacts of digital technologies

Certain groups are especially likely to cite both the positive and negative impacts of technology on political engagement.

For example, social media users are more likely than non-users to say technology has made people more informed about current events in all 11 countries surveyed; more accepting of people with different views in eight countries; and more willing to engage in political debates in nine countries. At the same time, in nine countries a larger share of users say technology is making people more divided in their political opinions - and in 10 countries a larger share of social media users say technology is making people easier to mislead with misinformation (see Appendix C for detailed tables).

These attitudes also vary by education level. Across all 11 countries, adults with a secondary education or higher are more likely to say technology has made people more informed about current events relative to those who do not have a secondary education. And in nine countries, adults with higher levels of educational attainment are more inclined to say technology has made people more subject to false information and rumors.

Meanwhile, adults with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely to say technology has contributed to both political divisions and tolerance of opposing viewpoints in seven of these countries (Colombia, India, Kenya, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tunisia and Vietnam).

In eight of the nine countries for which partisan information is available, those who have a partisan affiliation are somewhat more likely than those who don't identify with any particular party to say technology has made people more willing to engage in political debate. And in five of those countries, those with a partisan affiliation are more likely to say access to technology has made people more divided in their political opinions. But in most countries, similar shares of the affiliated and unaffiliated say technology has made people more informed, more accepting of those with different viewpoints and more susceptible to misinformation.

Lastly, social media users' assessments of the impact of technology on political attitudes are somewhat related to whether they view social media as an important news source. In seven out of the 11 countries, those who say social media are a very important news source for them to get political news and information are more likely than users who do not think social media are as important to say technology has made people more informed about news and current events.

When asked about different impacts social media have had on their country's political process, publics in these countries are more likely than not to say social media offer new avenues for political engagement. A median of 57% - and majorities in every country except for Vietnam and India - say social media have increased the ability for ordinary people in their country to have a meaningful voice in the political process. And a median of 53% say these platforms have increased the ability of nongovernmental organizations to promote their causes.

But these perceived benefits from social media are matched with perceived costs. An 11-country median of 65% say social media have increased the risk that people in their country might be manipulated by domestic politicians. And when asked whether these platforms might facilitate foreign interference in their country's elections, a median of 55% say these platforms have indeed increased this risk - although a median of 27% feel they have not had much effect either way.

Now it is much easier for our countrymen to know about the plans of our government for our OFW [Overseas Filipino Workers]. WOMAN, 48, PHILIPPINES

Among those who use social media, there are only minimal differences between the views of younger (ages 18 to 29) and older adults (those ages 50+) on these questions. However, there are some differences based on how extensively people rely on these platforms for information. In most countries, those who say social media are a very important news source are more likely to say these platforms have increased ordinary people's ability to have a meaningful voice in politics, and that they have helped nongovernmental groups to promote their causes. At the same time, in seven countries this group is also more likely to say these platforms have increased the risk of people being manipulated by domestic politicians, compared with users who do not see social media as a very important source of information.

In several countries, sizable shares say they do not know how these platforms have impacted the broader political system

These questions were asked of all adults - regardless of whether they themselves use social media platforms or not. And in several of these countries, sizable shares of those who do not use any social media platforms are unable to offer an opinion on how social media have impacted these aspects of the political process. This is especially true in Jordan, Lebanon, India and Vietnam. Among people in these countries who do not use social media, as many as 21% of Vietnamese, 34% of Jordanians, 41% of Lebanese and 51% of Indians either do not know the answer to these individual questions or refused to offer a guess.

Similarly, demographic groups who use social media at low rates (such as older adults or those with lower levels of education) are often more likely to say they do not know how social media have impacted these elements of the political process.

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3. Publics think technology impacts the political environment in both positive and negative ways

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Beyond their views of the personal impact of various technologies, publics in these countries are divided over how the internet in general has impacted

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impact of technology on schools by Yoon kim 

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impact of technology on schools by Yoon kim 

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The Classroom | Empowering Students in Their College Journey

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Advancements in modern technologies -- such as CD-Roms, videotapes, flash drives, networks, printers, scanners and computers -- as well as ever-evolving Internet technology, including online education, have impacted schools in many ways. They have increased the overall access to education, reduced the cost of instruction, helped create learner-centered education and improved the quality of education through interactive learning.

Improved Access to Education

Possibly the most obvious and important technological impact on schools would be the global access to education; the Internet has virtually eliminated geographical and time isolation across the globe. Students from around the world can now have access to education instantly at their own convenience, thus eliminating the rigidity of the traditional brick-and-mortar education model. Furthermore, many schools now offer free Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to noncredit-seeking students from anywhere. Most of these courses are often videotaped, allowing even more access for students who might not be able to participate in virtual classes.

Reduced Cost of Instructional Operation

Another impact is reduced cost in running schools. Modern technology has eliminated costly infrastructure, such as a library, classrooms and dormitories. Similar to MOOCs, one teacher can teach an unlimited number of students via online courses; similarly, different libraries can form a consortium and become an ebrary or cybrary, allowing member students access. As a result, schools do not need traditional infrastructure other than the installation of Internet, as well as instructional technologies. Such cost reduction is in stark contrast to brick-and-mortar schools, where tuition has been on the rise, and is often too expensive to afford. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, "The outstanding student loan balance now stands at about $870 billion, surpassing the total credit card balance ($693 billion) and the total auto loan balance ($730 billion)."

Learner-Centered Education

When a student uses any learning technology, such as a computer, she becomes an active learner, in charge of her learning activities and making choices and decisions. This learning process is a departure from being a passive recipient of information from her teacher, the traditional model. She can learn at her own pace, starting at the level where she feels comfortable. Similarly, modern technology has also changed the role of the teacher. Traditionally, the teacher has been the focal point in a class; now that role has become more indirect as a coach, mentor or facilitator who observes the process of learning activities around the student.

Improved Student Engagement

According to a recent U.S. Department Education study, ". . . on average, students (in a secondary educational setting) in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction." Despite such positive impacts, the same study acknowledges that those findings might not be the same in different settings, such as in medical studies or in higher education. However, technology and its impacts in modern life have become ubiquitous; in fact, some schools use cellphone technology to deliver educational instruction.

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Advancements in modern technologies -- such as CD-Roms, videotapes, flash drives, networks, printers, scanners and computers -- as well as ever-evolving Internet technology, including online education, have impacted schools in many ways. They have increased the overall access to education, reduced the cost of ...

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How Technology Has Made an Impact in Making Our Lives Better by Marcella Grant (Thrive Global) 

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How Technology Has Made an Impact in Making Our Lives Better by Marcella Grant (Thrive Global) 

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There is no doubt in the fact that in today's times, technology has made our lives quite easy and simultaneously efficient as well. And people have been using it for benefiting themselves in numerous ways, isn't it so?

For example, with the use of smartphones to even the use of cars we can achieve so much and get things done in a very short span of time. And owing to this, we can say that life has become quite simple and comfortable for us in ways which we couldn't imagine.

Now, all it takes is just a snap of one's fingers with which we can scour the internet and get all the important information which we want for our use in a blazing fast way.

And nowadays, as mentioned earlier almost everyone is having some kind of electronic devices with them such as a laptop or even a tablet. Not just that, the use of airplanes, cars, lifts, and everything which has made our lives convenient also falls into the same category.

After all, it has helped in making our lives seamless.

So, if we have to discuss the role of technology in making our lives beneficial then, how can we elaborate on it?

Let's Discuss.

Technology Has Made Our Lives Far Easier And Better Through Better Communication

The role of technology has successfully made the communication aspect much easier and better for us humans. Earlier, (a couple of decades ago) we had to wait for the message for days and even, in some cases, for months.

And we can drastically see the change which has taken place.

Now, all it takes is a few clicks of our fingers on the smartphones to send out a mail, message to our loved ones or office colleagues. The user experience and interface have drastically improved with the upcoming modern age technology.

With Technology Advertising Has Been Made Easier

Technology has not left a single aspect of our lives which it has not touched. And one such aspect is that of the advertisement. Nowadays, owing to the rise of digital technology and online marketing, advertising has become way easier and comfortable then it was before.

Some examples would be Facebook marketing, Google Ads.

Amazing Change in Travel Industry

The travel industry has been impacted by technology in a very huge way. There are Google Maps, Google Earth and so on which the user can operate and use as per their convenience. And moreover, there have been new and upcoming business models in the travel sector such as car rentals where a person can hire a luxury car or a mid-level car according to their needs. Overall, we can say that things are becoming more and more interesting.

Technology Has Made Learning Easier and Efficient

There is no doubt in the fact that with the surge on the internet over the last couple of years, it has become very easy for people to rummage the internet and get the necessary information. And owing to this, learning and grabbing new information regarding any subject has become way easier which is good for the geeks.

Role of Technology in Data Storing

A couple of decades ago retrieving data was a very tough process to deal with as people had to scour various files and specifically hand-pick the file by narrowing it down.

But now, it is not like that at all. Nowadays, all you need to do is save it on your computer, tablet, and even smartphones.

And whenever, you need, you can search for the specific file and within seconds it will be in your hands. Not just it is time-saving but also has made our lives significantly easy.

Conclusion: In the end, all we can say that technology has been rising at a very rapid pace and has truly impacted our lives in a huge way in various aspects of our day to day lives whether it be communication, file sharing, traveling, shopping etc.

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How Technology Has Made an Impact in Making Our Lives Better

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There is no doubt in the fact that in today's times, technology has made our lives quite easy and simultaneously efficient as well. And people have been using it for benefiting themselves in numerous ways, isn't it so?

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''Political Interaction with Revolution Of Communication Technology'' (BU)

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''Political Interaction with Revolution Of Communication Technology'' (BU)

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The development of the internet and SNSs (social networking sites) has greatly changed how the public discuss and participate political affairs. Before the invention of SNSs, people received political information through the mass communication channels, where politicians influenced the public and spread their political ideologies at the same time. It was a nonreciprocal way of communication without instant feedbacks and interactions. The case of Fireside Chats, where the 32 nd President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the public through radio during the dark period of the World War II and the Great Depression, is a great example of political communication in the era of mass media.

The 32 nd President Franklin Delano Rooseveltand the Fireside Chats

As technologies further improved, Kennedy and Nixon had televised debates in 1960 for the first time in history. Gradually, TV becomes a dominant channel for the public to obtain political information. But still, TV didn't bring about the access to sending feedbacks from the citizens to the politicians. Political discussion and participation only existed offline.

The first televised presidential debate: Kennedy versus Nixon

Similar to Kennedy, Obama redefined the presidential election with use of the new medium. Obama's campaign has initiated a new way to organize supporters, raise funds, advertise to voters and communicate to the public by taking advantages of interactive Web 2.0 and the new media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which are believed to bemore effective than television ads (Miller, 2008). Together with Twitter, these SNSs have refreshed the way how politicians and the public interact with and influence each other. For politicians, SNS is a powerful tool to learn about public opinions and adjust their political strategies accordingly, while for the public, it is a free access to participate the politics.

The Facebook page of Obama campaign

Political participation is summarized as citizens' endeavors to influence the government's actions through either direct or indirect activities, for example, by changing public policy making and implementation, or by influencing the government people who are responsible for the government decisions (Burns & Verba, 2001, Vitak et al, 2011). In the digital era, SNSs have promoted online political participation and supplemented traditional methods of political participation (Wellman, Haase, Witte & Hampton, 2001). According to a study (Smith, 2009), nearly one in five internet users posted their feedbacks or questions about the campaign on a website, blog, social networking site or other online forums in 2008. And there was a trend that young Americans (under the age of 30) engaged most deeply in the online political process, but online political involvement took place among all the age groups.

Kenski & Stroud (2006) argued that exposure to politics is one of the important factors to predict the political participation, while the internet and SNSs are the tools to increase the exposure. However, when these new media become a new and relatively open space for the public to discuss and participate in political affairs, they are also a vulnerable target space of fake news and extreme views. Allcott & Gentzkow (2017) explained why social media platforms are more conducive to the spread of fake news: 1) the cost to produce and spread content is small; 2) the format of the content on social media, short pieces of information on the small screen of mobile phone or news feed windows, makes it harder to detect fake news; 3) the highly segregated networks on social media platform make fake news readers reassured. Meanwhile, the study of Hong & Kim (2016) supported the echo chamber effect of social media with the evidence that politicians with extreme views have significantly more Twitter followers than those with moderate views.

Therefore, while people are delighted by the advantages of the online political discussion and interaction, we should also be alert to the negative impact it may impose on the political ecology.

Reference:

Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211-36.

Burns, N., Schlozman, K. L., & Verba, S. (2001). The private roots of public action. Harvard University Press.

Hong, S., & Kim, S. H. (2016). Political polarization on twitter: Implications for the use of social media in digital governments. Government Information Quarterly, 33(4), 777-782.

Kenski, K., & Stroud, N. J. (2006). Connections between Internet use and political efficacy, knowledge, and participation. Journal of broadcasting & electronic media, 50(2), 173-192.

Miller, C. C. (2008). How Obamas internet campaign changed politics. NY Times, 7, 49.

Smith, A. (2009). The Internet's role in campaign 2008.

Vitak, J., Zube, P., Smock, A., Carr, C. T., Ellison, N., & Lampe, C. (2011). It's complicated: Facebook users' political participation in the 2008 election. CyberPsychology, behavior, and social networking, 14(3), 107-114.

Wellman, B., Haase, A. Q., Witte, J., & Hampton, K. (2001). Does the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement social capital? Social networks, participation, and community commitment. American behavioral scientist, 45(3), 436-455.
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Political Interaction with Revolution of Communication Technology

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The development of the internet and SNSs (social networking sites) has greatly changed how the public discuss and participate political affairs. Before the invention of SNSs, people received political information through the mass communication channels, where politicians influenced the public and spread their political ideologies at the same time.

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How Technology is changing  the Future of Higher Education By Jon Marcus(The New York Times)

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How Technology is changing  the Future of Higher Education By Jon Marcus(The New York Times)

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How Technology Is Changing the Future of Higher Education (Published 2020)

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Labs test artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other innovations that could improve learning and lower costs for Generation Z and beyond.

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"Smartphones are disrupting the crucial connections between parents and their babies" by Annabelle Timsit

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Parents in rich countries spend a lot more time with their kids today than they did 50 years ago. But phones are increasingly creeping into those interactions, impacting their depth and quality.

For example, more than a quarter of American adults now report that they are online "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey published last week. Parents' increased smartphone use has experts concerned about the potentially devastating consequences this might have for the development of babies and toddlers.

"The most important thing for little people in the zero-to-three range is interactions with human beings," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Anything that disrupts the timing, or the meaningfulness, or the emotional quality of that interaction can have consequences on both parents and kids and on their relationship."

Brandon McDaniel, an Indiana-based researcher on family relationships, has coined a word to describe this phenomenon: " technoference." And it has become a global problem, Hirsh-Pasek says (more than 5 billion people worldwide are now estimated to own mobile devices). "I don't care if you're in Mongolia, or China, or the United States or Great Britain," she says. "Kids grow up the same way. They need human interaction."

How does parents' tech use affect children?

In 2015, security software company AVG Technologies surveyed 6,000 families (pdf) with kids between eight and 13 years old in ten countries, including Brazil, Czech Republic, and New Zealand, about their tech use. Over half of children said their parents checked their devices too often. More than half of parents agreed. Meanwhile, 32% of kids reported feeling "unimportant" when parents checked their phones.

There are many things that can get in the way of a parent's emotional bond with their children, including mental illness or physical separation. But one of the most common today is probably technology. This becomes particularly critical in interactions with young children.

When a parent responds to a baby's coos or cries by picking them up or playing peak-a-boo with them for example, the back-and-forth helps build the baby's brain architecture, which is later tied to children's learning, behavior, and health outcomes. Child development experts have different names for this, but one of the most common is " serve-and-return."

Babies need a loving, responsive, and attentive adult around them to learn and thrive. These interactions are "both expected and essential," according to Harvard's Center on the Developing Child, and "their absence is a serious threat to a child's development and well-being."

A quick scroll through Instagram or hastily written response to an email might not seem like a big deal, but babies are constantly learning from the world around them. Parents who are absorbed in their phones aren't teaching their kids crucial skills, like language.

Hirsh-Pasek, an expert in infant language development, found that "the fluency and connectedness of parent-child interactions at 24 months of age predicted children's language outcomes a year later." In a 2017 experiment (pdf), Hirsh-Pasek and her co-authors showed that, when parents tried to teach their 2-year-old words but were interrupted by a phone call, the toddlers didn't learn the words, whereas the ones whose parents were not interrupted did learn them.

"The adults in the little people's word are way more important than they will be as the kids get older-we are their gateway to the world," says Hirsh-Pasek.

When their parents are absorbed in their devices, kids may also act out (pdf) in a bid to get their attention back, and parents may respond negatively. In 2013, researchers observed 55 groups of caregivers and children between zero and 10 years old eating together in fast food restaurants across 15 neighborhoods in Boston. Of the 55 caregivers observed, 40 used a mobile device. Sixteen used the device almost continuously throughout the meal, displaying what the researchers called high levels of "absorption," defined as "the extent to which the primary focus of the caregiver's attention and engagement was with the device rather than the child."

When the kids tried to get their tech-absorbed parents attention, they were scolded, talked to in "a somewhat robotic manner," or physically pushed away.

Other studies have also found that parents in these situations interact less with their children and are more hostile towards them.

In 2017, McDaniel and behavioral pediatrician Jenny Radesky surveyed parents from 170 US families with children under five about their tech use and their child's behavior. Only 11% of participants said technology didn't interfere with their interactions with their child; 48% reported that technoference happened three or more times a day.

The researchers found that mothers' reports of technoference was associated with children's "externalizing and internalizing behavior," like whining, sulking, restlessness, or temper tantrums. This wasn't true for fathers' reported technoference. (The authors had several different theories for why that might be, including that kids in their sample might spend more time with mom than with dad, making mobile devices more disruptive to that relationship, or that children "co-regulate their emotions and behavior differently" with each parent.)

At a very young age, children "don't have the cognitive capacity or the resources to ... communicate with you and say I don't like this, it's really hurting me," explains McDaniel. So, they act out (pdf).

The study has several limitations, including the fact that its sample population skewed towards white, educated parents, and that it relied on parents self-reporting. But similar findings in other studies and observational work lend credence to its conclusion that, even when it's infrequent, technoference may be "associated with greater child behavior problems." As Radesky told Quartz in an email, "kids are watching us" and learning from us all the time, meaning that "even if we aren't interrupting play or conversation with them, we might still be influencing their own tech use habits."

Technology can be an incredibly helpful tool for families. Online forums can provide support for overwhelmed parents, and high-quality educational apps can help structure children's learning in a personalized and meaningful way. And we don't yet know enough about the connection and longterm impact between parents' tech use (as well as tech more broadly) and child development, says McDaniel. But experts agree that, when it comes to infants and toddlers, it's best to avoid or severely limit screen time. Why not parents as well?

Hirsh-Pasek believes limiting tech use could benefit parents as well as their babies. "There's nothing more addictive than looking into a young child's eyes, and listening to them, and learning about their world," she says. Technoference has, "in a sense, robbed us from having those kinds of rich experiences."
Read more from our series on Rewiring Childhood. This reporting is part of a series supported by a grant from the Bernard van Leer Foundation. The author's views are not necessarily those of the Bernard van Leer Foundation.

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Smartphones are disrupting the crucial connections between parents and their babies

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Parents in rich countries spend a lot more time with their kids today than they did 50 years ago. But phones are increasingly creeping into those interactions, impacting their depth and quality. For example, more than a quarter of American adults now report that they are online "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey published last week.

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"Is Technology Making Us Lazy?" by Jacob Nelson (May 14, 2017)

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"Is Technology Making Us Lazy?" by Jacob Nelson (May 14, 2017)

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In a recent discussion about the internet of things, a group of friends and I entertained the idea of one day being able to wake up in the morning and walk into our smart kitchens with our breakfast served and coffee made by friendly robots. We would then be driven to work by our smart cars while we relax and read the paper. Surprisingly, the thought of this scared me more than anything. As great as it sounded, I could think of nothing lazier. I thought about how google has completely eliminated the idea of traditional research. Hours that our parents spent in libraries researching for essays would take us ten minutes with a functional search engine. Has technology made us more lazy then? Has the digital age made our minds weaker and deep thinking impossible?

Image from MaxPixel (CC)

"Technology makes us weaker!"
In response to this question, Dominique Jackson snarkily writes that in the near future, Boy Scouts will be teaching kids how to use a GPS instead of a compass. His thinking is that with every new release of technology, we become less physically active and more reliant on a screen, fearing that one day we will be the space humans in Wall-E who hover around on chairs, the epitome of laziness. Dominique is not alone in these fears though.

On his blog, Andy writes that technology makes us weaker socially, physically, and mentally. He points out that technology has led to less face-to-face communication. It has also allowed us to remain sedentary for longer periods of time. Andy's gripes are very common among those who dissuade against the overuse of technology. The underlying feeling among this group is that technology allows us to not do things that we were forced to do before. Their biggest fear is that if we continue to rely on technology, we will reverse all the progress we have worked so hard to achieve.

Something seems missing in these arguments however. Hasn't technology enabled us to do things that we have never been able to do before? Where would we be without the computer? Man would not have made it to the moon. Traffic would be horribly inefficient. We would still commute by boat. If technology is bad, how do you explain all of this?

The answer is in how we use technology. How many Netflix show have you binge watched in the last month? How many hours do you spend hopelessly scrolling on the internet? According to Reader's Digest, binge watching may be worse than we think. Research from the American Heart Association suggests that watching more than three hours of television in a day doubles a person's risk of premature death. So Andy's fears were valid. Technology put to poor use can have negative effects.

Image by cwazniak from flickr.com (CC)
Our Obligation To Use Technology Ethically
Technology, while not innately bad, can be abused. After the advent of the Tesla autopilot, numerous drivers were caught sleeping or texting while driving, some resulting in crashes. As a result, various authorities called for a ban on the use of the word auto-pilot in Tesla ads. The thing is, this technology was not meant to harm anyone. Technology cannot (yet) harm anyone by itself. Because of this, it is our responsibility as owners of technology to use it ethically. For example, technology is not always perfect. Computer systems have glitches. Because of this, we should always be wary when using technology that can affect other people. The whole point of technology is convenience, but when we use technology in a way that disrupts others, it defeats the purpose.

Image by FancyCrave1 from PixaBay (CC)

Put to good use, however, technology has been shown to have positive effects on its users. While Andy may have worried that technology will make us physically weak, he does not have much to fear. Technologies like FitBit and smartwatches encourage healthy living habits by keeping you on your feet and tracking sleep cycles in order to ensure a good night's sleep. On top of this, Kristen from Gizmodo writes about the results from a UCSF study that suggest smartwatches may also have the ability to detect heartbeat abnormalities. If this is true, then smartwatches will have taken a leap beyond general fitness health.
Does technology weaken communication Skills?
Opponents of technology also fear that recent technology worsens our ability to socialize directly with other people. This, however, is another case of too much of a good thing being a bad thing. Sure, if you do all of your communication through Facebook messenger, you may need to reevaluate your communication strategy, but communication technology has largely produced more good than harm. Laurel Storm lays out four ways communication technology has succeeded:

Keeping in Touch: Communication brings people together and allows for the issue of distance to be negligible.

Doing Business: Companies more than ever before have the ability to expand their markets beyond their local base. Business networking has also been made easier with websites like LinkedIn

Overcoming Disabilities: Technology has brought communication to disabled people where it was not possible before through things like hearing aides and speech generating machines.

Reaching a Broader Audience: The internet has provided the ability to reach the broadest audience yet though mediums like YouTube and Facebook.

In the end, technology clearly has both good and bad uses. Of course people will always find a way to abuse technology, but when put to good use, it can have profound impacts. Above, I have shown you several examples of how technology has had positive impacts on our lives but certainly many more exist. As always, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. When it comes to technology, its negative aspects really only appear when its users become irresponsible with its use.

As a lover of technology, a class called "The Digital Society" obviously had immediate appeal to me. It wasn't until after signing up that I thought, "maybe I know it all? Maybe this class is for beginners..." Of course karma met this arrogance as I was perplexed after only the first class. Before this class, I had never thought very critically about technology, but when we were asked "has technology changed everything?" I was speechless. Of course it has, but how? Through the rest of the sessions, questions like these helped me develop a style of critical thought regarding the digital age.

One of the biggest challenges I faced this unit was understanding all of the ethical implications technology can have. Before I had seen technology only as a good thing. Little did I know, technology is not always all positive. It can have large impacts on real people. In our discussion on the internet of things I was given an awareness for the ethical dilemmas of automation and surveillance. What happens when robots replace our jobs? Is it alright for devices to have access to private information? These thought processes continued to shape my view of technology for the rest of this class. For instance, I recently read an article on the automation of the London underground. Most people see this as the future of the city and an amazing idea. However, the train drivers think otherwise as their jobs are at stake. Because of this class, it is in instances like these where I ask, "who really wins and who loses?" I experienced this same question as we discussed smart cities and automation.

Additionally, I also gained an in depth understanding of copyright. Before this class, I had never posted publicly and therefore did not have to think about source issues. Learning this whole process of proper attribution has proven to be a valuable skill to me as I prepare to enter the professional world where attribution is expected.

As a computer science student and worker, this class felt very relevant to me. Thinking ethically about my work is something completely new to me. On one hand it puts more pressure on me as a professional to be aware of what I am making and how it affects others. On the other hand, it gives my job another level of importance to me. When I go back to my job this summer, I plan on taking these critical thinking skills and applying them to my work. I want to perpetually ask questions like, who is this affecting? Is this efficient and usable? When I answer no, I'll know I can do a better job since efficiency and convenience is the whole point of technology.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a recent discussion about the internet of things, a group of friends and I entertained the idea of one day being able to wake up in the morning and walk into our smart kitchens with our breakfast served and coffee made by friendly robots.

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By Jacob Nelson (May 14, 2017)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a recent discussion about the internet of things, a group of friends and I entertained the idea of one day being able to wake up in the morning and walk into our smart kitchens with our breakfast served and coffee made by friendly robots. We would then be driven to work by our smart cars while we relax and read the paper. Surprisingly, the thought of this scared me more than anything. As great as it sounded, I could think of nothing lazier. I thought about how google has completely eliminated the idea of traditional research. Hours that our parents spent in libraries researching for essays would take us ten minutes with a functional search engine. Has technology made us more lazy then? Has the digital age made our minds weaker and deep thinking impossible?

Image from MaxPixel (CC)

"Technology makes us weaker!"
In response to this question, Dominique Jackson snarkily writes that in the near future, Boy Scouts will be teaching kids how to use a GPS instead of a compass. His thinking is that with every new release of technology, we become less physically active and more reliant on a screen, fearing that one day we will be the space humans in Wall-E who hover around on chairs, the epitome of laziness. Dominique is not alone in these fears though.

On his blog, Andy writes that technology makes us weaker socially, physically, and mentally. He points out that technology has led to less face-to-face communication. It has also allowed us to remain sedentary for longer periods of time. Andy's gripes are very common among those who dissuade against the overuse of technology. The underlying feeling among this group is that technology allows us to not do things that we were forced to do before. Their biggest fear is that if we continue to rely on technology, we will reverse all the progress we have worked so hard to achieve.

Something seems missing in these arguments however. Hasn't technology enabled us to do things that we have never been able to do before? Where would we be without the computer? Man would not have made it to the moon. Traffic would be horribly inefficient. We would still commute by boat. If technology is bad, how do you explain all of this?

The answer is in how we use technology. How many Netflix show have you binge watched in the last month? How many hours do you spend hopelessly scrolling on the internet? According to Reader's Digest, binge watching may be worse than we think. Research from the American Heart Association suggests that watching more than three hours of television in a day doubles a person's risk of premature death. So Andy's fears were valid. Technology put to poor use can have negative effects.

Image by cwazniak from flickr.com (CC)
Our Obligation To Use Technology Ethically
Technology, while not innately bad, can be abused. After the advent of the Tesla autopilot, numerous drivers were caught sleeping or texting while driving, some resulting in crashes. As a result, various authorities called for a ban on the use of the word auto-pilot in Tesla ads. The thing is, this technology was not meant to harm anyone. Technology cannot (yet) harm anyone by itself. Because of this, it is our responsibility as owners of technology to use it ethically. For example, technology is not always perfect. Computer systems have glitches. Because of this, we should always be wary when using technology that can affect other people. The whole point of technology is convenience, but when we use technology in a way that disrupts others, it defeats the purpose.

Image by FancyCrave1 from PixaBay (CC)

Put to good use, however, technology has been shown to have positive effects on its users. While Andy may have worried that technology will make us physically weak, he does not have much to fear. Technologies like FitBit and smartwatches encourage healthy living habits by keeping you on your feet and tracking sleep cycles in order to ensure a good night's sleep. On top of this, Kristen from Gizmodo writes about the results from a UCSF study that suggest smartwatches may also have the ability to detect heartbeat abnormalities. If this is true, then smartwatches will have taken a leap beyond general fitness health.
Does technology weaken communication Skills?
Opponents of technology also fear that recent technology worsens our ability to socialize directly with other people. This, however, is another case of too much of a good thing being a bad thing. Sure, if you do all of your communication through Facebook messenger, you may need to reevaluate your communication strategy, but communication technology has largely produced more good than harm. Laurel Storm lays out four ways communication technology has succeeded:

Keeping in Touch: Communication brings people together and allows for the issue of distance to be negligible.

Doing Business: Companies more than ever before have the ability to expand their markets beyond their local base. Business networking has also been made easier with websites like LinkedIn

Overcoming Disabilities: Technology has brought communication to disabled people where it was not possible before through things like hearing aides and speech generating machines.

Reaching a Broader Audience: The internet has provided the ability to reach the broadest audience yet though mediums like YouTube and Facebook.

In the end, technology clearly has both good and bad uses. Of course people will always find a way to abuse technology, but when put to good use, it can have profound impacts. Above, I have shown you several examples of how technology has had positive impacts on our lives but certainly many more exist. As always, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. When it comes to technology, its negative aspects really only appear when its users become irresponsible with its use.

As a lover of technology, a class called "The Digital Society" obviously had immediate appeal to me. It wasn't until after signing up that I thought, "maybe I know it all? Maybe this class is for beginners..." Of course karma met this arrogance as I was perplexed after only the first class. Before this class, I had never thought very critically about technology, but when we were asked "has technology changed everything?" I was speechless. Of course it has, but how? Through the rest of the sessions, questions like these helped me develop a style of critical thought regarding the digital age.

One of the biggest challenges I faced this unit was understanding all of the ethical implications technology can have. Before I had seen technology only as a good thing. Little did I know, technology is not always all positive. It can have large impacts on real people. In our discussion on the internet of things I was given an awareness for the ethical dilemmas of automation and surveillance. What happens when robots replace our jobs? Is it alright for devices to have access to private information? These thought processes continued to shape my view of technology for the rest of this class. For instance, I recently read an article on the automation of the London underground. Most people see this as the future of the city and an amazing idea. However, the train drivers think otherwise as their jobs are at stake. Because of this class, it is in instances like these where I ask, "who really wins and who loses?" I experienced this same question as we discussed smart cities and automation.

Additionally, I also gained an in depth understanding of copyright. Before this class, I had never posted publicly and therefore did not have to think about source issues. Learning this whole process of proper attribution has proven to be a valuable skill to me as I prepare to enter the professional world where attribution is expected.

As a computer science student and worker, this class felt very relevant to me. Thinking ethically about my work is something completely new to me. On one hand it puts more pressure on me as a professional to be aware of what I am making and how it affects others. On the other hand, it gives my job another level of importance to me. When I go back to my job this summer, I plan on taking these critical thinking skills and applying them to my work. I want to perpetually ask questions like, who is this affecting? Is this efficient and usable? When I answer no, I'll know I can do a better job since efficiency and convenience is the whole point of technology.

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In a recent discussion about the internet of things, a group of friends and I entertained the idea of one day being able to wake up in the morning and walk into our smart kitchens with our breakfast served and coffee made by friendly robots.

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The impact of technology on family relationship By:John Rustin  (NC Family Policy Council)

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The impact of technology on family relationship By:John Rustin  (NC Family Policy Council)

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Dr. Kathy Koch, Founder and President of Celebrate Kids, Inc. discusses the impact technology is having on family relationships, particularly among young people, and what parents can do to help ensure that their children develop an appropriate relationship with technology. This show originally aired in January of 2018 and was one of our most popular radio shows for 2018.

Transcript: The Impact of Technology on Family Relationships

Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Today we'll be exploring the impact technology is having on family relationships, particularly among young people, and what parents can do to help ensure that their children develop an appropriate and healthy relationship with technology.

Our guest is Dr. Kathy Koch, Founder and President of Celebrate Kids, Inc., which presents practical, relevant, results-oriented concepts to help parents, children and educators build healthy relationships.

Dr. Koch, welcome to Family Policy Matters. It's great to have you with us on the show.

KATHY KOCH: Thank you. I'm privileged to be here.

JOHN RUSTIN: Dr. Koch, as we begin, we certainly all recognize that technology is a rapidly growing and changing arena that impacts all of us in many ways on a daily basis. What do you believe is the most important thing parents need to know as it relates to raising children in today's technologically-advanced and technologically-saturated world?

KATHY KOCH: Great question to start with. I don't know if anyone will like my answer, but I don't compromise truth to make people happy. We need to remember children are watching us. They really are. When I ask pre-teens, teens and children: How many of you would like your parents to turn off their phones, 80 percent of the hands go up. So, I really want to encourage just a few things: Are your kids around technology too much, or isolatingly? If you're concerned about the brain development ramifications, then you need to ask yourself what they are observing as they are spending time with you. And I want to encourage you to use the pronoun "we." We need to make some changes here, rather than the pronoun "you" need to put that down, and you need, you need, you need.... It really needs to be a "we" factor in our homes.

JOHN RUSTIN: Is the concern more about what children are actually doing when they use technology, say reading a book on their device, or playing video games, or is it the mere fact that many children are immersing themselves in technology more and more, instead of experiencing people and the world around them in other ways?

KATHY KOCH: I don't think you'll be surprised when I say both. We need to be concerned for both. Certainly, [something] like reading is a more profitable activity. However, there's much research that suggests our reading comprehension is negatively affected when we read it on a screen. Note taking, when using a screen is not effective, etc. So some of the things that we think are not harmless when it comes to their attention span and things like that, may actually be harmful when we're looking at intellectual pursuit and academic achievement. The thing about video gaming and social media scrolling and things like that, that allows kids to isolate, right? It allows them to escape, separate, and it actually can contribute to the very depression that they think they may be escaping. And so I do want us to be alert to all of it.

JOHN RUSTIN: Dr. Koch, children today are clearly exposed to much more advanced technology than we ever were growing up. How does the ease and frequent access to just about everything by way of computers, smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and other similar devices affect us and particularly our children, compared to, for example, when we were growing up?

KATHY KOCH: This is really the crux of what we do at Celebrate Kids, to help parents understand what's happening to the spirit, mind, soul and heart of a child who is continually allowed to use screens. For instance, they can believe that they are the center of their own universe. When I was a child, I had to watch the TV show my dad wanted to watch. And if I wanted to buy one song, I had to buy the whole album to listen to the one song. Now, kids can believe that the world revolves around them and they deserve to be happy all the time. That's another lie. They think they deserve choice. For those of us who are older, we know choice is a privilege. Today's kids, because of the drop down menu on all technology that we use, their brain is expecting to always be given a choice. So we go to grandma's house and she serves pork chops. How many kids have said, "Wait, I don't want that." And grandma says, "I didn't give you a choice. This is not a restaurant with a menu. Eat the pork chops." So, I think that's a real issue. And the authority issue is huge. When I had a question that I wanted answered, I had to leave my bedroom and go find my parents, or maybe talk to a pastor, a teacher or a friend, or parents who I babysat for. There were people available to me when I wanted answers to questions that were important to me. A lot of our children and teens today are simply asking Siri on the phone, "What's the meaning of life?" And she has an answer and she's wrong. But they don't know she's wrong. They're able to go to Google.com and U-Tube University and any number of places you can think of to get answers for the questions. So, they can believe that we are not as necessary as we would love to be.

JOHN RUSTIN: So, how, Dr. Koch, do we balance the good that technology brings with the risks and harms associated with it, particularly when it comes to young, impressionable brains and hearts?

KATHY KOCH: It's all about boundaries, right? It's always been about boundaries. When you children were three, you didn't let them color all day. When they were six, you didn't let them play with dolls or trucks all day. There [have] always been boundaries and there's always been exposure to a variety of ideas and people and activities and toys. So I think that's a huge thing that we need to be remembering, that boundaries are healthy. Let's put out in visible eyesight for kids, a variety of options for them. They are addicted to the adrenaline that technology causes, and we're addicted to the technology itself. And so, it is hard when we say, "Please put it down, turn it off, put it away, find something to do." They really don't know how to handle boredom well, which is really dangerous. So we can actually help them handle boredom well, so that they don't go from one kind of "coke" to another, which is actually what we're seeing in our culture. So, let's put out board games on the coffee table. Let's put out a Frisbee and a football and a basketball and a baseball at the back door. Let's put out a Sudoku book on the dining room table, or whatever, so that when they're walking by, they see that there's something that they could sit down and participate in. And one other quick comment is that quiet is really important to brain development. How many of us adults would admit to having a great "Ah Ha!" moment when we're quiet. We're driving, we're emptying the dishwasher, we're changing a baby's diaper, we're doing something possibly, but we're quiet in the midst of doing that thing. I'm, for instance, in line to get onto an airplane and I'll have this "Ah Ha!" idea. And our kids today do not know quiet because of the pods in the ear and the screens that are open and observing, and we need to help them discover the benefit of quiet.

JOHN RUSTIN: That's a great point that leads into my next question, and that is about the impact that technology is having with respect to faith among our kids. Now, a big part of faith is prayer and reflection and taking time to be quiet and listening for what God may be seeking to teach. Talk about that, if you would. I know that you have said that technology's really maybe the biggest threat to our kids' faith. Share your perspectives with us about that.

KATHY KOCH: Yeah, it's so important, isn't it? The first lie that I talk about in my book is that we can think that we are the center of our own universe. That's a worldview lie. That's huge! If kids are allowed to believe that they're the center and the world revolves around them then they don't need God and they sure don't need to pray. And they don't need His Word because they think they are the Word, if you will. And so, it's extremely dangerous. And the idea that they think they can be happy all the time: that's why they have multiple screens up. That's why they x-out of games they think they might lose. That's why they're addicted to the reboot button and spellcheck and all those things that make everything easy. So, they could treat God like He's an ATM machine. It's His job to keep them happy. That's why: dropping out church; dropping out of faith; church hopping as young adults even; there's a lack of authenticity and transparency. I'm so concerned when I talk to teenagers. I ask them: How many of you are really able to be honest, to be honest with God. Or do you treat Him like a Facebook friend, and you're only going to give Him the status update that'll make Him smile and like it. That's so dangerous because God wants to know our hearts from our perspective. He knows, but he wants us to say to Him: "I blew it today. I'm sorry. I'm sure you were disappointed. Help me tomorrow." If we don't help our kids to learn authenticity and vulnerability and that God is approachable and will never turn them away and will always love them unconditionally, then they're in a lot of trouble.

JOHN RUSTIN: Dr. Koch, with that in mind, are there things that parents can do to help prepare their children, first of all even before they are allowed to access technology, but also if some parents may think: Hey, that train has already left the station. My kids are totally consumed with technology. What can they do once the technology has become such a major part of their children's lives to kind of draw that back in some and set some healthy parameters for use of technology in the home?

KATHY KOCH: The first thing I'll say related to the whole faith development question about that, is to make sure that we are proclaiming God's relevance and the word of God being relevant. Do they hear us pray in the time of their need. Do they see us opening the Word of God when we're looking for answers? Are we excited on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday to be able to go back to our church and be in fellowship with like-minded people? Do we model that, talk about that? We need to be fully present. Technology is fully present; it is always with them. And that's why they think they don't need us. And so, I want to encourage parents again to put down their devices, even put down the book and the-maybe you're doing something really legit, looking up Pinterest for new recipes. That's great but if they're awake and they're with you, then turn it off and play a game and do something together.

Talk about the difference between "wanting" and "needing." I think that's huge when we look at helping kids use technology well. When they're young, do we talk about: You need a nap, vs. You want a nap? I never really need a Diet Coke. I want a Diet Coke. And what do they hear me say? Do they hear me say,"I need that."? So, this is why they think they need a phone and they need that game and they need that song and they need that movie. They really don't. They need God. And so, do we use our language appropriately so they understand what we believe, and are we passing that on in really good ways? I hope that makes good sense.

JOHN RUSTIN: Oh I think it does. I really do. What would be some practical bits of advice that you would provide to parents, in addition to what you've already said, about setting some parameters in the home that may be helpful in creating certain times where technology can be used, different things like that? And do you find those kind of parameters or restrictions to be helpful or possibly harmful?

KATHY KOCH: I think it is helpful. And I think it's helpful especially if you have parameters for other things. Like, if you stick to bedtime and you stick to when friends are allowed over, and if you stick to how long they're allowed to do something, then you can add technology as a parameter. If you only have parameters for technology then they'll begin to resent that and they'll argue with you. I'm a big fan of digital-free days and digital-free times where we don't use technology except for educational pursuit after school. Maybe it's only a Saturday. That'll kill some people listening but really, that's good advice. And again, that's a family matter. I like digital-free zones though: the dinner table, breakfast, wherever you eat a meal, at home or a restaurant. No screens. That's captured talk time and we're giving it up to a tool that doesn't love our children. I'm actually also a huge fan of the car being digital-free. Now, don't panic. If you're going on a long car drive then certainly radio or a book on CD if you think that's really profitable, certainly talk-radio like this is great to listen to with your kids. However, the car is again where we are captured and so are they. Kids love talking to us in the car because they don't have to look into our eyes when they say something that's hard to hear. And so, let's use that time profitably. Let's let them look out the window and they'll figure out they won't die if they're bored. And let's have those moments of conversation, because when we're silent, someone will talk, and that's how you stay connected to your kids.

JOHN RUSTIN: That's great. I know that this may sound archaic but a number of years ago we implemented a TV-free summer in our home for a couple of summers in a row. And it was a really special time. And I think my children would admit now that it was a special time because we had to be creative about time that we spent together. It gave us more time to talk and, in some cases as you said, maybe be bored a little bit, but also be thoughtful about how we were going to spend that time. And it ended up being a very fruitful thing. I think those are great suggestions. I know that we have listeners out there who are challenged and struggling with this issue, even now as we're speaking. So I want to, Dr. Koch, give you an opportunity to let our listeners know where they can go to find helpful resources about your work and also to get copies of your excellent books.

KATHY KOCH: Thank you so much! Our website is celebratekids.com. So that's the first place to go. There's a shopping cart there and you can get to my blog if people are interested in connecting with me. I'm all over social media like you are. Certainly, my books are available at other online sites and even the local bookstore, perhaps. It would be great to stay connected with people who think we've got something to offer. That's fabulous. Appreciate the opportunity to be on with you.

JOHN RUSTIN: Absolutely. And I just would encourage our listeners to avail themselves of the great resources that you have available. And just want to thank you so much for taking time to be with us on Family Policy Matters and for your work to help foster healthy relationships between parents and children. Dr. Koch, thanks so much.

KATHY KOCH: It's my pleasure. Thank you.
- END -

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The Impact of Technology on Family Relationships

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Dr. Kathy Koch, Founder and President of Celebrate Kids, Inc. discusses the impact technology is having on family relationships, particularly among young people, and what parents can do to help ensure that their children develop an appropriate relationship with technology. This show originally aired in January of 2018 and was one of our most popular radio shows for 2018.

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"Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say"

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"Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say"

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By Matt Rachel(New York Times).

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Lisa Baldwin, a chemistry teacher, works with her students to fight through academic challenges. Credit... Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times

There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.

The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students' capability to focus.

Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology's impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students.

The timing of the studies, from two well-regarded research organizations, appears to be coincidental.

One was conducted by the Pew Internet Project, a division of the Pew Research Center that focuses on technology-related research. The other comes from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that advises parents on media use by children. It was conducted by Vicky Rideout, a researcher who has previously shown that media use among children and teenagers ages 8 to 18 has grown so fast that they on average spend twice as much time with screens each year as they spend in school.

Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students' attention.

"I'm an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention," said Hope Molina-Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work.

She said she did not want to shrink from the challenge of engaging them, nor did other teachers interviewed, but she also worried that technology was causing a deeper shift in how students learned. She also wondered if teachers were adding to the problem by adjusting their lessons to accommodate shorter attention spans.

"Are we contributing to this?" Ms. Molina-Porter said. "What's going to happen when they don't have constant entertainment?"

Scholars who study the role of media in society say no long-term studies have been done that adequately show how and if student attention span has changed because of the use of digital technology. But there is mounting indirect evidence that constant use of technology can affect behavior, particularly in developing brains, because of heavy stimulation and rapid shifts in attention.

Kristen Purcell, the associate director for research at Pew, acknowledged that the findings could be viewed from another perspective: that the education system must adjust to better accommodate the way students learn, a point that some teachers brought up in focus groups themselves.

"What we're labeling as 'distraction,' some see as a failure of adults to see how these kids process information," Ms. Purcell said. "They're not saying distraction is good but that the label of 'distraction' is a judgment of this generation."

The surveys also found that many teachers said technology could be a useful educational tool. In the Pew survey, which was done in conjunction with the College Board and the National Writing Project, roughly 75 percent of 2,462 teachers surveyed said that the Internet and search engines had a "mostly positive" impact on student research skills. And they said such tools had made students more self-sufficient researchers.

But nearly 90 percent said that digital technologies were creating "an easily distracted generation with short attention spans."

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Hope Molina-Porter, an English teacher in Fullerton, Calif., worries that technology is deeply altering how students learn. Credit... Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Similarly, of the 685 teachers surveyed in the Common Sense project, 71 percent said they thought technology was hurting attention span "somewhat" or "a lot." About 60 percent said it hindered students' ability to write and communicate face to face, and almost half said it hurt critical thinking and their ability to do homework.

There was little difference in how younger and older teachers perceived the impact of technology.

"Boy, is this a clarion call for a healthy and balanced media diet," said Jim Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media. He added, "What you have to understand as a parent is that what happens in the home with media consumption can affect academic achievement."

In interviews, teachers described what might be called a "Wikipedia problem," in which students have grown so accustomed to getting quick answers with a few keystrokes that they are more likely to give up when an easy answer eludes them. The Pew research found that 76 percent of teachers believed students had been conditioned by the Internet to find quick answers.

"They need skills that are different than 'Spit, spit, there's the answer,' " said Lisa Baldwin, 48, a high school teacher in Great Barrington, Mass., who said students' ability to focus and fight through academic challenges was suffering an "exponential decline." She said she saw the decline most sharply in students whose parents allowed unfettered access to television, phones, iPads and video games.

For her part, Ms. Baldwin said she refused to lower her expectations or shift her teaching style to be more entertaining. But she does spend much more time in individual tutoring sessions, she added, coaching students on how to work through challenging assignments.

Other teachers said technology was as much a solution as a problem. Dave Mendell, 44, a fourth-grade teacher in Wallingford, Pa., said that educational video games and digital presentations were excellent ways to engage students on their terms. Teachers also said they were using more dynamic and flexible teaching styles.

"I'm tap dancing all over the place," Mr. Mendell said. "The more I stand in front of class, the easier it is to lose them."

He added that it was tougher to engage students, but that once they were engaged, they were just as able to solve problems and be creative as they had been in the past. He would prefer, he added, for students to use less entertainment media at home, but he did not believe it represented an insurmountable challenge for teaching them at school.

While the Pew research explored how technology has affected attention span, it also looked at how the Internet has changed student research habits. By contrast, the Common Sense survey focused largely on how teachers saw the impact of entertainment media on a range of classroom skills.

The surveys include some findings that appear contradictory. In the Common Sense report, for instance, some teachers said that even as they saw attention spans wane, students were improving in subjects like math, science and reading.

But researchers said the conflicting views could be the result of subjectivity and bias. For example, teachers may perceive themselves facing both a more difficult challenge but also believe that they are overcoming the challenge through effective teaching.

Pew said its research gave a "complex and at times contradictory" picture of teachers' view of technology's impact.

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, who studies the impact of technology on the brain and is the director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Hospital, emphasized that teachers' views were subjective but nevertheless could be accurate in sensing dwindling attention spans among students.

His own research shows what happens to attention and focus in mice when they undergo the equivalent of heavy digital stimulation. Students saturated by entertainment media, he said, were experiencing a "supernatural" stimulation that teachers might have to keep up with or simulate.

The heavy technology use, Dr. Christakis said, "makes reality by comparison uninteresting."

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Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say (Published 2012)

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There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.

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Laziness, Technology And Brain Scanning A Billion People: A Conversation With David Krakauer 

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Laziness, Technology And Brain Scanning A Billion People: A Conversation With David Krakauer 

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Robert Wolcott

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David Krakauer, evolutionary geneticist, complexity theorist and CEO of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), takes the long view.

In our wide ranging conversation regarding where humanity might head ( see the video here), Krakauer shared perspectives on brain scanning a billion people, ethical issues posed by technology such as free will and privacy, and even how ideas like the Calculus change us as a species. "Ideas change who we are in a fundamental sense. They change how we attain energy in the world, they change how we organize our societies, they change how we move. Without the Calculus, we wouldn't have rocket ships."

Krakauer also discussed how the experience of being human might change this century as a result of technology. He started by looking back 150,000 years, and first considered what hasn't much changed. "If you went back 3,000 years to ancient Sumer, you'd meet someone and say, 'this is a decent human being.' The timescale over which core human values change is very slow."

What does seem different in our present century are the scale and pace of change. "If you look at the year 2000 B.C and the year 1000 B.C., there would be some difference, but not dramatic. If you looked at the year 1800 and the year 2016, they would look almost unrecognizably different."

While evolutionary theory teaches us that genomes change based on the adaptive capacity of individuals to their environments, ideas - and technologies are ideas in physical form - also provide adaptive, or maladaptive, power. Philosopher Karl Popper argued that "all life is problem solving," in the sense that genes encode solutions to challenges. Evolution favors genes whose organisms survive and reproduce, and eliminates those that fail. Our technologies play similar roles through other means.

Ideas also change our ethics. "The idea that somehow you can separate technology, mathematics, reason from morality strikes me as extraordinarily naïve," argues Krakauer. "Structures of knowledge always have ethical implications.... Think about online banking... decisions were being made about you that were in some dimensions moral decisions."
Trading Control For Convenience
What ethical issue concerns him most regarding our next few generations of technological development? Control, whether it's related to data from our online behaviors or our personal genetic code. "I'm most concerned about unthinking acceptance of convenient short term solutions." For instance, many consumers claim to be concerned about data privacy - who knows your details, and what they're allowed to do as a result - but faced with offers of convenience, most people actively or passively cede control.

When was the last time you downloaded an app and simply accepted its terms without reading them? It's understandable, but illustrates how often we comply. Recently, a senior executive at a major telecommunications provider shared that when consumers were faced with an offer for a 15% discount on internet access in exchange for a license to map their online usage patterns for commercial purposes, 98% of consumers accepted the deal. Ninety-eight percent. While this company opted not to use this information in order to avoid potential legal and brand challenges, the case illustrates consumers' willingness to trade critical information for short-term benefits.

Krakauer underscores another underappreciated threat we all face: Humans are lazy. Technology makes life easier, allows us to experience and accomplish more. But every time we outsource effort or decision making to other entities, human or otherwise, we relinquish some control. "What I worry about almost more than anything else is a certain kind of mental laziness, and an unwillingness to engage with the difficult issues.... It's somehow more pressing in a time where there are systems out there willing to make the decisions for you."
Brain Scanning A Billion People
As we digitalize more of our lives, the scale and depth of information available about us, individually and collectively, is equivalent to brain scanning a billion people. It's already transforming social, economic and political systems.

Our modern notion of privacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, as Krakauer's SFI colleague Jessica Flack points out. When humans lived in small groups, privacy was essentially non-existent. Everyone knew what you were up to. As populations expanded and society grew in complexity, privacy in our modern sense became possible. "In that tiny fleeting window of time, we experienced privacy," Krakauer explains. "So now, we're returning to a mutant version of that ancient state.... The debate might not be about privacy or anonymity so much as the scale of knowledge."

Humanity requires new ways to understand collectives, a challenge in which SFI is actively engaged. Computational, network and communications technologies proliferating this century will leverage, shape and be shaped by our social natures. It's one thing if your neighbor or cousin knows your intimate details. It's another if Google or a government knows. "That's something that humans, by virtue of their cultural conditioning are very ill-equipped to deal with," Krakauer cautions. "We don't have the right immune system to deal with who has access to our knowledge."

While human nature may not have changed much over the past 150,000 years, our individual and collective experiences of being human certainly have. We'll need far more research, diligence and personal responsibility to navigate this century's rapidly evolving world.

Returning to the long view, Krakauer asks a question central to how we build our futures: "What are those things we can count on into the future to steer a responsible course? What are those things that we think really will no longer be here?"

... Read More

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Laziness, Technology And Brain Scanning A Billion People: A Conversation With David Krakauer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
David Krakauer, evolutionary geneticist, complexity theorist and CEO of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), takes the long view. In our wide ranging conversation regarding where humanity might head ( see the video here), Krakauer shared perspectives on brain scanning a billion people, ethical issues posed by technology such as free will and privacy, and even how ideas like the Calculus change us as a species.

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"Technology Enhances Creativity" by Lauren Cho

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"Technology Enhances Creativity" by Lauren Cho

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https://www.mindmeister.com/blog/improve-creativity-6-tips/

Technology has come a long way. From flip phones to smart phones, technology these days never fails to impress the world. As technology advances with time, it also enhances people's creativity.

People are able to constantly search things and discover new information they didn't know before. It allows us to become educated and have an outlet to speak our minds.

This ties in with people's creativity an how it's shown. Now not only can we share the ideas we have but also view each others. What I mean by this is watch people's videos posted on the internet through Youtube.

Youtube has become a multibillion dollar enterprise over the past years. Although relatively new, Youtube's success is owed to all the video creators and their viewers. They are able to voice their different skills and opinions. A lot of Youtubers discuss that without Youtube they would have been in worse shape with no way to channel their messages to the world. Using video cameras and editing their videos on computers, it all aids them to put out their best product. Technology is able to help boost their creativity.

Becoming a more technological society increases our potential to engage in the types of experiences that lead to greater creativity. Having this technology available, people can make whatever they want. We have the reassurance of knowing that we can upload something straight from our phones and connect with information and people around the world.

Many people like to point out that having technology would decrease our creativity because we know too much information and have a lack of originality.

This doesn't necessarily mean that it kills our creativity. Although we have all the information online, we can always add to other people's thoughts and build off of them. Creativity does by no means have to be limited to finding an original idea. People can add to different concepts and this can also be called creativity.
https://hello.rindle.com/is-technology-killing-creativity/

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Technology has come a long way. From flip phones to smart phones, technology these days never fails to impress the world. As technology advances with time, it also enhances people's creativity. People are able to constantly search things and discover new information they didn't know before.

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"Technology: Making Music Into Art" by Wilson Rothman (TIME Magazine)

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"Technology: Making Music Into Art" by Wilson Rothman (TIME Magazine)

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What's more surprising, finding a classically trained composer at M.I.T.'s Media Lab or discovering that his research there has produced a Fisher-Price toy? Either way, it is hard to question the pedigree of Symphony Painter, a new kind of electronic music software designed for the Color Pixter electronic sketchpad. The brainchild of M.I.T. professor Tod Machover, Symphony Painter ($20; fisher-price.com Color Pixter sold separately) combines visual arts and music: you draw a picture and then press the triangular play button to hear a musical interpretation of your artwork. Experienced musicians might predict some outcomes: lines curving up tend to...

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What's more surprising, finding a classically trained composer at M.I.T.'s Media Lab or discovering that his research there has produced a Fisher-Price toy? Either way, it is hard to question the pedigree of Symphony Painter, a new kind of electronic music software designed for the Color Pixter electronic sketchpad.

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"Why People Are Better At Lying Online Than Telling A Lie Face-to-face"

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"Why People Are Better At Lying Online Than Telling A Lie Face-to-face"

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University of British Columbia

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In the digital world, it's easier to tell a lie and get away with it. That's good news for liars, but not so good for anyone being deceived.

Michael Woodworth, a forensic psychologist at UBC Okanagan studying deception in computer-mediated environments, says offering up a fib in person might make you provide certain signals that you're trying to deceive, but lying online avoids the physical cues that can give you away.

"When people are interacting face to face, there is something called the 'motivational impairment effect,' where your body will give off some cues as you become more nervous and there's more at stake with your lie," says Woodworth. "In a computer-mediated environment, the exact opposite occurs."

The motivational enhancement effect - a term coined by Woodworth and colleague Jeff Hancock from Cornell University - describes how people motivated to lie in a computer-mediated environment are not only less likely to be detected, they are also actually better at being deceptive than people who are less motivated.

When telling a lie face-to-face, the higher the stakes of your deception, the more cues you may give out that you're lying. So, what isn't in a text message may have advantages for a would-be deceiver: text doesn't transmit non-verbal cues such as vocal properties, physical gestures, and facial expressions.

Woodworth's research is very timely as technology and deceptive practices converge.

"Deception is one of the most significant and pervasive social phenomena of our age," says Woodworth. "On average, people tell one to two lies a day, and these lies range from the trivial to the more serious. Deception lies in communication between friends, family, colleagues and in power and politics."

Woodworth began his exploration by looking at how to detect deception in face-to-face environments. But he soon recognized the invasion of information and communication technologies into nearly all aspects of our lives was an opportunity to study how technology affects "digital deception" - defined as any type of technologically mediated message transmitted to create a false belief in the receiver of the message.

"Given the prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives, an important set of concerns have emerged about how technology affects digital deception," says Woodworth. He points out a growing number of individuals are falling prey to deceptive practices and information received through computer mediated contexts such as the Internet

"By learning more about how various factors affect detecting deceit in online communication, our research will certainly have important implications in organizational contexts, both legal and illegal, in the political domain, and in family life as more and more children go online."
Common threads detected in psychopath texts
Michael Woodworth's research at UBC Okanagan goes beyond deception. He also studies the personality disorder of psychopathy, looking at what secrets can be gleaned from the language used by psychopaths who have killed.

After interviewing dozens of psychopaths and non-psychopaths convicted of murder, Woodworth and colleagues used electronic linguistics analysis to automatically process the interview transcripts, paying attention to the appearance of certain words, parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, nouns), and semantics - for example, looking at how often certain topics came up.

The results were revealing.

"In the transcripts of psychopathic offenders, we found twice as many terms related to eating, and 58 per cent more references to money," says Woodworth. "And the psychopaths were significantly more likely to discuss both clothing and drinking while discussing their homicide, compared to non-psychopathic offenders."

Woodworth has now teamed with noted forensic psychologist and deception researcher Stephen Porter, who joined UBC Okanagan from Dalhousie University last summer, and fellow forensic psychologist Jan Cioe to build a multi-disciplinary forensic science graduate program and research centre at UBC Okanagan.

Bringing together prominent forensic psychologists will benefit both the academic and wider communities, says Woodworth.

"In the back of my mind I'm always thinking 'how is this going to potentially have some applied value?' whether it be the community in general, or specifically for law enforcement, or by furthering our knowledge within a certain area," he says. "All of these applications ultimately assist with both assessment and treatment."

This research is supported by a grant of $87,055 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.

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language acquisition; relationships; social psychology; literacy; communications; educational technology; computer science; computers and internet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why People Are Better At Lying Online Than Telling A Lie Face-to-face

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In the digital world, it's easier to tell a lie and get away with it. That's good news for liars, but not so good for anyone being deceived. Michael Woodworth, a forensic psychologist at UBC Okanagan studying deception in computer-mediated environments, says offering up a fib in person might make you provide certain signals that you're trying to deceive, but lying online avoids the physical cues that can give you away.

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"Too Much Alone Time? Tips To Connect And Find Joy While Social Distancing" by Allison Aubrey(npr)

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"Too Much Alone Time? Tips To Connect And Find Joy While Social Distancing" by Allison Aubrey(npr)

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We are social creatures. So it's no surprise that quarantine fatigue has begun to set in.

"Humans are wired to come together physically," says psychologist Judith Moskowitz of Northwestern University. But, loneliness has become widespread in modern life. And, social distancing has just exacerbated the problem, Moskowitz says.

Social connection is essential to our well-being, since prolonged isolation can increase the risk of depression and anxiety, says Dr. Sandro Galea of Boston University's School of Public Health. "We know from other events, the longer the isolation, the more risk," Galea says.

Social distancing recommendations will remain in place for months to come, and until there's a vaccine, limits on big gatherings will likely continue. For the elderly or those who live alone, the isolation can be particularly grueling. But, people are finding new ways to interact with each other, even under extraordinary circumstances.

Here are some strategies to connect with others.

Note: If you're feeling persistent sadness or anxiety that interferes with day-to-day life, consider seeing a therapist (which you can do online, too).
1. Don't scroll, but do connect online, with real-time activities
When it comes to our emotional health, social media platforms can be a double-edged sword. Simply scrolling through a Facebook, TikTok or Instagram feed may not help you connect with other people in a meaningful way.

So instead of cultivating that empty FOMO (fear of missing out) feeling, use the power of virtual platforms to connect more intentionally, more deeply.

Start by asking yourself: What matters to you? Do you have a hobby you'd like to resurrect, or take up for the first time? A whole world of online, live-streamed classes has opened up, from ceramics to languages to bread-making. Always wanted to play the banjo? "Find a banjo class," says Judith Moskowitz, a psychologists at Northwestern University.

The face-to-face, real time connections allow us to pick up on facial expressions and body language to better simulate real-world gatherings. A live, synchronous class, Moskowitz says, "is one way to get to know people and to broaden your social network."

Outside of classes, if you use social media to stay in touch with friends, instead of just commenting on posts, make the effort to interact one-on-one, says Joe Walther, who directs the Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara. "It's the intimacy of the messages, and the depth of the interactive conversation that will sustain us," he says.
2. Making art is a social act: Express yourself and share.
Looking for a place to connect with others who use art to express themselves? The UnLonely Project has created a community through its Stuck At Home Together initiative. You can watch a short film, then participate in an online conversation. You can view others' art or share your own. And for motivation to get started, the group has designed creative challenges, like crafting a self-portrait from objects around the house.

The group behind these initiatives includes physicians and researchers who document how the creative processes can help people maintain good health and fend off disease. "When you make art, you are in the moment - you are with [your] thoughts and feelings," says Jeremy Nobel, who founded the program and is also on the faculty at Harvard Medical School.

And by sharing what you create, it's as if you're sharing a "representation of your thoughts and feelings, whether it's a painting, a poem, a baked good, or a garden," Nobel says.

He says loneliness isn't just about lacking companionship. "Often loneliness starts with a sense of estrangement or disconnection from who you are. How do you fit into the world?" Nobel says.

Art can be very powerful for centering and positioning - a way to explore your own identity. "And I actually believe for many people, that's an essential first step to connecting with other people in an authentic way," Nobel says.
3. Reach out to the elderly
For many elderly people, social distancing has brought layers of challenges. "It's not just the lack of contact with others," says physician Kelli Tice Wells who is a senior medical director at health insurer Florida Blue. It's also "not being able to navigate things that can be critical to your life" such as on-line grocery shopping or getting prescriptions, Wells says.

Florida Blue now offers virtual companionship and assistance to seniors through a program called Papa Pals, which matches elderly adults with younger people, who are paid to provide assistance.

Miriam Membreno, of Miami, Fla., who is trained as a social worker, recently started working as a Papa Pal, after her hours at her regular job were cut short. She meets with a few elderly people virtually.

"I do feel like I'm helping them be less lonely," Membreno says. She says sometimes they just want to share stories, and she likes to listen. Other times, during a virtual visit, she says, they share worries that they have bottled up. "Just having those stress and concerns released," is worthwhile, she says.

Another program for seniors, Live a Dream, collects video montages to brighten a senior's day. Young people can submit a short video to share. You can tell a joke, play an instrument, or just give some encouraging words.

There are numerous efforts to connect elderly people in senior living facilities with younger people around the country. Check with local groups to find one where you live.
4. Become a citizen-scholar, a online tutor, or assistant to the visually impaired: Find your way to volunteer, virtually
As many community organizations struggle to keep up with rising needs and shrinking budgets, volunteer options - even contactless ones - abound.

Does the idea of becoming a citizen scholar sound intriguing? The Smithsonian has digital volunteer opportunities. For instance, "citizen scholars are invited to transcribe historic documents including diaries and working papers of prominent Americans," according to the Smithsonian website. To get involved, you can check out the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
5. Keep friendships alive, with small acts of kindness
Or, you could help people with low-vision, a program called Be My Eyes, is an app that connects people who are blind or have low-vision with volunteers who offer virtual assistance.

VolunteerMatch, a database of volunteer opportunities has a searchable site for virtual volunteering, with thousands of postings around the country, calling for all kinds of skills from tutoring kids to making face masks. Find more options on Idealist.org.

Sometimes, a small gesture can help you reconnect. Even though we can't bake together, think about dropping off some cookies to a friend. Ask your neighbor if you can pick up some grocery items for them on your next trip. Organize a puzzle or game swap.

During these strange and difficult times, "you can feel like you're really depleted and you have nothing to give," says Judith Moskowitz. "But just a simple act of helping someone else out comes back and bolsters you as well," she says. An act of kindness can lift our spirits. "And that really feels good."
Elena Renken contributed to this report.
Look for creative ways to nourish your friendships, like working through a cookbook together, or watching movies together, suggests Lydia Denworth, author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond. And don't miss the opportunity for small touch points throughout the day: Even sharing a joke over text can make you feel less alone, she says.

"Friendship is critical in times of stress - that's what friendship is for," Denworth says.

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Too Much Alone Time? Tips To Connect And Find Joy While Social Distancing

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We are social creatures. So it's no surprise that quarantine fatigue has begun to set in. "Humans are wired to come together physically," says psychologist Judith Moskowitz of Northwestern University. But, loneliness has become widespread in modern life. And, social distancing has just exacerbated the problem, Moskowitz says.

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it is making kids and parents more distant

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it is making kids and parents more distant

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everyone is listening to music because of technonlgy

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everyone is listening to music because of technonlgy

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Technology Makes Us Better; Our Oldest Computer, Upgraded  By: John Tierney(New York Times.)

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Technology Makes Us Better; Our Oldest Computer, Upgraded  By: John Tierney(New York Times.)

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When the Sojourner's tiny wheels rolled over the Martian surface on July 5, it was in some ways a bigger leap for mankind than Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon. You may not have realized that if you were watching network television, which gave the Mars landing relatively short shrift. But that was the beauty of this extraterrestrial event: you didn't need a television to follow it.

Anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection could see pictures from the spacecraft. You could study Martian sunsets or put on cardboard 3-D glasses to take in a 360-degree view of the landscape. With a few clicks of the mouse, you could read a treatise on Martian geology, check out the latest weather conditions on the planet, sit in on a news conference or watch scientists issuing commands from the mission-control room. One Web site provided a recipe for throwing a Mars Madness Celebration -- red and brown M & M's were recommended -- and gave directions to dozens of such gatherings across America. Other sites let you participate in on-line chats with planetary scientists as well as religious fundamentalists convinced that the mission was a hoax being staged in the Arizona desert. During the week of the landing, the various Mars Web sites were visited more than 200 million times.

It was easily the most popular event in the history of the Internet, proof at last that humanity could use this new medium for something loftier than viewing pictures of a naked Pamela Anderson Lee. The Moon landing was the apotheosis of the old technological order: a big-budget achievement of central planning, a cold-war triumph of the military-industrial complex packaged by politicians and presented to the masses by the media establishment. The Mars visit was a low-budget operation with a charming quirkiness to it, a peaceful scientific exercise instead of a propaganda victory over an enemy nation. In 1969, Communist authorities suppressed coverage of the Moon landing; this year, Russians followed the Mars mission on the World Wide Web, using the very machines that helped end the cold war.

Is this a better world? Has technology made us better? Tools can't change human nature, but they can encourage or suppress certain qualities, and most people would probably agree on what constitutes ''better'': wiser, happier, kinder, more equitable and cooperative, less duplicitous and belligerent. The tricky part is defining ''us.''

In the two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, individuals reaped enormous personal benefits that were accompanied by some social liabilities. As people abandoned farms and small towns, they lost communal bonds; as personal incomes rose, public air and water got dirtier; as power became concentrated in capital cities, elites controlled new tools of mass communication and mass destruction. Indoor plumbing and washing machines freed women of onerous work, but there was less socializing at wells. Trains and cars enabled workers to move away from industrial neighborhoods, but these suburbanites spent more time alone in their cars and backyards, lapping up the wisdom of distant publishers and broadcasters instead of chatting with relatives and neighbors. Although new technology is often described as a Faustian bargain, historically it has involved a trade-off not between materialism and spirituality -- lugging water from the well was not a spiritually uplifting exercise for most people, no matter how much it might appeal to the Unabomber -- but between individual freedom and social virtue.

Today's technologies offer a better deal for everyone. Individuals are acquiring more control over their lives, their minds and their bodies, even their genes, thanks to the transformations in medicine, communications, transportation and industry. At the same time, these technologies are providing social benefits and undoing some of the damage of the past. Technology helps to conserve natural resources and diminish pollution. Today's farmers are so efficient that unneeded cropland is reverting to forests and parks; the most high-tech countries have the cleanest air and water. The Information Revolution, besides enabling people to visit Mars at will, is fostering peaceful cooperation on Earth by decentralizing power. Political tyrants and demagogic warmongers are losing control now that their subjects have tools to communicate directly with one another. People are using the tools to do their jobs without leaving their families. They're forming new communities in cyberspace and forming new bonds with their neighbors in real space. Technology has the potential to increase individual freedom and strengthen community -- even though at the moment, so many people complain it does neither.

Technology's victims have become familiar images in the media: on-line addicts who don't know their next-door neighbors; satellite- dish owners who have stopped reading; computer users overwhelmed by E-mail, infuriated by software glitches and baffled by incomprehensible manuals; workers displaced by machines or forced to put in longer hours; frazzled parents, especially working mothers, too exhausted and busy to spend time with their children. We contrast these pathetic figures with images of a happier past, of families quietly relaxing in a pre-machine age when people still had time to read, contemplate the meaning of life, visit with their relatives and neighbors.

But when exactly were those halcyon days? If premachine means before the Industrial Revolution, the average person then was short-lived, illiterate and oblivious to most culture beyond the village. Women's lives were consumed with domestic chores and continual pregnancies, and women were especially unlikely to be educated. Marriage records from a region of 1750's England, then one of the world's most literate societies, show that two-thirds of the bridegrooms could sign their names, but only one-third of the brides could. It would be hard to call that a better world.

Living conditions and educational opportunities certainly improved after the Industrial Revolution, but people still didn't have much time to sit around discussing the classics or communing with nature. In the middle of the last century, the typical man in Britain worked more than 60 hours a week, with no annual vacation, from age 10 until he died at about 50. That left him with about 90,000 hours of free time over the course of his adult life -- barely a third of the free time enjoyed by today's workers. This trend shows no sign of abating, says Jesse H. Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University. He projects that by the middle of the next century, the average workweek in America will be shorter than 28 hours.

Since 1965, Americans have gained an average of almost one hour of leisure each day, according to social scientists at the University of Maryland who have been studying people's ''time diaries'' over the past three decades. Americans are now spending a little more time reading books and magazines, exercising, pursuing hobbies and attending adult-education courses. Evidence from the diaries and other research shows that in recent decades, people have been going more frequently to art museums, the theater and the opera.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, the diaries show that the workweek has been shortening, that women have as much leisure time as men and that parents are spending as much time with their children as they did in the 1960's. These children, unfortunately, are less likely to live with two parents, which may be partly a consequence of technology that has made divorce and single parenthood less of an economic burden: men and women are presumably more inclined to live separately now that they can both support themselves outside the home, relying on machines to make clothes, clean house and do most food preparation. But new technology is hardly the only cause of the traditional family's decline, and in any case it's hard to get too nostalgic for the days when women had no choice but to stay in the kitchen.

Why, if men and women have more time and opportunity than ever to pursue their dreams, do they grouse so much about modern technology? One reason is that new technologies like computers usually are more trouble than they're worth -- at first. They're hard to learn and create resentment among workers, particularly the unskilled ones who fear displacement and are jealous of higher-paid experts in the new technology. The introduction last century of electricity to factories did not immediately increase workers' pay and productivity; the widespread benefits came only after several decades, when factory managers and workers finally learned how to use the new motors efficiently. Then wages increased for everyone, raising the standard of living and creating new kinds of jobs. Luddites have been warning for two centuries that technology destroys jobs, but the overall effect of automation is to free workers to concentrate on other, less-tedious tasks. Today's workers are richer and more cultured than their Luddite ancestors (and better dressed, thanks to mechanical looms). While they may have fewer jobs in the textile industry, they have more opportunities to work as teachers, social workers, travel agents, personal trainers, writers and museum curators.

As much discomfort as the personal computer has caused, there's no reason to assume that the machines will remain complicated. Gadgets become simpler as technologies mature and marketers appeal to the masses. George Orwell's despair over cars, gramophones and telephones was at least partly due to the crude state of those technologies in his day. The automobile was a relatively unreliable, high-maintenance machine until a couple of decades ago. Gramophones were cumbersome and yielded tinny sounds. Telephones were forever disturbing the peace of people trying to eat, converse or read. The phone didn't become wholly civilized until people were freed to ignore it by the invention of the answering machine -- a contraption that was despised before coming to be regarded as a necessity. Today, E-mail is a novelty that can be disruptive, but pioneers are developing techniques for coping, like automated responses when there's no time to deal with an overloaded mailbox and filters to sift out the junk mail.

Another reason we grouse about modernity is that our expectations are higher. The middle class wants perquisites once limited to the rich, from material luxuries to cultural experiences to intellectual fulfillment. Our ancestors may have been content to pass the time on the porch chatting with neighbors about the weather and crop prices, but they didn't have many other choices. Today most people -- including those academics who rhapsodize about traditional communities while working in offices far from their hometowns -- demand more stimulation than their relatives and neighbors can provide. We feel more rushed because we have more possibilities.

''Free time is increasing, but not as fast as our sense of the necessary,'' says Geoffrey Godbey, a co-author of ''Time for Life,'' a report on the time-diary research project. ''With technology we've upped the ante. Instead of corresponding with 6 or 7 people, we have 150 E-mail partners. Thirty years ago most people didn't bother shampooing their carpets or blow-drying their hair or making their own bread, but now that they have the equipment, they have higher standards.''

The most dispiriting trend discovered by Godbey and his colleagues is the couch-potato paradox: people have been watching more television even though they rate it among their least-favorite forms of leisure. Americans average more than 16 hours a week, an increase of 4 hours since 1965, which means that most of our recently acquired free time has gone to the tube. A die-hard optimist could argue that television has been improving, that people are deriving joy and enlightenment from all those new cable channels, but it would be just as easy to argue that they're staring at cubic zirconium rings. The increase in tube-watching seems especially perverse considering that it coincides with a decline of two hours a week in the amount of time people spend socializing, an activity they consider much more enjoyable than television. A society of solitary people sitting at home enviously watching the camaraderie on ''Friends'' does not seem like a triumph of the communications revolution.

The good news is that people with computers are watching less television, and they've increased the amount of time spent socializing with family and friends (partly because they get together to play computer games). At the moment only about 40 percent of American households have computers, but the percentage is rising as the machines become cheaper and easier to use. Over the past year, home computers have begun outselling televisions in the United States, a statistic that cheers George Gilder, who in 1990 wrote a book titled ''Life After Television.'' Now the editor of the Gilder Technology Report, he expects the broadcast-television empires to collapse -- and an intellectual culture to flourish -- once the masses can easily receive video and text from a computer network as diverse as the Internet.

''When I debate network television executives,'' Gilder says, ''they come up to me afterward and say: 'Look, you don't understand. People like the stuff we put on. We've done market surveys and we've found that people are boobs.' Well, I'm a boob when faced with conventional TV. It's too much work to find something good, and if you do, it probably won't accord with your particular interests. Television is a lowest-common-denominator medium even with 50 or 500 channels. You'd never go to a bookstore with only 500 titles. In the book or the magazine industries, 99.7 percent of the stuff is by definition not for you, and that's what the Internet is like. It's a first-choice medium with a bias toward each individual's area of excellence instead of the few commonly shared interests, which are mostly prurient and sensational.''

Now that the computer is combining the television with the telephone, it's clear that George Orwell got things precisely wrong in ''1984.'' He was remarkably prescient to envision society's being transformed by a two-way communication device called the telescreen, but he didn't foresee that these telescreens would promote freedom. One-way television is useful to Big Brother, but two-way communication devices undermine central authority by communicating with one another. Totalitarian countries have fewer telephones than televisions; democracies have more telephones.

Why was Orwell so technophobic, so sure that telescreens would promote tyranny and war? Peter Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who analyzes the mistakes of ''1984'' in his recent book, ''Orwell's Revenge,'' finds the answer in an essay Orwell wrote imagining how humans could free themselves of the drudgery of washing dishes. In this 1945 essay, Orwell considers the possibility of paper plates but settles on another solution: ''Every morning the municipal van will stop at your door and carry off a box of dirty crocks, handing you a box of clean ones (marked with your initial, of course) in return.'' Orwell envisions a dishwashing factory run by a public agency -- Big Brother's Ministry of Crockery, as Huber calls it.

''The thought of private, automatic dishwashing machines never even surfaces,'' Huber writes. ''For Orwell, the centralization of powerful machines is inescapable economic destiny in the industrial age.'' The most graphic refutation of Orwell was the famous Apple commercial broadcast during the 1984 Super Bowl, in which the enslaved masses were liberated by a lone woman hurling a sledgehammer at a demagogue on a huge telescreen.

At the time it was a wonderful image of the home computer's revolutionary potential. In hindsight, it's even more apt, because the target of the attack, I.B.M., which then seemed to be the omnipotent Big Blue, was about to be humbled. It was more Wizard of Oz than Big Brother. The company had dominated the era of mainframe computers, but it floundered in the late 1980's when it faced competition from upstarts offering cheaper, decentralized machines.

As these personal devices proliferate, it's becoming impossible for political leaders to censor information. Africa's leaders can control newspapers, but citizens in remote villages are now getting uncensored news from Africa Online. And as information becomes central to economies, the incentives for tyrants to wage war are diminishing. Military conquest of foreign lands made a certain amount of sense when the victors acquired manpower and resources from farms, mines and factories. Access to scarce natural resources was vital -- in the Middle Ages, armies fought wars over salt. Today wealth is based more and more on information, not natural resources, which is why the Congo is poor despite its vast mineral reserves, and why Hong Kong is rich even though it must import food and drinking water. The Beijing autocrats may have acquired title to Hong Kong's real estate, but they haven't conquered it. They can't seal its borders or appropriate its wealth. If they try to stop Hong Kong's telescreens from communicating, computer keyboards around the world will respond, and Hong Kong's money will start to flow away, followed shortly by its populace.

Now that the specter of Big Brother is receding, today's critics of technology have been focusing on the opposite danger: too much freedom. Conservatives worry that traditional values are threatened by on-line crudity; liberals worry that social injustice and selfishness will prevail in the unregulated realm of cyberspace. The critics correctly see that governments are losing some of their power to impose laws and moral standards, but that doesn't mean we're doomed to chaos and cruelty. Humans developed sociable rules and moral codes long before the era of centralized governments. The Internet may look like a dangerously anarchic world, but it's actually fairly similar to the ancient environment in which humans evolved to become the most cooperative, virtuous creatures on earth.

The original Information Revolution occurred during the Pleistocene, a decentralized era if there ever was one, when hunter-gatherers on the African savanna developed a powerful new computer: the human brain. The brain evolved to its large size because its information-processing capacity enabled humans to band together and increase their chances of survival. The size of a primate's brain correlates directly with the size of its social group, and the formula worked out by scientists indicates that the human brain is sized for a group of about 150, which by no coincidence is the number in a typical band of hunter-gatherers.

The large brain enabled our ancestors to work together because they had so much information about one another. They knew whom to trust because they could store memories of past behavior and obtain news about others' reputations. They developed instincts and customs that stigmatized selfishness and encouraged voluntary cooperation, especially within the band but also with outsiders. Other animals make sacrifices for the common good of their immediate kin, performing acts of altruism that insure the survival of their mutual genes, but humans go further. ''We are just about the only animals who act altruistically toward nonrelatives,'' says Matt Ridley, a zoologist and the author of ''The Origins of Virtue,'' a new book analyzing the evolution and economics of cooperative behavior. ''Humans can be selfish, of course, but what makes us special is our instinct to be nice to one another. Every culture defines virtue almost exclusively as pro-social behavior, and vice as antisocial behavior.''

This cooperative spirit has made possible the division of labor, which has been the source of all wealth, technology and culture. Just as Stone Age toolmakers independently developed complex trading networks for obtaining rock blades from distant tribes, 11th-century merchants established a trading system across Europe without any central guidance or enforcement authority. The merchants traveling among disparate kingdoms developed their own legal code and observed it voluntarily because they knew that a violator would be ostracized and unable to conduct business. The mere communication of information was enough to make them behave honorably.

''The Information Revolution is taking us back toward our better social instincts,'' Ridley says. ''The Industrial Revolution helped centralize authority, creating hierarchical bureaucracies that tried to coerce cooperation but often brought out the most selfish instincts in both the rulers and their subjects. The way to regain community spirit is to have small institutions and horizontal networks of equals who voluntarily cooperate, like the people you see chatting on the Internet today. These virtual communities formed spontaneously because our brains are naturally inclined to this sort of information exchange. It's what we spent most of our time doing in the Pleistocene.''

The Pleistocene savanna makes a good image for the Internet: a wide-open frontier being settled without any central planning. A few sociopaths are out there spreading computer viruses, and encounters among strangers can provoke viciously uncivil ''flame'' wars. But rules of etiquette are evolving as people coalesce into communities and networks. By trading information, they're discovering whom to trust and whom to avoid. They're writing E-mail letters to relatives and scheduling meetings with friends. Some, like merchants, are cooperating for profit, but a surprising number seem to be acting out of pure goodwill. They're freely providing information, from software to consumer advice to counsel for the lovelorn.

Most of the information is of no interest to most people, which is why the Internet can seem so pointless. My first few forays persuaded me that it was the world's most effective way to waste time. But in researching this article, I decided to give it another try. I had just read a good review of ''Data Smog,'' a book by David Shenk about the dangers of the Information Revolution, so I looked for it among the 2.5 million books at the Amazon.com Web site. I found it right away, along with an assortment of reviews from newspapers and magazines. Some of the most succinct analysis (''Excellent at describing info glut, not so hot at solutions'') came from laypeople who had volunteered their own comments.

There was also an area -- ''Check out these titles!'' -- listing other books ordered by buyers of this one, an extraordinarily useful cross-referencing feature. I began clicking from book to book, each time benefiting from the expertise of previous buyers to discover new related titles. It was like going from one Pleistocene water hole to another, at each stop picking up advice and directions to the next one.

Within a couple of hours I had found enough technophobic literature to keep George Orwell happy for years -- hundreds of books ranging from old scholarly critiques of the Industrial Revolution to titles like ''Surviving the Media Jungle'' and ''Under Technology's Thumb.'' I discovered ''Technolopoly,'' by Neil Postman, revealing that America has become the world's ''totalitarian technocracy,'' a place with no ''transcendent sense of purpose or meaning.''

Within a week, Amazon.com had graciously delivered to my door a small library assailing its own electronic technology. I read ''Data Smog'' -- which decried the Internet's ''fragmented, asynchronous, decentralized 'free-market' culture where the public good is sacrificed'' -- as well as Clifford Stoll's ''Silicon Snake Oil'' and ''Amusing Ourselves to Death,'' another lament by Postman. I went through treatises on information have-nots and spiritually deprived Internet surfers. I learned about a degraded electronic culture that is rendering books obsolete -- an ominous trend revealed in books purchased on line at the largest, most helpful bookstore in history. I tried to take the warnings seriously, but as the experts described the terrible plight of Americans drowning in data, there was something I couldn't get out of my mind.

It was the line spoken by Emperor Joseph II after the premiere of ''The Abduction From the Seraglio'': ''Too many notes, my dear Mozart.'' He was expressing the feeling common among the day's elite that Mozart's complex music was too fast-paced and stimulating for the average listener.

Like new music, new technology is always disturbing, especially to the establishment, and it always causes unforeseen problems. The agricultural and industrial revolutions were accompanied by new plagues, pollutants and weapons of destruction. Today's revolution will bring troubles and trade-offs, but we can cope with them. Transmitting information from one willing individual to another is hardly a new menace.

Like Mozart's music, this is something our brains are equipped to handle. This is what we're good at, and what makes us better.

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Technology Makes Us Better; Our Oldest Computer, Upgraded

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Article by John Tierney on technology's potential to increase individual freedom and strengthen community, even though so many people complain it does neither; says new technologies like computers usually are more trouble than they are worth--but only at first; notes that it took decades to benefit from other new technologies--such

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"Fake news is real — A.I. is going to make it much worse"

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"Fake news is real — A.I. is going to make it much worse"

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Fake news is real - A.I. is going to make it much worse

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Advancements in AI and machine learning are rapidly paving the way for "deepfake" videos, content that falsely shows people saying and doing things they never said or did. These fakes are becoming so realistic that news outlets may soon have trouble judging what truly is fact or fiction, making "fake news" an incredibly larger threat.

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"Social media enables students to express themselves" by Hannah Chern, Elizabeth Joseph and Ally Nguyen

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"Social media enables students to express themselves" by Hannah Chern, Elizabeth Joseph and Ally Nguyen

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In an increasing digitalized age, you may find yourself flooded with a constant stream of social media posts. You'll find countless articles analyzing the seemingly negative effects these platforms have on teenagers, as well as parents, peers and teachers advising you to put down your phone. Despite this, in a survey of 265 students, 79 percent said they viewed social media as a positive thing.

For senior Delaney Kemp, who runs a healthy food Instagram account, social media has allowed her to explore her interests and meet new people with similar ones.

"I definitely think of it as a form of expression because nutrition is what I'm going to be doing in college, so it expresses my interests and my future," Kemp said. "I'm definitely wanting a bigger audience, but I've made a lot of connections with other pages and users, so if that's what I gain out of this page then I'd say that's successful."

Sophomore Leif Campbell also utilizes social media to express his interests, but he does it by livestreaming himself playing video games on Twitch.

"I have a dual PC setup, so I have one PC playing the game and another doing the streaming," Campbell said. "It lets me express myself in the way of showing other people what I like to do most. It's just showing other people something that's cool. I'd say it's successful."

Additionally, seniors Annika Lehan and Ryan Williams operate photography accounts on Instagram. Lehan utilizes hers to showcase her work to a wider audience.

"I started my photography Instagram because I wanted a way for other people to see my work that wasn't necessarily my family and friends," Lehan said. "I also just don't like posting my face on the internet so I've liked putting my work up instead."

Williams agrees that social media has allowed him to reach a wider variety of users, but more so favors the opportunity it presents to express his own views.

"I see my photography as how I see the world through my eyes, it's very much self expression of how I see the world," Williams said. "When I take a picture, that's a picture I took and it's something I envisioned and saw and something I want to take a picture of and share it with the world. So I think it's just really sharing my perspective on things and how I see the world around me."

Like Williams, junior Noah Hookstra uses social media to express his perspective. Hookstra uses Twitter as a platform to share his thoughts and opinions, usually revolving around culture or politics.

"I think that Twitter is a way of communicating the essence of ideas ... It is the quickest way to put out a thesis," Hookstra said. "If I think about something specifically and I don't have an essay-amount of thought on it, but I just have a quick response to something in my life or the broader world, I will try and just put forward a quick Tweet just to document what I think about things."

Hookstra believes that Twitter is a platform where ideas can be discussed and spread easily.

"There was this concept in the Renaissance called salons where intellectuals will gather and just spit ideas off of each other," Hookstra said. "Twitter is both a refined and unrefined version of salons where I am able to say what I think about Kamala Harris' latest speech and then someone else tells me I am wrong."

Social media can offer a benefit for potential work or educational opportunities. When applying to the University of Illinois, Lehan linked her Instagram as an additional portfolio.

Similarly, Williams has also used his Instagram account as a portfolio.

"I've had people contact me based off my account, like there was this art show in Kansas City and they contacted me because they saw my work on my account," Williams said. "So in the day and age of technology, it has become like the new portfolio, like 'just go to my Instagram handle and see the photos I post.'"

Social media platforms can also be used to portray a different side of oneself. Although apprehensive to share her journey with depression in-person, senior Morgan Muehlberger utilizes YouTube as an outlet to document both her everyday life and more serious videos.

"I definitely take more risks on YouTube than I do in person. I've always wanted to talk about mental health, but I've always been too afraid to," Muehlberger said. "By making an account, I made a spot where I can talk about it. I'm not hiding behind a screen because I am still putting myself out there, but I get to really put myself out there in my own way. I can portray myself any way I want to online, which really helps."

Due to the ability to showcase her personality, Muehlberger believes her emotional state improves while she's logged onto her account.

"By giving me a good community to post what I want without fear of judgement, YouTube has allowed me to experiment with different types of videos and has helped me come out of my shell by being able to talk about controversial subjects," Muehlberger said. "It's my safe place. I feel better after I make a video and I feel inspired and it makes me feel good about myself."

Much like Muehlberger, math teacher Sarah Sides uses a public platform to inspire others. Sides uses Instagram to showcase her wardrobe.

"I post a photo of my daily outfit which I would describe as affordable but also trendy and comfortable," Sides said. "I really like to show people that you can dress fashionably without spending a ton of money and I also like to show students, girls especially, that you can be stylish and smart; they're not mutually exclusive things because they can go hand in hand."

While social media can be an outlet for expression, it may also be cause for concern; many students refrain from using any digital platform at all. For example, sophomore Aaliyah Gonzalez does not have any social media and believes she likely won't ever have one.

"I don't use social media because my parents feel that it is unsafe to use and I feel like it's a drain on my energy and another distraction for me," Gonzalez said. "I probably won't get any social media in the future because I already have a lot on my plate and I don't want the distraction."

On the other hand, for sophomore Alex Whipple, the decision to not use social media was mainly centered around his privacy.

"I've never really had a use for [social media]," Whipple said. "I believe that if you don't know me personally, I don't need to be expressing my beliefs or personal life to you."

Additionally, Whipple believes that distancing himself from social media helps set boundaries.

"When I play video games with my friends, we use a private voice chatting service to speak with each other and I talk with them every day," Whipple said. "I also see them through Science Olympiad and Robotics almost all the time. If I had any form of social media, I don't think I'd have a private life."

Though Hookstra believes social media has negative impacts, he ultimately believes the benefits of social exchange outweigh the harms.

"I actually think that there is a lot of people who kind of rag on Twitter as a toxic, firestorm environment - and don't get me wrong, it is," Hookstra said. "A lot of people complain about a Twitter bubble and it being echo-ey. I definitely think that it can be a problem, but my experience is that it is a good way to experience ideas and then bounce your own off of other people."

Like Hookstra, Muehlberger ultimately believes social media not only lets her express herself through her creations, but also empowers her to take ownership over her creations.

"I will continue to post videos because it's something I really enjoy. I love editing and I love directing a video," Muehlberger said. "It inspires me and makes me feel proud of the projects I've worked on. I'm excited for people to see my videos and I'm confident with myself in them."

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Social media enables students to express themselves

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In an increasing digitalized age, you may find yourself flooded with a constant stream of social media posts. You'll find countless articles analyzing the seemingly negative effects these platforms have on teenagers, as well as parents, peers and teachers advising you to put down your phone.

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"Has Technology Killed Face-To-Face Communication?" by Carol Kinsey Goman (Forbes)

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"Has Technology Killed Face-To-Face Communication?" by Carol Kinsey Goman (Forbes)

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Most of us use our cell phones and computers to inform, make requests of, and collaborate with co-workers, clients and customers. The digital age has connected people across the world, making e-commerce and global networking a reality. But does this reliance on technology, also mean we are losing the ability to effectively communicate with each other in person?

Ulrich Kellerer thinks so. He is a leadership expert, international speaker, and author. According to Kellerer, "When it comes to effective business communication, over reliance on technology at work can be a hindrance, especially when it ends up replacing face-to-face, human interaction."

Carol Kinsey Goman: You were the founder and CEO of Faro Fashion in Munich, Germany. What did you discover about business communication in this role?

Ulrich Kellerer: The digital age has fundamentally changed the nature and function of business communication. It has blurred international boundaries allowing people to connect with each other across the world. Communication is mobilized and instantaneous, and it is easier than ever to access and share information on a global scale.

However, I've also seen the negative impact of digital communication on business both internally and externally. While digital methods themselves are not detrimental - in fact many devices help us boost productivity, increase and inspire creativity -- it is our intensifying relationship with the digital environment that leads to unhealthy habits that not only distract us from the "present," but also negatively impact communication effectiveness.

Goman: In the midst of a digital age, I believe that face-to-face is still the most productive and powerful communication medium. An in-person meeting offers the best opportunity to engage others with empathy and impact. It builds and supports positive professional connections that we can't replicate in a virtual environment. Would you agree?

Kellerer: Connection is critical to building business relationships. Anyone working in sales knows that personal interactions yield better results. According to Harvard research, face-to-face requests were 34 times more likely to garner positive responses than emails. Communication in sales is complicated. It requires courtesies and listening skills that are simply not possible on digital platforms.

Interpersonal communication is also vital for a business to function internally. While sending emails is efficient and fast, face-to-face communication drives productivity. In a recent survey, 67% of senior executives and managers said their organization's productivity would increase if superiors communicated face-to-face more often.

Goman: In my research on the impact of body language on leadership effectiveness I've seen the same dynamic. In face-to-face meetings our brains process the continual cascade of nonverbal cues that we use as the basis for building trust and professional intimacy. As a communication medium, face-to-face interaction is information-rich. People are interpreting the meaning of what you say only partially from the words you use. They get most of your message (and all of the emotional nuance behind the words) from vocal tone, pacing, facial expressions and body language. And, consciously or unconsciously, you are processing the instantaneous nonverbal responses of others to help gauge how well your ideas are being accepted.

Kellerer: While digital communication is often the most convenient method, face-to-face interaction is still by far the most powerful way to achieve business goals. Having a personal connection builds trust and minimizes misinterpretation and misunderstanding. With no physical cues, facial expressions/gestures, or the ability to retract immediately, the risk of disconnection, miscommunication, and conflict is heightened.

Goman: Human beings are born with the innate capability to send and interpret nonverbal signals. In fact, our brains need and expect these more primitive and significant channels of information. When we are denied these interpersonal cues, the brain struggles and communication suffers. In addition, people remember much more of what they see than what they hear -- which is one reason why you tend to be more persuasive when you are both seen and heard.

In addition to eye contact, gestures, facial expressions and body postures, another powerful nonverbal component (and one that comes solely in face-to-face encounters) is touch. We are programmed to feel closer to someone who's touched us. For example, a study on handshakes by the Income Center for Trade Shows showed that people are twice as likely to remember you if you shake hands with them.

Kellerer: Business leaders must create environments in which digital communication is used strategically and personal communication is practiced and prioritized. Technology is a necessary part of business today but incorporating the human touch is what will give businesses the competitive edge in the digital marketplace.

Goman: Agreed!

... Read More

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Most of us use our cell phones and computers to inform, make requests of, and collaborate with co-workers, clients and customers. The digital age has connected people across the world, making e-commerce and global networking a reality. But does this reliance on technology, also mean we are losing the ability to effectively communicate with each other in person?

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"Your Smartphone Is Changing the Human Race in Surprising Ways." by Sarah DiGiulio (NBC)

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"Your Smartphone Is Changing the Human Race in Surprising Ways." by Sarah DiGiulio (NBC)

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Will someone born in 2017 ever unfold a map to determine the best driving route from New York City to a small town in Massachusetts? Will they memorize a phone number other than their own? Will they grow up to be smarter because their mind is no longer cluttered with mundane facts and the processes technology can do for us?

Psychologists and neuroscientists don't know these answers yet. But they're beginning to understand how spending every waking moment within reach of Internet-connected devices is affecting our lives.

"We've never had a technology that we use so intensively for so many different things," says Nicholas Carr, author of "The Glass Cage: How Computers Are Changing Us."
Related: AI Chatbots Are Shaking Up the Workforce in Unexpected Ways
We keep our brains in a constant state of overload, always distracted by new bits of information. It's human nature to want to take it all in because at one point in history knowing everything that was going on in the environment literally helped humans survive, Carr explains.

Now, constant connection to the Internet via smartphones and laptops has changed long-established rhythms of human thinking. There used to be times when we were socializing and learning from the people and the world around us and times when we were alone with our thoughts.

"But it becomes much much harder to practice the attentive types of thinking - contemplative thought, reflective thought, introspective thought," Carr says. "That means it's very hard to translate information into rich, highly connected memories that ultimately make us smart and intelligent."

Our relationship with technology affects how we communicate. But it also affects the deeper ways we interact and connect with people, according to Dr. Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT and author of "Reclaiming Conversation."

Now we can always be heard, we never need to be alone, and we never worry about being bored thanks to the constant feeds of information.

"If you can't be alone with your own thoughts [ever], you can't really hear what others have to say because you need them to support your fragile sense of self," Turkle told NBC MACH in an email. "True empathy requires the capacity for solitude."

Even if we think we're bored, the brain is working hard to process information we've taken in to replenish itself, Turkle explains. Just like Carr and others are concerned that this stream of distractions prevents deep thinking, Turkle's concern is that those distractions also prevent the deep feeling that lets us connect emotionally with others.

One 2014 study followed 51 kids who spent five days at an outdoors camp - no phones or laptops allowed. After time away from technology, the children were better able to read facial expressions and identify the emotions of actors in videos they were shown, compared with a control group of kids who didn't attend the camp.

Less interaction with technology allows us to focus on conversations and interactions with others instead of trying to fulfill cravings for finding new information via smartphones and other devices.

"We need to reclaim face-to-face conversation," Turkle said. "Never have we needed to talk to each other and understand each other more."

Others aren't as pessimistic. Dr. Keith Hampton of Michigan State University believes technology is expanding our worldviews, access to information, and opportunities to maintain relationships.

We used to cut social ties in predictable patterns - when we transitioned from high school to college, when we moved neighborhoods or changed jobs - and then form new relationships in the new setting, he says. "Now those ties stick with us."

The persistence of those relationships affects everything, from determining which people we rely on for emotional support to what activities we become involved in, where we travel, and how we form political opinions. "You're gaining a more diverse social network," Hampton says.

The belief that online social activity diminishes in-person social interactions is a myth, Hampton adds. Research actually shows the opposite: Those you maintain contact with most frequently using mobile devices are the people you confide in and who you see most frequently in person.

A 2011 survey by PewResearch backs this up, suggesting people who communicate using social media and mobile phones have more close friends than those who don't. But the long-term effects of technology use on our social networks are still unknown, Hampton says.

"Environmental factors are always changing us and are always changing the way we think," says Dr. Benjamin Storm, associate professor of psychology at University of California Santa Cruz.

But in the same way that advances in tech are outpacing our understanding of what it's doing to our behaviors and relationships, those changes are also outpacing our understanding of how it's affecting learning and thinking, says Storm, who studies human memory and cognition.

In a recent study, Storm and his colleagues found that offloading one piece of information - even the simple act of saving a computer file - actually made it easier to learn an unrelated piece of information.
Related: Algorithms Learn From Us, And We Can Be Better Teachers
In that way, our digital devices have become a memory partner - you can make more room for new information in your brain when you store and access other information digitally.

The concern, however, is that too much "digital offloading" means we might miss out on the mental connections that make us more creative and intelligent, Storm explains - "and that offloading may prevent us from developing the same sort of expertise as we would otherwise."

A study published last month in Nature Communications found that certain parts of the brain actually switch off or become less active when drivers used GPS to navigate the streets of London compared to those who relied on memory.

When we lean on GPS, we're no longer using certain parts of our brain the way we have over millennia, says Dr. Hugo Spiers, the study's author and reader in neuroscience in the Department of Experimental Psychology at University College London. "This may not be good for us, but we can't currently tell."

Meanwhile, Spiers is working on a project to better understand how neuroscience and tech can interact to build smarter cities that improve human wellbeing. He's optimistic about our capacity to become smarter using technology, he says. "There is much untapped learning potential in tech."

There are plenty of unanswered questions about how new forms of technology affect our thinking and behavior or if they harm our intelligence and creativity, Storm says, and there's a danger in deciding whether the changes are good or bad - "It's never that simple."
Follow NBC MACH on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Your smartphone is changing the human race in surprising ways

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Will someone born in 2017 ever unfold a map to determine the best driving route from New York City to a small town in Massachusetts? Will they memorize a phone number other than their own? Will they grow up to be smarter because their mind is no longer cluttered with mundane facts and the processes technology can do for us?

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"5 Ways Technology Has Changed the Communication Field" by the American University Washington, DC

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"5 Ways Technology Has Changed the Communication Field" by the American University Washington, DC

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Technology is now the most important communication tool for organizations. Technology has transformed how organizations conduct public relations and marketing, including how they interact with the media and stakeholders. Graduates with a master's degree in communication gain skills to guide and perfect an organization's use of communication technology to better achieve goals.

1. Traditional Media vs New Media
The rapid development and adoption of new technology has changed the face of communication through traditional media. The word of the day, according to the Newspaper Association of America, is innovation. Professional journalists in print and broadcast media have had to compete with amateur publishers for readers' limited attention spans. Media organizations that fail to keep current on communication technology may find themselves swallowed up by other more agile organizations that can. Web-based and mobile apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are often the first places readers go when they want breaking news. Respondents to Reuters Institute's 2015 Digital News Report indicated how individuals consume news:

11% paid for news online

26% accessed it through a smartphone

32% shared news stories through email and social media

2. Traditional Marketing Communication vs Digital Marketing Communication
The technology revolution has dramatically altered marketing as well. Companies can no longer rely on traditional advertising to generate revenue. This trend has resulted in a number of developments in marketing communication:

Native advertising, which is driving customers to a website by embedding a sponsored link within a news feed, which offers value-add content

Retargeting ads, which are "sticky ads" that follow users around as they visit other sites

Customer relationship management automation, which allows users to build drip-style email marketing campaigns based on user triggers

Big data, which has enabled marketers to collect vast amounts of data about their audiences so they can predict what they might do next

The need to carefully craft a messaging strategy that addresses all stakeholders according to their specific needs

3. Public Relations in a Digital World
Social media has made public relations (PR) more challenging, but it has also broadened an organization's accessibility. Public relations managers must be diligent in the way that communication is used. In the past, high-ranking officials in an organization may have left most communication outside of the business to a PR representative. Now each time senior managers interact with stakeholders, the media and the public, they are vulnerable to misrepresentation. With the proliferation of smart devices and real-time reporting, PR professionals have to educate and monitor everyone in an organization. They must also develop crisis communication plans when embarrassing and negative news goes viral over social media.

4. Devices for Communication Technology
The growing abundance of technological devices means that virtually every person in the company has a computer at home and a mobile phone in their pockets. It is also commonplace for employees to bring their mobile devices to work or to conduct work off of them from their home. This practice puts organizations at risk for data breaches. Even the federal government is adopting this approach, called BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). The idea that employees might be doing work on their personal devices means that communications (and IT) professionals must consider how sensitive work-related data might be used by employees both on and off the clock.

5. Communication in the Workplace
The accessibility that non-technical professionals have to devices and applications raises a question regarding how businesses practice organizational communication outside their walls. The Institute for PR ( IPR) sees this as an excellent opportunity for communication professionals to "think outside the firewall." In other words, communication professionals should consider the merits of making content available outside of their organization's private servers. Allowing employees to access digital files and work email outside of a business firewall might increase productivity.

Communications Degrees and Technology
Communication technology can be a blessing and a curse for businesses. Technology improves productivity, but it also complicates marketing strategies and public relations, as well as internal communications. Using the latest technology for the betterment of the organization requires a carefully thought out communication strategy fed by acquired skills in strategic communication and media communication analysis - skills that can be obtained by pursuing a Master of Arts in Strategic Communication.

Learn more about the online Master of Arts in Strategic Communication. Call 855-725-7614 to speak to one of our admissions representatives or request more information.

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5 Ways Technology Has Changed the Communication Field

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Technology is now the most important communication tool for organizations. Technology has transformed how organizations conduct public relations and marketing, including how they interact with the media and stakeholders. Graduates with a master's degree in communication gain skills to guide and perfect an organization's use of communication technology to better achieve goals.

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"Is Technology Making Us Lazy?" by Weird

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"Is Technology Making Us Lazy?" by Weird

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Photo courtesy of Jeff the Trojan

While there are a million amazing gadgets, apps, and sites that make life easier and less painful, sometimes you need to ask - is it necessary? Here are three inventions that might take technology too far.

When Saying Happy Birthday is Too Much
This handy little Google Chrome extension remembers all your Facebook friends' birthdays when you can't. The best part is that it sends a birthday greeting for you! Nothing like a computer-generated message to make your 1,956 Facebook friends feel extra special on their day.

When Holding Your iPad is Too Difficult
Next time you find yourself grocery shopping in the United Kingdom, you won't have to worry about holding your iPad. This shopping cart comes with a dock and speakers designed exclusively for your device. Hallelujah! Wait, who's shopping with an iPad and why do we need speakers? Nevermind.

When Checking On Your Child is Too Annoying
Baby monitors no more. This spy camera watches your sleeping baby so you don't need to drop in and swoon over the peaceful quiet of a newborn. Instead, you can enjoy this moment on a screen. Just like everything else in your life.

What are your favorite laziness-inducing gadgets? Tell us in the comments or tweet us @WIREDInsider.

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Photo courtesy of Jeff the Trojan While there are a million amazing gadgets, apps, and sites that make life easier and less painful, sometimes you need to ask - is it necessary? Here are three inventions that might take technology too far. When Saying Happy Birthday is Too Much This handy little Google Chrome extension...

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"Technology helped fake news. Now technology needs to stop it" by John Cook (BAS)

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"Technology helped fake news. Now technology needs to stop it" by John Cook (BAS)

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Heavily criticized for their role in spreading lies that influenced the 2016 US presidential election, the social media giants have begun to acknowledge what happened. In October, representatives of Google, Facebook, and Twitter testified before Congress and pledged to improve their response to the problem. The companies have even taken action to flag misinformation when it appears on their sites.

This is a welcome development. It is imperative that social media outlets push back against fake news, both as it relates to future elections and on critical scientific issues like vaccines and climate change. But it is also important to keep in mind that with the wrong strategies, the fight against false statements could be ineffective or even undermine its own goals. Efforts to counter misinformation should be informed by scientific research into the efficacy of various approaches. Fortunately, psychological research on misinformation goes back decades. The solution lies in pairing psychology with technology.

Tech tries to undo the damage. There is no question that social media have played a large role in amplifying the impact of misinformation over the last decade. A stunning one-fifth of online discussion about the 2016 US election originated from automated social media bots. (Bots are automated scripts that generate content and interact with people online.) Pro-Trump bots were significantly more prolific than pro-Clinton bots, with the result that most of this automated content supported Trump. To make matters worse, fake news stories were more widely shared than real stories, underscoring the harsh reality that truth is at a disadvantage when competing with often inflammatory fake news.

All these issues remain unresolved. To be sure, the social media giants are attempting to turn the fake news Titanic, developing tools and algorithms to counter the corrosive influence of misinformation. Google now includes authoritative fact-checks in its search results. Facebook has begun labelling links to fake news sources as false, and says it can reduce the spread of an untrue story by 80 percent.

However, efforts to counter misinformation can be ineffective, or worse, even counterproductive. When conspiracy theorists encounter debunking posts on Facebook, they double down by increasing their likes and comments on posts that support their conspiracies. General warnings about fake news cause people to have less trust in true headlines, showing that even well-intended efforts to fight fake news can boomerang unexpectedly.

Further, new research indicates another subtle but dangerous side effect of fact-checking. As fake news labels become more commonplace on social media outlets like Facebook and Google, people are coming to expect fake news to be labelled as such. As a result, when a fake news post is not tagged, people are more likely to believe it is true than if they had not been exposed to fake news labels in the first place. Researchers call this the "implied truth effect"-a reminder of the psychological minefield that is the human mind when dealing with misinformation.

Time for technocognition. While fake news rocketed into public consciousness just over the last year, researchers have studied how to counter misinformation for many years, discovering myriad potential pitfalls along the way. When debunkings are designed poorly, they can be ineffective or even make matters worse by reinforcing the misinformation. For example, if a debunked myth is not replaced with a fact-in the same way that a defense lawyer tries to provide an alternative suspect in a murder trial-the myth is likely to return and continue to influence people. When a debunking threatens a person's personal beliefs, it can backfire and strengthen the misconception.

Without psychological research, we wouldn't know any of this. While such research is essential, though, it cannot alone stop post-truthism from swamping society. The tech world needs psychology to design effective, evidence-based strategies, but psychology needs technology in order to reach the masses. This has led to an interdisciplinary approach is known as " technocognition." The idea behind technocognition is that information architecture should incorporate principles from psychology, behavioral economics, and philosophy to undo the damage and polarization that fake news has inflicted through social media. Technology contributed to the problem, and is an important part of the solution.

One of the most exciting areas of research into misinformation seeks the holy grail of fact-checking: the ability to automatically detect a claim in real-time and instantly assess its accuracy. In a study published in 2015, researchers at Indiana University developed a novel method to computationally assess the accuracy of a given claim. The method involves turning information from Wikipedia infoboxes (the least-disputed sources on the site) into a network of subjects-such as "Socrates"-and objects-such as "person." Any statement of fact, such as "Socrates was a person," is represented by a link between the two nodes in the network. Once this network was constructed, researchers were able to assess the veracity of any new claim by measuring how long you would have to travel through the network to join two nodes. For instance, the computer program found a long path length between the terms "Obama" and "Muslim," so rated the claim "Obama is a Muslim" as having low truth value. (While the scientists built their system based on Wikipedia, they write that they could "leverage any collection of factual human knowledge .")

Advances in automatically detecting misinformation should be coupled with research into the relative effectiveness of ways to present the results of fact checking. For example, experiments show that explaining the rhetorical techniques used to mislead people is an effective way to counter misinformation, but this strategy has yet to be tested in a social media context. Another useful research finding is that fact-checks are more effective when they come from a friend. Based on this knowledge, a tech company could devise a way to make it easy for people to share the results of fact checking with their social network.

It is still early days, but interdisciplinary approaches incorporating technology and psychological research could yield ways to reduce the damage caused by online misinformation. Scholarly research, unfortunately, moves slowly, and elections over the next few years face a fake-news threat similar to what we saw in 2016. But our understanding is growing. More than ever, we now need collaboration between the social media giants and researchers on misinformation.

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Technology helped fake news. Now technology needs to stop it - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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Heavily criticized for their role in spreading lies that influenced the 2016 US presidential election, the social media giants have begun to acknowledge what happened. In October, representatives of Google, Facebook, and Twitter testified before Congress and pledged to improve their response to the problem.

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Distance learning is basically a way of disseminating knowledge, where the educators and students are separated in distance or time or even both. Undoubtedly, distance learning offers wide variety of opportunities to students to attain higher education, but it is not all about benefits and advantages indeed. The distance mode of education offers students the flexibility to decide, what they want to learn, when they want to learn, at what pace they want to learn and what they would like to learn. So, with such flexibility, distance learning is soon becoming the most favored choice and open learning method for students today, especially for working professionals.

It is understood and well researched that not all students tend to learn via same technique of open learning and there is no particular technique that facilitate learning in everyone. There are several factors that affect student's capacity to study. Applied learning, interaction, prior knowledge, analytical skills and motivations are some of the factors.

So, considering this varied consistency of students, distance learning needs to triumph over all these issues and challenges. Though most of these challenges were already addressed with the use of technology, but there are several cons and disadvantages that both students and teachers encounter. Some of the cons of distance learning include:

Pros of Distance Learning

With distance education the energy and time of the students can be saved and it is astronomical indeed. It enables the students to prevent hectic commute and even the hassles of trying to reach the class on time, thus keeping their mind free of anxiety and stress. Flexibility is another primary advantage of distance education as it enables the students to study at their own pace and perform their coursework at any specific time which fits with their busy schedule. Students get the opportunity to be the master of their own schedule with distance learning.

Distance learning also allows the students to continue with their part time & full time work schedules and other commitments, whilst earning a certificate, diploma or a degree. Distance learning has very less interruption into your daily schedule. Tuition fee of on-campus courses are quite expensive compared to distance education. The additional cost of the courses is actually required by the institution to maintain the physical location and to pay the faculty members. In distance learning, students can save money on travelling and paying the faculty. If anyone who desire to earn a degree with small budget then distance education would be financially feasible for them.

Candidates who are self-disciplined person and highly driven with hectic personal schedule may opt for distance learning, while any social person who prefer to succeed in structured environs of classroom with face to face interaction may opt for traditional learning system. Either way, students can pursue for higher education and earn a degree with ease.

Cons of Distance Learning
No Physical Interaction
Educators are both role models and knowledge givers for students in the conservative way of education. When the physical interaction between teachers and students is missing, then students tend to lose personal interaction with their educators and thereby the mental buildup of students may get hampered. Most of the students prefer to learn when their educators are physically present in the classroom. So, for such students distance learning would not be beneficial indeed.
Less Motivational
In distance learning, students are not required to attain classroom in person. They are isolated and hence they don't get same sort of interaction with other fellow colleagues in the course. Besides, the educators will also not be able to interact with the student directly; therefore they can't motivate the students as they do in classroom. In traditional way of learning, the students get the opportunity to thrive in an environment which gives them a challenge to perform in a peer group. In distance mode of learning, all these motivational factors are not present and can be unfavorable for many students.
Distance Learning Don't Help In Developing Oral Skills And Social Interactions
Remember, most of the distance learning courses don't facilitate oral communication, unless the program is synchronous learning event, where the students are asked to participate by using some communication techniques. Today, most of the distance learning courses use asynchronous method of learning and don't facilitate such interactions.
Difficult To Choose A Quality Educational Program
When it comes to select the best distance learning program, it really becomes difficulty for students to determine the best course out of so many programs. They find it complicated to select the best course which will offer them maximum benefits because they are unaware about the recognized quality guaranteed online courses.
Employer's Reluctance To Accept Distance Mode Of Training
It has already been determined that most of the employers hesitate to accept the concept of distance mode of learning and they prefer hiring the employees who have completed their degrees through traditional mode of education.
Important To Have Good Time Management Skills
Students can only reap maximum benefits from distance learning if they have better time management skills because in this mode of learning the students should have self-guided skills in their learning approach.
Technical Difficulties
Another difficulty that distance learners will encounter with this mode of education is the requirement of sound technical skills; this includes good typing skills to excel in distance learning setup. Distance learning also includes some hidden cost, like maintenance and purchasing of computer and other equipments to succeed in the learning process.

So, it will not be exaggerated to say that along with several benefits and flexibility, distance learning also has several disadvantages and cons associated. Most of the distance learning courses are either program-dependent or person-dependent. So, to make future distance learning more efficient and widespread, it is important to minimize and avoid all these aforementioned factors.

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Distance Learning Programs | Benefits Of Distance Learning | What Is Distance Learning | Cons Of Distance Learning | Open Distance Learning |Pros & Cons Of Distance Learning

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by South University

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Technology plays a large role in many aspects of day-to-day life, and education is no different. Technology is rapidly changing the way students learn and how instructors teach.

Computers have replaced chalkboards as the go-to tool in classrooms today. And it's not just happening in higher education; technology is part of education for children of all ages. It's also a part of their daily lives. According to a research study by Common Sense Media published in October 2011, "computer use is pervasive among very young children, with half (53%) of all 2 to 4 year olds having ever used a computer, and nine out of 10 (90%) 5 to 8 year olds having done so."

As technology continues to evolve, it brings with it new opportunities and challenges for educators and students. Social networking is a great example of technology that can help - or hinder - education, depending on how it is used and integrated into teaching plans. Privacy and security are two concerns that can come with using social networking in the classroom. It can also become a distraction to students, or even a tool used for bullying. According to a 2011 Pew report, 15% of children surveyed said they had been the victim of mean behavior on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

However, using social networking as part of the learning process can also have benefits. Students who are more introverted may open up and connect more with faculty and other students when they are communicating through social networking. It also affords students the opportunity to collaborate and work together in a whole new way.

There are also social networking sites designed specifically for education. An article on technology in education by Education Week mentions ePals and eChalk as two sites "designed specifically for learning."

College students can be notoriously connected to technology, including social networking, through their smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Social media in education presents college students with different benefits and detriments compared to their younger counterparts. According to Mashable, "Facebook is the most used social media tool in higher education." Additionally, Mashable says that colleges can use social media to encourage school spirit, foster the growth of alumni groups, and offer virtual tours to potential students.

So whether it is a college student studying classic literature or a grade school student first learning to read, technology is now an integral part of the education process.

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Technology plays a large role in many aspects of day-to-day life, and education is no different. Technology is rapidly changing the way students learn and how instructors teach. Computers have replaced chalkboards as the go-to tool in classrooms today. And it's not just happening in higher education; technology is part of education for children of all ages.

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Abstract

Distance education plays an important role in broadening educational access and increasing higher educational opportunities. The success, however, for any distance education initiative relies on a critical and core resource, namely having participating faculty who provide quality instruction. This study uses survey design and diffusion of innovation theory to examine faculty participation in relation to their technology use, their attitudes toward technology and distance education, and their adoption of innovations at a public postsecondary 10-campus system. Ordinal regression analysis identified 20 significant variables (16 predictors representing the four latent dimensions of the conceptual model and four demographic characteristics) that explain faculty participation in distance education. The findings identify a number of core issues underlying faculty participation and non-participation in distance education which pose implications for policy and practice relevant to technology use and skills, training and development, course design and technical support, quality issues, and workload and compensation.

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Notes

1. 1.

Research examining response rates for paper- and web-based surveys have shown mixed results. While most studies show paper surveys generate a higher response (Carini et al. 2003; Hogarty et al. 2003; Layne et al. 1999), other studies indicate the opposite with web surveys garnering higher returns (Beebe et al. 2007; McCabe et al. 2006).

2. 2.

For the purpose of this analysis, Minority references: African-Americans, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and more than one ethnicity.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Ronald H. Heck, professor, Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, for his assistance with the data analysis.

Author information

Affiliations

1. Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 1776 University Avenue, Wist Hall #220, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

Lynn N. Tabata

2. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Office of the Vice President for Academic Planning & Policy, Bachman Hall, Room 204, 2444 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

Linda K. Johnsrud

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lynn N. Tabata.

Additional information

An earlier version of this study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association Chicago, Illinois, April 2007.

About this article

Cite this article

Tabata, L.N., Johnsrud, L.K. The Impact of Faculty Attitudes Toward Technology, Distance Education, and Innovation. Res High Educ 49, 625 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-008-9094-7
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The Impact of Faculty Attitudes Toward Technology, Distance Education, and Innovation

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Distance education plays an important role in broadening educational access and increasing higher educational opportunities. The success, however, for any distance education initiative relies on a critical and core resource, namely having participating faculty who provide quality instruction.

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"How technology has changed education" (Vista College)

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"How technology has changed education" (Vista College)

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For better or worse, we're living in a technology-driven world. Since the internet exploded onto the scene in the '80s and '90s, became accessible to the average family in the early 2000s, and eventually began to fit into our pocket with the development of smartphones, it's safe to say technology is on an upward trajectory, and it shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.

Today, the internet dominates many aspects of our life. We're so used to it that we don't even think about all the areas it touches. It helps us communicate with our friends and family. It's an invaluable tool in the kitchen as we look up recipes and ingredients. If we're attempting DIY repairs on our car, we might look up a tutorial on YouTube. We access our entertainment online. Whenever we have any question, from the most mundane to the most complicated, we ask the internet.

There's one facet of our life, however, where we might not often think about the effects of technology, and that's the realm of education. Today, we want to spend some time examining how technology has found its way into the halls of schools across the country and around the globe, and all the ways technology has changed education.

How Does Technology Impact Education?

In many ways, education has not changed at all. The foundational system is still in place. A teacher instructs a student or a group of students, who use their studies to learn to become members of society. A few will then go on to become teachers themselves, and pass their knowledge along to the next generation. Books are frequent educational tools, and students will read these, write essays, reword my essay, conduct research, participate in debates and projects, and even gain hands-on experience that will help them better understand and navigate the world and their future careers.

While much of this tried-and-true model still exists today, changes are popping up. So how has technology affected education today? Let's look at a few of the most common ways.

1. Greater Accessibility

In the past, students and teachers alike needed to be physically present in the same location for learning to take place. Thanks to the way internet technology allows for instant and convenient communication over great distances at the click of a button, this is no longer the case.

How has technology changed learning? In the realms of higher education, it has led to the exciting possibility of online degrees. Established traditional schools now offer some of their courses online, while other schools have sprung up that operate entirely online, with students and teachers never once meeting face to face. In primary and secondary schools, this same technology allows for cyber-schooling, where children can complete their work from the comfort and convenience of home.

Online schooling such as these examples has helped immensely in breaking down geographic barriers that have long prevented many students from reaching certain educational institutions. For example, imagine someone who wants to study a highly specific program only available at one school across the country, but is unable to attend due to family commitments that don't allow her to uproot her life and move. Thanks to online education, she can now complete her degree.

2. Increased Flexibility

The idea of flexibility due to the internet goes hand in hand with improved accessibility. Online classes have freed students from having to attend school at specified times, something that is often impossible due to work or family responsibilities. Instead, course materials are available online, and students have the freedom to study and complete classwork whenever their schedule permits. As long as they complete work by the assigned deadline, it's up to them to plan how to use their time.

Technology has opened the doors of education to many who might otherwise be unable to attend a traditional school. Anyone working full-time, for instance, will now be able to continue their job while getting an education. Parents with young children can also find opportunities to attend school. Kids who are extremely serious about a sport and train for hours during the day now have the freedom to fit their schooling around their busy schedule.

3. Differing Interactions between Teachers and Students

With the development of online educational programs, the interactions between teachers and students have undergone a fundamental shift. There are advocates on both sides of this matter, with some saying this change is for the better and others saying it's for the worse. Perhaps the most helpful position to take is that this change is neither wholly negative nor entirely positive, and instead has both pros and cons.

For example, because this interaction is online, class time is no longer students' only opportunity to ask their teachers questions and request information. Instead, they can take advantage of emails, instant messaging, and texting to ask their professors questions anytime, rather than having to wait for the next class, when the question is no longer fresh in their mind.

On the other hand, however, these technologies mean neither student nor teacher will have the benefit of a face-to-face conversation, where nonverbal cues aid communication, and additional topics may come up that supplement the original discussion.

4. Advent of Online Testing

Along with online education comes the advent of online testing, which is hugely beneficial for a whole host of reasons. Foremost among those reasons is the fact that online testing is impartial and entirely fair. If a machine is grading the test and automatically correcting wrong answers, it's impossible to show any signs of bias. Additionally, online testing can be an excellent solution for those who suffer from test anxiety and are distressed by taking tests in a room with a group of other people. Finally, it's also much better for those with busy schedules, who may struggle to be at a testing center at a particular time.

Online testing isn't without drawbacks, however. Most notably, it is only effective for multiple-choice tests, not for essay or short answer questions. Students can still take essay-based tests online, but a human teacher will need to grade them.

5. Improved Ability to Meet Special Needs

In the past, a rigid classroom structure defined the world of academia. Each student had the same experience, no matter their differing needs or abilities. While some students could function well in this environment, others had unmet needs.

Technology improves a school's abilities to meet the needs of all types of students. Now, students with hearing, speaking or seeing impairments, or those who are largely housebound, can still receive a quality education. Technological advancements can also meet the needs of students with intellectual, social, or developmental disabilities. No matter what a student's unique needs may be, technology affects education for the better by improving our ability to create learning environments that work for everyone.

6. Availability of Online Learning Content

Learning used to take place exclusively in a classroom setting. Educational tools were either books or officially produced videos. One of the ways the Internet has changed education is by allowing anyone to share their knowledge with the world by publishing an educational blog post, e-book, or YouTube video.

The far-reaching benefit that comes out of this is that it makes it easier for anyone to learn. Imagine if you were planning a trip to Italy, and wanted to gain a fundamental knowledge of conversational Italian. No longer must you sign up for a class at a local university, or even visit your local library to check out a stack of dense textbooks. Now, all you need to do is pop open your laptop or phone and find a free app that'll teach you.

7. Greater Emphasis on Interactivity

Much of our traditional educational model focuses on the idea of passivity, where students sit back and listen to a teacher talk, or read words on the page of a textbook. This concept leaves very little room for interactivity and engagement, however, beyond what the student can manufacture in themselves.

Technology, on the other hand, tends to be more interactive. Students can engage directly with interactive models and videos, navigate websites, browse the internet for research, and more. For example, imagine the difference between trying to memorize a list of every country in the world from a book, versus an interactive tool that asked you to click on every nation as it prompted you with a name. Interactive tools help spark a broader interest in the subjects at hand, leading to improved retention and a desire to pursue topics further.

8. Heightened Ability to Keep up With Current Events

Let's say the only teaching tools a teacher has are textbooks, most of which contain information that's at least a year or two old, due to the lengthy publishing process. That may not have been a problem in the past, but the world today is moving faster than ever, thanks to technology. If the only information you have to share with students is a few years old, you may as well be decades behind.

Technology allows teachers to keep students up to date on not only current events, but also brand-new research and cutting-edge discoveries. Through using PowerPoint, YouTube, blogging technology, and the power of a good search engine, teachers can help their students understand the modern world they're living in much better than if they didn't have these tools.

9. Adaptability and Personalization

Educational spaces are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that what helps one student learn may be virtually useless to someone else, and what makes no sense to one student may be the only thing that clicks with another. Everyone's brain works differently, and everyone has a unique learning style - yet, for many years, all those students read from the same textbook.

How does technology affect education? It solves problems by allowing room for far greater adaptability. Students can benefit from having a range of tools and learning technologies at their fingertips, so if one solution doesn't work for a student, another might. If the students in question are still young children, teachers can better personalize learning plans and incorporate different technologies that will help a specific student.

10. Shifting Classroom Dynamics

With the arrival and popularization of internet technology, the dynamic in classrooms - particularly college classrooms - is experiencing a shift. Where the professor may once have been the sole source of knowledge, the internet has changed this. All the information in the world is available online, and students are extremely capable of looking things up for themselves, rather than needing to absorb this information during class time.

Because of this, many classrooms are shifting, so students spend homework time learning new concepts and ideas, while they spend class time debating these ideas and discussing their various implications. In this type of classroom, the teacher is less of a lecturer and more of a moderator and mentor. Professors will likely offer office hours in case students have additional questions or concerns about the material.

This same model applies to online schools, which often expect students to gather information independently before sharing their thoughts on discussion boards and forums, where professors act as moderators. Students can contact their professors via text or online messages, or else they may host office hours in local public spaces such as libraries and coffee shops.

11. Preparing Students for a Technology-Based World

Because books and face-to-face lectures have dominated intellectual and academic spaces for so long, there are plenty of people who felt a bit scandalized by the sudden inclusion of video presentations, iPads, e-books, and podcasts into these spaces.

But it's essential to realize almost every other facet of today's world relies on these technologies. When students leave high school and college to find a job, these jobs will almost certainly involve technology of some kind. Even if they don't, internet technology will inundate other facets of their personal lives. The inclusion of these technologies into the classroom is about preparing students for a world that will be full of them. The technology is not only there to supplement the learning - it's there so students will learn to use it and integrate it into their lives.

Learn More about the Programs We Offer at Vista College

It's impossible to deny technology has impacted education in ways too numerous to count. Because of this, you want to attend a school that's in step with these changes, and that empowers you to embrace them as you prepare to seek a job in a technology-facing world. Here at Vista College, that's exactly what we strive to do.

While we have multiple ground campuses, we also offer many of our program options online, so you can complete them from the convenience of your home. Browse our complete list of programs to decide which one might be right for you.

Technology isn't just about the format we offer our courses in, either. We also offer a range of programs in technology-based fields. Explore our technology programs for more information and get ready to take the first steps toward your new technology-focused career.

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How Technology Has Changed Education - Vista College

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For better or worse, we're living in a technology-driven world. Since the internet exploded onto the scene in the '80s and '90s, became accessible to the average family in the early 2000s, and eventually began to fit into our pocket with the development of smartphones, it's safe to say technology is on an upward trajectory, and it shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.

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"How Deception Technology Gives You The Upper Hand In Cyber Security" by Dan Woods (June 22, 2018)

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"How Deception Technology Gives You The Upper Hand In Cyber Security" by Dan Woods (June 22, 2018)

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It is a long-held maxim in cybersecurity that the bad guys have the advantage. They only have to succeed once, but the good guys have to stop them every time. So it is always interesting and often important when a new method comes along that seeks to change that balance of power.

Deception technology gives defenders a rare advantage against attackers by doing something that other forms of cybersecurity don't: Provide early and accurate detection by laying a minefield of attractive decoy systems and content to trip up attackers. This is all done within the organization's networks and serves as a high-fidelity warning system of attacks that have bypassed perimeter security controls.

Decoys are designed to catch threat activity as the adversary looks to understand the network and how to find its target. Whether through a simple scan or an attempt to download malware, once an attacker goes after a decoy, it is safe to observe what they do in a contained environment. In most cases, when an attack is detected, the right thing to do is shut the attack down right away. But with deception you have the option to watch what is happening, learn more about the nature of the attack, and better understand the way that the attackers intend to spread through your network. Once you feel you've learned enough, you can then easily shut the attack down.

In this article, I am going to summarize how deception-based cybersecurity works and provides defenders the upper hand using For a longer explanation of how deception-based systems work to enhance cybersecurity, see Attivo Networks as an example. I spoke with Carolyn Crandall, Chief Deception Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Attivo for her insights on this topic. Active Defense: How Deception Has Changed Cybersecurity and the related research mission Creating a Balanced Cybersecurity Portfolio, both published on Early Adopter Research.
What Is Deception?
Deception is the evolution of the idea of the honey pot - external sites that would attract people who had bad intentions so that they could be identified. While honey pots were often used by security researchers, it was not a popular threat detection technique for enterprises. Deception takes a new approach and moves decoys inside the network, offering more valuable insight into threats that have penetrated perimeter defenses.

Today, deception methods depend on decoy assets, fake credentials, and information that should never be accessed by anyone legitimately. If someone does access these assets, you know you have an intruder or at a minimum a policy violation that has created security risk. This detection mechanism is particularly valuable for reducing what is called dwell time, which is the length of time an attacker remains undiscovered inside the network. The current industry average has hovered at around 100 days for the last couple years and these long dwell times provide the attacker the time needed to successfully complete an attack.

Remember Katherine Zeta Jones' iconic scene in Entrapment where she weaves in and out of laser beam tripwires during a big heist? That's what deception inside a company is now like. When anyone attempts to access those internal decoys or deception credentials, the digital equivalent of a laser sensor is triggered, and you know you're under attack, where the attack is located, and what it's attempting to do. You can then respond immediately and confidently.

"With detection, there can be a tremendous amount of information accumulation, attack analysis, and correlation. Deception simplifies and automates these processes in order to make sure the attack is stopped, purged, and prevented from returning," said Crandall.
Changing the Balance of Power
Deception is also unique in that an organization can safely watch attacks unfold, using a deception sandbox to engage attackers for deeper forensics. Security analysts can observe attackers in a safe manner because the assets under attack are high interaction decoys that are designed to trick an attacker into thinking they are escalating their attack, all while actively collect forensics. With deception, you can therefore engage an attacker and then use this threat intelligence to activate countermeasures. This is perhaps the most unique aspect of deception, as it changes the balance of power between attackers and defenders, and you learn more about them than you would otherwise.

"A fundamental problem with traditional detection technologies is that they are designed to stop once they have detected an attack. Unfortunately, when you only block an attack, you don't get the opportunity to study it," said Crandall. "Yes, you stop it from coming in, but you're not learning from it. Valuable information is lost, information that can be critical to quickly eradicating the attack and preventing the attack from returning."
What Type of Activities Do Deception Systems Detect?
State of the art deception systems detect a wide variety of threats and are not reliant on known signatures, database lookups, or pattern matching:
Putting Deception Into Practice
There are a wide array of deception tactics available to enterprises. But before putting these to use, companies should understand what makes deception most effective.

Deception must be authentic: For deception to work, the decoy must seem real so you can lure the attacker in and learn about how they want to attack your system. You must be able to offer a view of reality that seems real and is attractive to the opponent. If you offer decoys or targets that seem fake, the attacker will avoid them and as such, the solution will not work. "For deception to be effective, first and foremost, it needs to be authentic," said Crandall. "Attackers are sophisticated. To fool them, deception needs to be identical to production assets and credentials. It needs to be believable enough for them to fall for it."

Deception must be comprehensive : Deception must be able to cover an ever-changing attack surface. Some vendors that provide deception-based cybersecurity only focus on one form of deception - like credentials, decoys, or data files. But it's better if you can cover all attack methods and services by putting in credentials and mapped drive objects to attract engagement and decoys in the network, in the cloud, and in specialized places like the IoT, POS, ICS, SWIFT, network and telecommunications environments.

Deception must be scalable : Deception is more efficient than other means of detecting cybersecurity threats because it is not attempting to analyze traffic or behavior or attempting database lookup, which are all prone to high false positive alerts. Instead, you're putting in decoys or bait and if those are accessed, you know there's a problem. There are no false positives. Scalability is thus not about processing power, but about designing and implementing a comprehensive and authentic set of decoys and bait that can then be put in place throughout your environment. Once those deceptions are deployed, you must then be able to automate management and refresh them periodically to maintain authenticity. Machine learning has dramatically simplified the processes of generating, deploying, and operating deception environments. Deception campaigns are now self-learned, proposals automatically created, and at a push of a button, can be globally executed.

What Are the Benefits of Using Deception?
Deception brings with it a variety of benefits for both large and mid-size enterprises. These include:

Reduction in dwell time and the mean time to detection and remediation.

High-fidelity alerts that simplify and accelerate incident response, while eliminating alert fatigue.

Through engagement, it provides deeper forensics of adversary intelligence including indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

It is also not reliant on knowing every attack vector or method and is designed to detect early reconnaissance, credential theft, and lateral movement.

If you suspect that an attack is underway, you can automatically add additional decoys around at-risk critical assets or simply reset the attack surface, upping the complexity for an adversary.

Gain visibility to device adds and changes on a network and at risk credentials so that you can mitigate risk and reduce the attack surface the attacker is targeting.

Deception-based cybersecurity technology like Attivo Networks allows companies to gain internal threat visibility where before attacker reconnaissance, lateral movement, and credential theft would often evade them. Whether it is the industry average of dwell time or the unrelenting number of breaches we see each year, it is clear that attackers can and will get inside an organization's network and a different approach is needed to get a different result. "I would say one of the biggest myths about threat deception is that this is a technology that you would want to do last, versus doing earlier on," said Crandall. "Whether you have the most sophisticated security controls or not, you need to know as quickly as possible about the threats that are inside your network and whether they can cause you harm. Being overly confident in one's perimeter defense has left all too many companies in precarious positions."

Attivo's technology implements a full stack of deception in order to achieve these benefits. It reduces dwell times of attacks by setting up decoys, traps, and bait for attackers. Its native partner integrations with a wide variety of other cybersecurity products ensure that as much information as possible can be automatically shared when an attack occurs and that traditional knowledge silos are removed. With Attivo's system, knowledge about an attack is gathered safely within its built-in sandbox and its attack visualization tools can help an organization quickly gain actionable threat intelligence. It also allows companies to learn from attacks to create automated response processes and repeatable playbooks to shut down current attacks and to prevent or detect future attacks.

The value in using deception to change the asymmetry of the attack becomes very evident when using it in conjunction with a security test, in a Red/Blue exercise or as part of a penetration test. Adding deception gives the defenders an offense-based advantage they did not have before, and a capability to reliably detect the attackers once they get inside the network. By effectively slowing down attacks, it can also be a powerful deterrent as attackers experience increased costs and are forced to restart their attacks or seek easier targets.

Ultimately, as I mentioned earlier, deception provides a way of changing the balance of power between the attacker and the defender. With deception, the defender can quickly detect the attack, learn the attacker's tactics, and create an offensive playbook of countermeasures to outsmart their adversary. Multiple Attivo customers have shared that it is their expectation that deception will become a widely deployed de facto security control over the next few years.

"It's not enough to detect alone," said Crandall. "You need to be able to take action on it, understand the attack, run the forensics on the attack, and then respond to it. Block it, quarantine, threat hunt it, build a better defense for the future. That's all part of active defense. So detect early, reduce your dwell time, and ultimately improve your time to respond and remediate."

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How Deception Technology Gives You The Upper Hand In Cybersecurity

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It is a long-held maxim in cybersecurity that the bad guys have the advantage. They only have to succeed once, but the good guys have to stop them every time. So it is always interesting and often important when a new method comes along that seeks to change that balance of power.

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How Technology Affects Human Relationships(social media today)by Bryan Kramer

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How Technology Affects Human Relationships(social media today)by Bryan Kramer

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If you're anything like me, you reach for your smartphone as soon as you wake up to check email and respond to texts. The rest of the day, you're constantly on a tablet, mobile device, laptop or desktop for personal or professional use. You're messaging, browsing, friending, tweeting and sharing.

It's great that we have the technology to connect with people across the globe instantly, but there's also a sense of disconnection. If there's an internet-capable device with a screen anywhere nearby, the immediate world doesn't get our full attention. It got me thinking about the long term impact of technology on personal interactions, so I requested some input from my Facebook followers. I asked:

"Q: What do you think? How does technology affect human relationships?"

I was amazed by the overwhelming response.

Conversations Lack Context

One poster stated a point that almost all of us have felt at one time or another: "My biggest issue with technology and relationships is the inability to detect tone. You can never really know when someone is being sarcastic, funny, not funny, serious or joking."

I can't tell you how many times I've wondered what someone meant by their words - whether on social media, in a text or via email. Unless you see the person's face, hear their voice and understand the environment, you have no idea of the context surrounding the written words. Misunderstandings, miscommunications and assumptions result, which have an impact on how we view others.

Online Contact Falls Short on Empathy

As a corollary to the context issue, there's an utter lack of empathy when using technology to interact with others. "I'm so sorry your ___ died" or "I heard you lost your job; I feel for you." Where is the compassion and solidarity with loss? It certainly does exist within the soul of the person who texted, posted or emailed this - but words alone don't necessarily convey that emotion.

Technology Fails to Deliver Essential Personal Touch

Sometimes you just need a hug, a handshake or a pat on the back. Once in awhile, I get "stickers" and "emojis" on social media. The thumbs up symbol or smiley face is cute, but it doesn't make me feel a personal connection with the poster. Do you use technology to pet your dog or cat? Not likely, because they couldn't care less. Sometimes we fail to realize that, as humans, we're also animals that need personal touch.

Tech Overload Leads to Cocooning

Technology has become an electronic addiction for some, taking them out of the physical world as they cling to the features it offers. And like many addictions, there's an impact on the number and quality of human relationships. Conversations through social media and email take the place of traditional interactions and discussions; eventually, a person doesn't even need to leave the house to communicate with others - and many people won't. The cocooning phenomenon leads to social isolation that can be crippling for some.

Online Contact Accelerates Relationships: A Case Study

"Stan" married his college sweetheart. After two months of marriage, he walked into the home office to find his wife chatting with someone on Facebook. She assured him the guy was just a friend, but Stan soon saw the person's name all over his wife's news feed and posts. Not long after, she traveled to meet the man - staying at his place. Their child was born within a year after the visit.

Stan sees that whole relationship as something that started and developed entirely online. He's convinced his ex-wife's behavior would have manifested at some point, but technology drove the two of them apart faster. Stan's new relationship started through an online dating site, but he quickly moved it into the real world. He's understandably not a fan of developing relationships through social media.

Key Takeaway

All in all, the impact of technology on human interaction paints a pretty gloomy picture. But it's a valuable discussion to have, as it teaches us the value of balancing our offline and online communications with others - personally and professionally. I guess the best approach is to make yourself available through technology only when appropriate, so that it supplements our relationships rather than replacing them.

Is this a too-dismal view of technology in human relationships? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
This post originally appeared on Bryan Kramer's blog

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How Technology Affects Human Relationships

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If you're anything like me, you reach for your smartphone as soon as you wake up to check email and respond to texts. The rest of the day, you're constantly on a tablet, mobile device, laptop or desktop for personal or professional use. You're messaging, browsing, friending, tweeting and sharing.

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"Digital technology can be harmful to your health" by Newsroom UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles)

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"Digital technology can be harmful to your health" by Newsroom UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles)

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As we hurtle with delight into a future where a wristwatch can tell us how many steps we've taken each day and a few taps on a screen can bring up a video chat with relatives several time zones away, we need to be more mindful of the costs of technology.

That was the message that UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield and health economist Anusuya Chatterjee delivered at a Zócalo/UCLA event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles on Monday night before a capacity audience.

To address the topic of the evening - "Is digital technology destroying our health?" - moderator Chad Terhune, a senior correspondent at California Healthline and Kaiser Health News, asked panel members, "All this digital technology - this explosion we've all seen in our hands - is it doing more harm than good?"

A biobehavioral scientist, Block said there are tangible benefits when people can monitor their own vital signs with such ease and take more responsibility for their own health care. But an excessive amount of screen time, especially at night, is starting to take a toll, he warned.

"Perhaps the most dramatic impact is the reduction in the amount of sleep," the chancellor said. Fifty years ago, the average adult got eight and a half hours of sleep; now we average less than seven hours a night, he explained. Bright light reduces levels of the hormone melatonin, which regulates sleep, and decreases leptin, which makes you feel full. At the same time, bright light increases ghrelin, which makes you feel hungry.

So more time with computers and phones can make us gain weight not just because we're more sedentary, but because of their effect on our sleep cycles, according to the chancellor.

Sleep "is a primitive process, but absolutely necessary," Block said.

Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology and director of the UCLA Children's Digital Media Center, was most concerned about the social costs of our obsession with digital technology. She cited a recent study conducted by her center that found that sixth graders' ability to read emotions from nonverbal cues improved significantly in just five days when they went to a camp that focused on face-to-face interactions. She also pointed to another of their studies that found that college students felt most "bonded" to their friends when they talked face to face, and most distant from them when they text-messaged. And, yet, of course, these students still most often communicated by text.

"Being able to understand the feelings of other people is extremely important to society," Greenfield said. "I think we can all see a reduction in that."

Chatterjee, a Milken Institute Fellow, didn't want to lay all the blame at the feet of technology. "I feel that actually we should rather say humans are using technology in such a way that it's affecting their health," she said. "Humans are making the choice to be so obsessed with technology."

She noted that sometimes when she is checking her email and her son says something to her, she responds with a distracted "uh-huh." And when she says something more to him, "He's replying back in the same language - 'uh-huh' - because he's looking at the iPad," she said. "Maybe that's our future. ... That's scary.

"If we are not careful about all these minor things right now, the effect in the future when this generation grows up is going to be much, much bigger," Chatterjee said.

Terhune asked what can be done to ward off these negative consequences. Is the answer just to unplug our devices?

"Part of this is may be making bedrooms safe spaces where there aren't any electronic devices ... and reinforcing the idea that most people need seven to nine hours of sleep," Block suggested. This might be good to reinforce in children so they can get started on good habits early. "It's not something to be embarrassed about, that you need sleep," he said.

Chatterjee, who lives in New York City, noted that it's hard to tell her son to stop watching the iPad, especially in the winter. "When I say, 'Stop using the computer and go play,' he says, 'Where will I go?' So I cannot tell him to unplug," she said. She's also concerned about the safety of parks and recreational facilities she might send him to. So policy makers and city leaders need to get together so parents and kids have viable alternatives to screen time, she said.

Chatterjee also noted that businesses need to do a better job of being mindful of the health of their workers when they sit for hours in front of a computer screen. People need to get up every hour from their desks and walk around, she said. "People can think you're weird, but it's helping you."

Greenfield agreed with the need for changing workplace expectations. "It used to be if you answered a letter in two weeks, you were doing fine," she said. "Now if you don't answer in a few hours, people think you're not responsive. ... You can't concentrate because the expectations are so great."

Block concurred, noting that the brain finds it hard to process two things at once. He noted that he was recently reading a book that talked about how Albert Einstein came up with his theory of general relativity. "These kinds of amazing intellectual accomplishments require full attention. ... Could we be losing the ability to have that focused concentration because we have multitasking?"

In a question-and-answer session that followed the discussion, a member of the audience wondered whether digital technology was becoming as addictive and dangerous as cigarettes.

Greenfield noted that when she published her book "Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers," in 1984, she thought an addiction to video games was crazy. "If a child wants to finish a book, nobody says, 'My child is addicted to reading,'" she said.

In the years since, however, the definitions have changed. Just check out the latest diagnostic manual from the American Psychiatric Association, she said.

"[Using] the same criteria that are used for alcohol and drugs, if you apply them to video games, there is such a thing as addiction," Greenfield said. "We could find such a thing with cell phones in the future."
This story appears on the Zócalo Public Square website. Watch a video highlighting Chancellor Block's remarks:

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Digital technology can be harmful to your health

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As we hurtle with delight into a future where a wristwatch can tell us how many steps we've taken each day and a few taps on a screen can bring up a video chat with relatives several time zones away, we need to be more mindful of the costs of technology.

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"Lost in Translation: Emotion and Expression through Technology" by Shaylyn Joy (University of Connecticut)

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"Lost in Translation: Emotion and Expression through Technology" by Shaylyn Joy (University of Connecticut)

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"5 Ways Technology Has Made Us Lazy" (Geneva Business School)

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"5 Ways Technology Has Made Us Lazy" (Geneva Business School)

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5 ways technology has made us lazy

Has technology has made us lazy, or simply relieved us of our chores?

The World Economic Forum has a lovely series entitled " What if " where a blogger will propose a thought-provoking question about the future, and our current situation (primarily where technology is involved). "What if jobs as we know them disappear?" for example, looks at how automation, artificial intelligence, and data analytics are transforming the employment landscape in ASEAN. The discussion usually explores possible, plausible, and probable impacts of new technologies on the future of society, employment, and then looks at how we should respond.

Earlier this month, the question was "What If: drugs are printed from the internet". One of the questions asked within the article was "Would you feel comfortable taking medicine downloaded from a digital prescription to a 3D printer in your home". This is a fascinating question for many reasons - a true testament to the fourth industrial revolution we're experiencing - but it paints a bleak picture of local pharmacies and drug stores becoming obsolete if this reality comes true.

We've seen technology and the entrance of eCommerce eliminate bricks and mortar stores in the past, but we don't always recognize how these innovations are making us lazy, too. We don't need to run errands anymore; we literally can press a button and have most of our first world problems solved in an instant.

5 ways technology has made us lazy

1. Delivery services on steroids - we used to spoil ourselves with an occasional delivered meal, a pizza, or Chinese food, whatever was nearest to us and delivered. Delivery services and online shopping have evolved so rapidly that realistically, we don't have to leave our homes to do "chores" anymore. We can get groceries, clothes, dinner, laundry, makeup [insert anything else you can think of here] delivered directly to our front door.

2. Ride-sharing - Once in the not-too-distant past, we couldn't use an app and expect a ride to come within moments of our inquiry. Before Cabify, Lyft and Uber, if we needed a ride, and couldn't hail a cab we would walk. Whether it was walking to a busier corner for a taxi, finding the nearest public transport hub, or walking to the actual destination, we were not groomed to stay put and have a ride come to us.

3. An influx of entertainment - We've all heard the jokes about Netflix like watching so long in a "binge session" that Netflix embarrassingly asks if we're still watching. At our fingertips, we have Netflix, Hulu, HBOgo, Apple TV, iTunes store -thousands of hours of entertainment so easily accessible that we don't need to leave our sofa to find enjoyment. No more running to Blockbuster, or Redbox, or even the movie theater.

4. Social media - It seems that texting or social media lurking on a mobile phone have become the most common form of communication for generations of digital natives. Picking up the phone to call someone seems more of an effort than many like to commit to - even voice memos have replaced a two-way conversation.

5. Asking for directions - Thanks to GPS, Google Maps, Waze, and the boatload of other navigation technologies we no longer ask anyone for directions. There is no more pulling off at a random gas stop on a road trip to see where the heck you're at. No more reading paper maps - we have a small voice inside our phone that directs us everywhere we need to be.

Do you think that saying technology is making us lazy is too harsh of an indictment? Or do you think that technology has just provided relief from the burdens of running errands or getting unnecessarily lost? What are the pros and cons of the hyper-ease we can now experience when accomplishing tasks? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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The World Economic Forum has a lovely series entitled " What if " where a blogger will propose a thought-provoking question about the future, and our current situation (primarily where technology is involved). "What if jobs as we know them disappear?" for example, looks at how automation, artificial intelligence, and data analytics are transforming the employment landscape in ASEAN.

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We live in a digital world; just short of being pixelated or virtual ourselves, the things around us continue to get smarter, faster, more connected becoming increasingly more digital. Customer relationships are digital; Business channels are digital; Our conversations are digital, and our social interactions are slowly being affected by this digital world.

With the existing of new and emerging technologies through the past decade, it is an undeniable fact that digital technologies have made a high contribution to improvements in our lives. It has made our lives easier, placing more of our daily activities to the online web and being able to communicate across long distances. For example, currently being on exchange has allowed me to connect with my family back home via FaceTime an online video application. Nevertheless, the downsides of technologies cannot be ignored; which is why I will be discussing the negative implications that the digital technology can bring into the social face-to-face interactions of our relationships today.

"A group of four laughing men sits on an edge overlooking a green valley" by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash

Last week, upon reflecting about the assignment I realized how digital technology was affecting MY personal social face-to-face interaction as instead of swinging by my friend's place 3 blocks away I just snapchated her to 'catch up' on our lives. Then, I was supposed to go to my professor's office hours, but instead I emailed him my question I had about the assignment. Later that evening, as I was walking off the bus, I saw a boy asking a girl for the time, however she was too busy scrolling through her phone to even notice he was there. All of these missed interactions in which memories could have been made if being physically together, professional connections for a potential letter of recommendation could have been possible or even just a welcoming smile to the boy that was carrying a suitcase were missed opportunities. All because of one thing: technology. Instead of engaging with one another analogously it is slowly shifting and becoming digital. With the average adult being awake for 15 hours and 45 minutes every day it is said that we spend about 45 percent of that time using a proliferation of technology.

Humans are made to form relationships since we have an innate longing to share our lives with family, friends and partners. This social interaction is important but often complex as people take in face to face communication in different ways (through tone, facial expression, words etc.). However today, instead of spending time in person with friends, we are consistently choosing to communicate via online mechanisms such as applications like Facebook, IMessage, Snapchat and Instagram. These four are only some of the new ways that offer ways of interaction and engagement allowing us to be as physically close to one another as possible in a virtual world. They do this by allowing us to send voice message, photos, videos and video call online as well as send text messages. However, the biggest difference: conversations that happen over technology lack content. You never really know when someone is being sarcastic, funny, or serious. Misunderstandings, miscommunication and assumptions impact how we view others, and happen very often when there is no face-to-face communication. While technology tries to account for this, for instance, with the emoji's, bitmoji's and giff's used in texting apps, they give the sender the ability to communicate a facial expressi on virtually. Additionally, in 2012, Snapchat came out allowing us to take pictures of ourselves, videos and type messages which allows the use of our own tone of voice and facial expressions; making it the closest digital invention to human interactions that entertains one another without physically being side by side. While this is great because technology allows people to connect across the globe instantly, there is also a sense of disconnection that comes with this. Online contact still falls short and fails to deliver personal touch despite all these advances. For example, once in a while I get "stickers" and "emojis" on social media but it doesn't make me feel a personal connection with that person. It is not the same as getting a hug.

Conversations that now happen through social media and have taken the place of traditional interactions is causing people to leave their houses less and less since they do not need to leave to communicate with others. This can lead to social isolation. Essentially, instead of spending time in person with friends, we just call, text, instant message them or send a 10 second snapchat. In some extreme cases, some people only lead lives in the virtual world in which they have even gotten married in online video games such as Second Life. Second life is a virtual world where avatars do the kind of stuff that real people do in life, however some players even choose to get married online via this game.

Moreover, using apps and social media allows one to portray an image that they want the world to see, not being true to who they really are. Not many people will post about their bad days, however there will be lots of posts online about travelling and how thankful they are and how great their life is. Technology in this way can cause relationships not only to be strained with others, but can also cause your relationship with your self to spiral downwards. Seeing what others are constantly achieving causes you to examine your life and often leaves you feeling as if you are not good enough when you are not posting on social media, or that other's lives are better than your own. In this way technology affects your relationship with yourself.

"Woman standing alone looking down at her phone" by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

These methods of connecting, although entertaining and the new way of adaption, still do not and will not incorporate all aspects of face-to-face interaction; because as most of us forget, physical face-to-face interactions is one of the most important determinants for our bodies to keeping us happy as well as for our mental health. It's something essential and irreplaceable, creating the bond between relationships that one can trust and hold on to which you cannot get by simply conversing overs social media. Continuing to interact in person allows us to focus on the other person and truly learn about whom they are. Furthermore, one should not be surprised that a human contact is proven to bring us a sense of relaxation and well being to our bodies. Not only that but face-to-face interactions build trust, find out hidden gems that one would not want to talk over social media about as well as are able to enjoy and make memories with that you can look back on.

So, next time you text a friend, why not ask them to hang out and grab a coffee instead of communicating to them through our online devices.

"Two friends drinking tea from tall mugs" by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Personal Reflection:
I started the Digital Society course not having put much thought into the implications of technology. Thinking I had a fairly general idea of what it consisted of with social media playing a role in our every day lives and cities becoming more sustainable through technology; I feel like this course introduced me to the" behind the scenes" of technology we as students don't often think of every day.

Being an exchange student from Canada, I had the opportunity to engage in courses that are not usually offered back home. Therefore, as a marketing student, seeing the course "the Digital Society" immediately appealed to me. I was drawn to the course knowing that today, the business world, yet alone marketing departments are quickly headed towards the direction of the digital world and peaked an interest on a personal level in which I hoped I could grasp a deeper understanding on what is out there. And exactly that I did.

I found myself to be continually amazed yet sometimes scared when discussing in class on topics such as the Internet, net neutrality, the Strava data incident or even at the DigiLabs when I tried out the Virtual Reality for the first time. This class has made me take a step back and look at the technology of today, how rapidly things have changed and how it has truly made such vast differences in all our lives today; good and bad. This course has helped me gain insight into the advantages and implications that come with this new era of technology. It challenged me to think critically, learn a new writing style and present a powerful idea in a limited time.

Perhaps one of the most important things the course has taught me is the understanding of all the ethical implications technology actually comes with. My thought process continued to shape my view in technology in a different way than how naïve it was before, which for that I am grateful as I gained important knowledge such as keeping my own data protected for in the future. Furthermore, a useful yet very overlooked tip I gained as well was the understanding of copyright - something Id never thought I would ever need. Since we normally get asked to write essays for our courses it was a different and more enjoyable experience to write blogs as we learn a more realistic form of writing that is becoming widely used today.

During my reflection, I realized that this course is not only served to inform us, however to make us aware of what we are surrounded by. I most enjoyed this course as it was unlike any other course I have taken in my University experience. The guest speakers coming in every week gave it a refreshing and unique outlook, gaining insights form multiple people as well as the pecha kucha's performed challenged me, knowing that one day, in the business world I will be asked to use it again.

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Technology is Affecting the Quality of Human Face-to-Face Interaction

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We live in a digital world; just short of being pixelated or virtual ourselves, the things around us continue to get smarter, faster, more connected becoming increasingly more digital. Customer relationships are digital; Business channels are digital; Our conversations are digital, and our social interactions are slowly being affected by this digital world.

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"Technology impacting parent-child relationships" by Lori Maranville

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"Technology impacting parent-child relationships" by Lori Maranville

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Dr. Jenny Radesky, developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan, studies family use of digital technology.
Could parental stress and our constant "checking in" in our digital world, cause us to "check out" in our roles as parents? Could this technology interference be causing our children to act out?

A study in the journal Pediatric Research took a closer look at this issue, surveying technology use in 183 couples with children under the age of 5, and results show some correlation.

Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the study, saw the results as significant as they showed some association between a child's externalizing behaviors (like tantrums and aggression) and technological interruptions that can get in the way of parent-child interactions throughout a typical day.

Digital interruptions

Parents involved in the study answered online questionnaires conducted between 2014 and 2016. In addition, the study considered one, three and six-month time points. As people were surveyed about how many times per day devices like a cellphone, television, computer, tablet, iPod and video game console interrupted a conversation or active engagement with their child. Parents reported that, on average, they experienced disruptions by at least two devices interrupting interactions, and that the interruptions occurred one or more times a day.

In addition, parents reported observations of internalized problems/solutions, like whining and sulking along with externalizing behaviors like temper tantrums and hyperactivity. Parents also reported on their own feelings of stress and depression.

Parent stress, child behavior and technology connection

Radesky and study author Brandon T. McDaniel, a professor at Illinois State University, concluded in their findings that "parents, stressed by their child's difficult behavior, may then withdraw from parent-child interactions with technology and this higher technology use during parent-child interactions may influence the child's externalizing and withdrawal behaviors over time."

"It can be that the child is reacting to not getting attention and they amp up their behavior to be able to get more of a parent reaction," Radesky said. "The other possibility is that they're not getting as much reciprocal play time or conversation with their parents."

Although a distinct cause and effect relationship cannot be determined from the findings, Radesky said, the results are compelling enough to warrant further study and to advise parents to be mindful of their own technology use.

Radesky, who has been researching digital use and its impact on families since about 2013, said it is hard to measure, especially with how fast mobile technology has become an integral part of daily family life. "We don't have the data yet to tell the threshold of what is too much technology use." Also, she said, the threshold is different for different people and situations.

Intentional technology use

"I'm not telling parents to put their phones down altogether," she said. "There are times when we need these devices," adding that they can be used by parents in positive ways and for meaningful interactions with their children. She advises parents to be intentional in how they use their devices, avoiding the urge to respond to every notification that's coming at them and interrupt their thought processes and the flow of activity with their kids.

As a parent of a 5 and 9-year-old, Radesky said she understands technology interference.

"What I strive for is being aware and telling my kids why I'm using my technology and being critical of the technology that's sucking me in and also helping model that I can unplug and create a time and a place for technology too."

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Technology Impacting Parent-Child Relationships | Ann Arbor Family

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Dr. Jenny Radesky, developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan, studies family use of digital technology.Could parental stress and our constant "checking in" in our digital world, cause us to "check out" in our roles as parents? Could this technology interference be causing our children to act out?

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Crispin Andrews (Engineering and Technology)

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The OECD has claimed that computers distract pupils, make them lazy thinkers and can even lower grades. Does the education industry agree?

UK schools spend £900m a year on technology, but according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), computers don't improve pupil results. Last September OECD released claims that computers distract children, make them lazy thinkers and, if used too frequently, can even lower academic standards. Its education eirector, Andreas Schleicher, says that technology has given schools too many false hopes. However, the 35,000 educators and technology buffs who turned up to the Bett show last week seemed to disagree.

Bett, formerly the British Education and Technology show, began in 1985 at the Barbican in London. As the use of technology in schools, colleges and universities grew so did the show's size, and in 2014 a record 35,044 visitors from 113 countries turned up over four days. Organisers expect to announce a similar number for this year's show, which was held at the Excel exhibition centre.

Seven hundred companies and organisations were also there exhibiting their work. That's large multinationals like Google, Apple and Microsoft, and plenty of small, one-product firms. Leading experts form education and technology gave speeches and held forums and seminars. Even the United Arab Emirates Government turned up to showcase its digital platform, which all of the country's schools are signed up to, and to recruit teachers and technology experts to go and work there.

Are computers in schools distracting pupils?

"Young people take qualifications in technology, so how can these be taken if technology is not used," says Stephen Diston, head of sciences at exam board OCR. "I suppose across the curriculum there is a danger that technology could become a distraction, but using technology in a range of contexts is exactly what young people will be doing for the rest of their working lives. So having experience of using technology in a language lab, or as a research tool in humanities, those are transferable skills that all students need. I'd be worried if the only time students saw a computer was in a computer science lesson."

Gareth James, the IET's head of education 5-19, thinks that if there is insufficient technology around young people as they grow up they will not be able to function in the modern world, because so much requires technological ability. James was at the Bett show promoting BBC: micro bit. The programmable computers allow kids to play games and design moving constructs. Prototypes have been sent out to some schools. The plan is to send one out to every Year 7 student in England and Wales.

Gaining practical technology skills

"Employers are telling us that young people are coming to them without the necessary practical technology skills for the jobs they have available," he says. "We also want young people to become effective creators of technology and using technology. How else will society be driven forward?"

So if the experts are telling us that we need more, not less, technology in schools, what exactly was the OECD going on about when they criticised the use of technology in education?

The impact of tech on test results

OECD examined the impact of school technology on test results all over the world. From these results, it found no noticeable improvements in reading, maths and science results. In some of the better performing systems, such as Shanghai in China and in South Korea, children and young people, on average, spent less than ten minutes a day online in school. In Sweden and Australia, the average was between 40 and 50 minutes a day, and yet, in both countries reading results were in decline. Spain, Denmark and Norway also had high daily Internet use but stagnating test results.

Schleicher is concerned that too much technology encourages children to look for ready made answers to enquiries, and can interfere with teacher-pupil interaction, which he thinks is necessary for young people to develop higher order thinking skills. Better basic skills help close the socio-economic achievement gap, he believes, not more access to technology.

Diston agrees that students need to be given the opportunity to develop the ability to write extended prose and that could suffer if they are typing on the computer all the time. He wonders though, that outside school, whether people actually do that much extended handwriting?

"Some people have the attitude that if information isn't there on the first three pages of Google then that information doesn't exist," he adds. "Developing research skills, using technology, how to select and utilise information to help enquiries is one of education's biggest challenges."

James believes that, far from hindering their ability to interact with each other and with adults, technology can actually help young people become more effective formal and informal communicators.

"You have to remember that young people are already innovative communicators, who can often help adults come up with new ways of connecting with the outside world," he says.

Tapping technology's potential to support learning

The OECD report shouldn't be entirely ignored, though. Look under the headlines and a more reasoned argument appears. It's not that technology is bad for children and young people, or has no positive impact on their learning; it's just that education systems haven't worked out best, how to tap that potential to support teaching and learning. Schleicher says that more thought and resource needs to go into this, and into training teachers, not just to use of technology, but to use technology towards learning goals.

"Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge," he says. "Its impact on education delivery remains sub-optimal, because we may over-estimate the digital skills of both teachers and students, because of naive policy design and implementation strategies, because of a poor understanding of pedagogy, or because of the generally poor quality of educational software and courseware."

Getting the digital agenda right

Schleicher believes that education needs to get the digital agenda right.

"Provide educators with the sort of environment in which they can help young people develop 21st Century skills. Adding 21st Century technologies to 20th Century teaching practices will just dilute the effectiveness of teaching," he says.

Diston agrees. "It always comes down to the quality of teaching and technology should be viewed as one of the resources you use in the classroom," he notes.

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The OECD has claimed that computers distract pupils, make them lazy thinkers and can even lower grades. Does the education industry agree? UK schools spend £900m a year on technology, but according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), computers don't improve pupil results.

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How Does The Use Of Social Networking Affect Family Communication Of Teenagers by Selami Ahmet Salgür (March 2016)

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How Does The Use Of Social Networking Affect Family Communication Of Teenagers by Selami Ahmet Salgür (March 2016)

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"The effect of technology on relationships" June 08,2010

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"The effect of technology on relationships" June 08,2010

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Email, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, blogs (of course), and scores of others-all part of the new and wonderful ways we can now connect with one another electronically, each with its own culture and unique set of rules. In one sense, the planet has never been more interconnected. And yet, this interconnectedness, while wonderful, hasn't come without cost.
Isolation
Much has been written about the dangers of internet addiction. From pornography to merely surfing the web, the internet is clearly the television of the 21st century, an electronic drug that often yanks us away from the physical world.

Like any addiction, the real cost, for those of us who are truly addicted, is to the number and quality of our relationships with others. We may enjoy online relationships using social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, for example, but the difference between these kinds of interactions and interactions with people in the physical world is clearly vast.

As long as we expect no more from these online relationships than they can give, no good reason exists why we can't enjoy the power of social media sites to connect us efficiently to people we'd otherwise not touch. The problem, however, comes when we find ourselves subtly substituting electronic relationships for physical ones or mistaking our electronic relationships for physical ones. We may feel we're connecting effectively with others via the internet, but too much electronic-relating paradoxically engenders a sense of social isolation.
Dangers
Making our meaning clear electronically presents extra challenges. For example, we write things like "LOL" and "LMAO" to describe our laughter, but they're no real substitute for hearing people laugh, which has real power to lift our spirits when we're feeling low.

I've also observed people using electronic media to make confrontation easier and have seen more than one relationship falter as a result. People are often uncomfortable with face-to-face confrontation, so it's easy to understand why they'd choose to use the internet. Precisely because electronic media transmit emotion so poorly compared to in-person interaction, many view it as the perfect way to send difficult messages: it blocks us from registering the negative emotional responses such messages engender, which provides us the illusion we're not really doing harm.

Unfortunately, this also usually means we don't transmit these messages with as much empathy, and often find ourselves sending a different message than we intended and breeding more confusion than we realize.

As a result, I've made it a rule of thumb to limit my email communications as much as possible to factual information only. If I need to work something out with someone that feels difficult, uncomfortable, or unpleasant, I make myself communicate in person. In-person interactions, though more difficult, are more likely to result in positive outcomes and provide opportunities for personal growth. Whenever I hear stories of romantic breakups, firings, or even arguments going on electronically, I cringe. We find ourselves tempted to communicate that way because it feels easier-but the outcome is often worse.
Etiquette
For transferring information efficiently, the internet is excellent. For transacting emotionally sensitive or satisfying connections, it's not. My wife and I joke that we use email messaging when we're sitting back-to-back in our home office, but we use it to keep a record of our schedule. When we have a conflict, we turn our chairs around and talk.

Even when we're all careful to use the internet only to exchange information, problems can still arise. People tend to delay answering emails when they don't have what they consider to be good answers or when they want to avoid whatever responsibility the email demands of them. But this is like being asked a question in person and rather than responding, "I don't know" or "I'll have to think about it," turning on your heels and walking away in silence. It's far easier to ignore an email sender's request than a request from someone made in person because an email sender's hope to get a response or frustration in not receiving one remains mostly invisible. But it's every bit as rude.

Our "emotional invisibility" on the internet perhaps also explains so much of the vitriol we see on so many websites. People clearly have a penchant for saying things in the electronic world they'd never say to people in person because the person to whom they're saying it isn't physically present to display their emotional reaction. It's as if the part of our nervous system that registers the feelings of others has been paralyzed or removed when we're communicating electronically, as if we're drunk and don't realize or don't care that our words are hurting others.

Social media websites are wonderful tools but are often abused. A few common-sense rules for the electronic world apply:

1. Don't say anything in an email you'd feel uncomfortable saying to someone in person. If it needs saying but feels awkward, do it in person. Look upon it as practice for handling confrontation maturely. Consider yourself drunk every time you get online so that you take steps to monitor yourself carefully. If you find yourself tempted to behave like a boor, step away from your keyboard (you wouldn't drive drunk, would you?).

2. Don't delay your response to messages you'd rather avoid. If someone has reached out to you, they care about your response. I'm sometimes guilty of this one myself, but I'm working on it.

3. Relationships are affected by online communication. It's much easier to injure friendships online than in person because of the ease of creating misunderstandings electronically. Non-verbal communication, after all, (argued by to some to represent up to 40% of our in-person communication) is completely absent. Be careful how you word every electronic message you send, in whatever context. Remember that every internet message you send becomes a permanent part of your brand (whether you're trying to market something or not).

4. Balance time on the internet with time spent with friends and family. It may seem too obvious to mention, but it feels qualitatively different to go out to dinner with friends than to spend several days engaged in back-and-forth email exchanges. So much communication and meaning is lost in the latter. And our effect on one another is much more intense when we meet in person. When a friend is going through a rough time, nothing substitutes for in-person communication. A gentle smile or a heartfelt hug has far more power than the cleverest emoticon to lift another person's spirits.

Conclusion
The internet is an amazing tool. But even as it's shrunk the world and brought us closer together, it's threatened to push us further apart. Like any useful tool, to make technology serve us well requires the exercise of good judgment. For whatever reason, the restraints that stop most of us from blurting out things in public we know we shouldn't seem far weaker when our mode of communication is typing. Unfortunately, typed messages often wound even more gravely, while electronic messages of remorse paradoxically have little power to heal. Perhaps we just don't think such messages have the same power to harm as when we say them in person. Perhaps in the heat of the moment, without another's physical presence to hold us back, we just don't care. Whatever the reason, it's clearly far easier for us to be meaner to one another online. Let's try not to be.
If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to explore Dr. Lickerman's website, Happiness in this World.

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The Effect of Technology on Relationships

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Technology is driving us to distraction                               By: James William (The Guardian) 

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Technology is driving us to distraction                               By: James William (The Guardian) 

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Technology is driving us to distraction | James Williams

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How often are you diverted from a task by the seductive lure of your mobile phone? And does it matter? In a landmark book, James Williams argues we're losing the power to concentrate

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"Plugged-in Parenting: How Parental Smartphones Use May Affect Kids." by Beata Mostafavi(university Of Michigan)

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"Plugged-in Parenting: How Parental Smartphones Use May Affect Kids." by Beata Mostafavi(university Of Michigan)

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Technology and Parenting: How Parental Smartphone Use May Affect Kids

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How has technology impacted parenting? Parents are more connected than ever, but plugged in parenting is leading to distracted parenting. See tips on unplugging.

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"11 Ways You Can Use Technology to Express Yourself"

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"11 Ways You Can Use Technology to Express Yourself"

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As technology becomes increasingly prevalent in the office and at home, so do worries that people are living in their own insular digital worlds. But new advances in technology are in fact freeing users from their desks, allowing them to unplug and take their gadgets out into the real world. In doing so, users are discovering innovative and exciting ways to use technology to express their personalities, style, and ideas. Here's how.

1. Use It to Share Your Ideas

Recent research shows that using technology can stimulate imagination and enhance creativity, particularly in the classroom. Social media and online platforms give people outlets for their ideas and create opportunities for collaboration, interaction, and feedback from their peers. Thanks to the Internet, students are now writing more outside the classroom and are able to share their work with a broader, more varied audience. In turn, they become more confident in not only their writing abilities, but also their ideas and opinions.

2. Create Art

New technological innovations like gesture control let artists add computers to their arsenal of art supplies. Intel® RealSense™ technology will soon make it possible for you to open an app on your laptop or tablet, create drawings in the air with your hands, and have the results appear on your screen. Channeling your inner Michelangelo has never been easier.

3. Show Off Your Unique Point of View

If your medium of choice is photography, technology can give you a boost here as well. Intel® RealSense™ snapshot uses three separate lenses to capture your photos. This depth-sensing allows you to change the focus of your photos after you take them, switch the photo's perspective, or adjust layers of color. From a single shot, you can create a series of photos to show off your individual point of view.

4. Express Your Style

Gone are the days when wearable technology meant clunky watches, industrial wristbands, and awkward glasses. Tech companies are now teaming with designers in order to create wearables that value both form and function, so you can stay connected while you display your personal style. This year, Intel launched MICA (My Intelligent Communication Accessory), a collaboration with Opening Ceremony. Crafted with luxurious finishes like 18-karat gold and sapphire glass, these smart devices (which sync your calendar, messages, notifications, and more) would look more at home in a jewelry boutique than a tech convention.

5. Be Heard at Work

In an increasingly connected world, chances are you'll have business to do with someone in another city, state, or country. With the advances being made in video chat technology, you can rock that cross-continental presentation or pitch. With immersive video chat, you can place your silhouetted image right into your presentation so you can talk your boss or client through it slide by slide and make sure all your ideas are heard.

6. Work From Wherever You Feel Inspired...

... not wherever you have an outlet. Intel-powered 2 in 1 devices have two times the battery life of older laptops, so you can foster your creativity wherever it strikes. Use your 2 in 1 to take your reading and writing out of the library and your art project out of the studio.

7. Communicate with Your Computer

It sounds like science fiction, but new technology is making it possible for you to communicate with your devices directly, without the use of a keyboard or mouse. 3D cameras embedded in your device track facial movements so your computer can actually read your emotions. Crazy, right? With a simple smile or frown, you can express your love for the game you're playing or your frustration with instructions you're reading, and your computer can adjust accordingly.

8. Your Body Can Express Its Needs

Raise your hand if you gave your parents a step counter for Christmas (or know someone who did). That's what we thought. Even while fitness trackers have reached the point of ubiquity, they continue to evolve in order to better anticipate our bodies' needs. The Basis Peak, for example, measures your activity level, monitors your heart rate, and analyzes your sleep patterns with a single device. It also gives you gentle reminders to stay active throughout the day, so your body can let you know when it's time to get moving.

9. Make Sweet Music

For those who are more aurally-inclined, technology makes it possible to express yourself through music without being a piano prodigy or vocal talent. Not only are there increasingly easy-to-use apps and programs to help you compose music of your own, but your computer's gesture control capabilities make it possible to play an instrument (or at least have the experience of playing one) without ever taking a lesson.

10. Find Your Personal Soundtrack

Innovations in headphone technology also allow you to listen to the perfect mood-setting song anytime, anywhere-with no wires or charging involved. You can even sync your headphones with a fitness tracker to stay more in tune with your body.

11. Overcome Disabilities

Technology is also making it possible for people with mental and physical disabilities to interact with their environments in ways that hadn't previously been possible. Recent studies have found that mobile technologies expand communication, social, and technical skills for those on the autism spectrum. Digital storytelling and person-centered projects encourage young people and students with autism to express their ideas and showcase their talents and ambitions.

Advances in 3D cameras are also making self-expression and communication easier for the visually impaired. For example, in their 2015 CES Keynote address, Intel unveiled a special jacket that uses tiny embedded 3D cameras to take in key sensory information from the wearer's surroundings. These allow the jacket to vibrate and alert the wearer when a person or object comes near it. This makes it easier for blind or visually impaired people to navigate their geography as well as social interactions (they can "see" when someone offers a hand for a handshake).
Whether you fancy yourself an artist, an athlete, or a fashionista, Intel® RealSense™ technology makes it possible for you to express your unique point of view while you connect with the world. Learn more here.

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11 Ways You Can Use Technology to Express Yourself

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As technology becomes increasingly prevalent in the office and at home, so do worries that people are living in their own insular digital worlds. But new advances in technology are in fact freeing users from their desks, allowing them to unplug and take their gadgets out into the real world.

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"Why Access to Screens is Lowering kids' Social Skills" by Belinda Luscombe (T

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"Why Access to Screens is Lowering kids' Social Skills" by Belinda Luscombe (T

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This Is How Technology Is Affecting Your Relationship

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This Is How Technology Is Affecting Your Relationship

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It is now an uncontested fact that technology is pervasive throughout our lives. But how often do we assess its presence in our relationships, recognizing how, exactly, it has impacted the way we interact with those closest to us?

Historically, we are going where no human has gone before, hooked up to apps offering unprecedented exposure to the innermost thoughts and actions of others, as well as new avenues to spy on our loved ones, cheat, and cover the tracks.

A 2014 Nielsen survey found that the average American spends 11 hours on social media, and more than half of that time is spent looking at a smartphone or tablet.

Technology has put our relationships in beta, redefining how we communicate our desires and trust one another. Brought to you in partnership with Paramount's Men, Women and Children, here are five unbelievable ways in which technology is changing the very fabric of our societies, revealing how little we know about the people we think we know - and how little we know ourselves.
1. Social media may literally change our genes.
The science of epigenetics has shown that our experiences may permanently, even heritably, transform our DNA. This means that things we feel, like trauma and loss, change the way future generations are wired. By this logic, can communication physically transform us?

"Disrupting technologies of communication - such as the alphabet, such as language - absolutely change the architecture of the brain," says digital scholar and techno-optimist Jason Silva, host of the Shots of Awe web series. "We are designed by that which we have designed, including language, technology, and visual media."

Today, we use applications like Instagram as "mental scaffolding" for our memories - and soon, predicts Silva, we will be able to fully immerse ourselves in the output of someone else's dreamspace without the square confines of a handheld device. For better or worse, we either use these tools to offer our vision of the world in a certain place and time, or to stupefy our audience.

Warns Silva, "You can use these fragments to reconstruct, or deconstruct, who a person is, but you shouldn't use them to pretend to know the entire person."
2. Social media accelerates our relationships.
Benjamin Painter, 32, of Dallas, lost his ex-wife to a fantasy relationship she developed over Facebook's Mafia Wars. He believes the behavior would have eventually manifested without a digital outlet.

"She started telling me that I was different, but I thought it was normal to go through life changes after graduation and marriage," says Painter, who was then a recent college grad. "[Two months into the marriage], I walked into my home office and saw a chat window open on her Facebook page on the computer. 'Who is this?' I asked her. 'Oh, it's just Johnny*,' she told me."

The name began appearing constantly in his then-wife's news feed and comments. Painter says he only stopped seeing it when his wife blocked him from seeing her Facebook account. When she asked him to move out of their shared apartment, Ben started attending therapy in hopes of healing their marriage.

Painter's wife soon traveled to Seattle, Washington (a place near the setting of the Twilight series), and stayed with Johnny during her trip. They now have a child together.

"The child is a walking, talking thing that was born out of a situation that mostly occurred in cyberspace," says Ben. "She never wanted to be uncomfortable or unhappy, and inhabited bubble worlds to sustain that. I am sure this part of her would have shown up eventually, but technology made the rift grow faster."

On the other hand, Ben met his current girlfriend of two years on OKCupid, and was immediately struck by their common language. "I asked her out quickly because I needed to get us out of the internet and into the world."
3. Online dating actually delays "IRL" meetings.
"Whatever dating site you use, you 'meet' someone and immediately start fantasizing about them, because it can be more fun than reality," says Bea Arthur, a mental health counselor and founder of Pretty Padded Room, an online therapy website. "I see people delaying meeting in person for as long as possible, although we know better."

We should know better because relationships start to become solid after about five dates, says the therapist, while the first meeting is simply an initial interaction. Expectation is the root of the most disappointment in online dating, Arthur says. Are we afraid to burst the bubble of an attractive online persona?

"People delay and accelerate the meeting up to extend or dispel the fantasy," continues Arthur. "When we are single, there's only our imagination of our next partner, but it's very difficult to actually confront the variable of another person and their effect on you, so the transition can be difficult."

Our fears and motives surrounding online dating stem from personal experience; for example, experienced daters may intuitively know to rule out a bad fit right away, while experienced, jaded daters may want to "drag out the dream a little longer."
4. Technology mobilizes the LGBT community.
Tara*, 25, a writer from New York City, waited for years to break the cultural barriers her traditional family posed around coming out about her sexual orientation. Like 43 percent of LGBT young adults, she found enough comfort in a supportive online community to do it, gradually.

"When I was first questioning myself, I made an OkCupid profile saying 'bisexual', but I hid my face because I was terrified," she says. "But I wouldn't have met my ex-girlfriend, I wouldn't have had the courage to do it if I weren't going online and looking for someone to talk to."

Remarkably, half of LGBT youth say they are truly close to a supportive person they met online, compared to just 19 percent of straight youth, and 60 percent use social networking to find or create a community of similar people. Nearly three quarters of LGBT people have engaged in civic activity online by blogging or commenting about a cause or issue.

Tara is waiting to write an identifying essay about her experience, because she is not ready to face its permanence.

"If you're gay, you don't just come out once, you're constantly coming out of the closet, but with the internet it's this thing you can't control," she says. "The internet is a great place to find community, and find comforting places, but it's permanent."
5. Technology is changing the way we mourn.
When we die, we can will our belongings to family and friends. What about the trail of data, images, and comments we imprint online every day? Do they survive us?

"One interesting way in which technology affects us is in the appearance of virtual pages dedicated to people who have died," says Christina Zampitella, a clinical psychologist and thanatologist (grief specialist). "It's an opportunity for those who loved this person to memorialize them and have a continued bond."

It works for the benefit of the community of people who survive the deceased, and is such an effective tool that Zampitella often encourages her grief patients to set up a Facebook page in the loved one's memory.

"Some parents who lose a child keep their cell phones active in order to see how their child interacted with the world, and to hear their voice messages, because you forget people's voices," she said. This is called a linking object - something that physically connects you to another person.

"It cannot be bad or harmful, unless the person is in complicated grief and avoiding the reality of a loss," she says. "Having a way of maintaining a bond to the person is very helpful. What better way of using technology?"

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This Is How Technology Is Affecting Your Relationship

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It is now an uncontested fact that technology is pervasive throughout our lives. But how often do we assess its presence in our relationships, recognizing how, exactly, it has impacted the way we interact with those closest to us?