The Wiley Handbook of Psychology, Technology, and Society

Larry D. Rosen, Nancy Cheever, L. Mark Carrier, Larry D. Rosen, Nancy Cheever, L. Mark Carrier

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118772027
• eBook ISBN: 9781118772010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Edited by three of the world's leading authorities on the psychology of technology, this new handbook provides a thoughtful and evidence-driven examination of contemporary technology's impact on society and human behavior.

• Includes contributions from an international array of experts in the field
• Features comprehensive coverage of hot button issues in the psychology of technology, such as social networking, Internet addiction and dependency, Internet credibility, multitasking, impression management, and audience reactions to media
• Reaches beyond the more established study of psychology and the Internet, to include varied analysis of a range of technologies, including video games, smart phones, tablet computing, etc.
• Provides analysis of the latest research on generational differences, Internet literacy, cyberbullying, sexting, Internet and cell phone dependency, and online risky behavior

Part I
The Psychology of Technology

1
The Acute and Chronic Impact of Technology on our Brain

David A. Ziegler,¹ Jyoti Mishra¹ and Adam Gazzaley²

¹University of California, San Francisco

²Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Our modern-day environments are technologically richer than ever before. There is no better example of the pervasiveness of technology and media in our daily lives than a brief survey of the annual International Consumer Electronics Show. The 2014 event was dominated by innovations such as smartwatches, earbuds that measure heart rate (and vary your workout soundtrack accordingly), and even a navigation jacket that integrates wirelessly with mobile GPS devices. Such wearable electronics are the perfect examples of how media and technology have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. While there has been much discussion and debate over the potential positive and negative societal implications of technology (Ling, 2004; Rosen, Carrier, & Cheever, 2013), an equally important but relatively unexamined question is what effect these new technologies have on our brains.

With each new wave of technological advancement, we are faced with new streams of sensory inputs from myriad modalities that challenge our brains and require us to adapt to an ever-changing information landscape. This burgeoning set of new information brings with it novel forms of irrelevant distractions and interference, which can disrupt performance on goal-directed activities. Further, this information overload imposes greater cognitive demands on our neural systems to selectively attend to sensory inputs that are relevant to our immediate goals, while ignoring the interfering sources. Over the past decade, research in our laboratory has focused on unraveling the neural mechanisms underlying our capacity to selectively attend to goals in the face of interference (Clapp, Rubens, Sabharwal, & Gazzaley, 2011; Gazzaley et al., 2008; Gazzaley, Cooney, Rissman, & D’Esposito, 2005; Zanto, Rubens, Bollinger, & Gazzaley, 2010). In this chapter, we will review what is known about how our brains cope with technologies such as television, Internet, email, digital and social media, video games, and mobile devices, how multitasking with multiple technological devices affects neural processing, and will consider the possibilities for harnessing new technologies for personal cognitive benefit.

Usage and Attitudes Toward Technology Across the Lifespan

While an ever-increasing pool of new technologies and digital media appears to be an inevitable phenomenon, there is no clear consensus as to whether the impact of this on our brains is positive or negative. Proponents of technological innovation cite increases in productivity, flexibility, and control over how we accomplish our goals (Hill, Hawkins, Ferris, & Weitzman, 2001; Valcour & Hunter, 2005), but the majority of the existing research literature tends to focus on negative aspects of technological media innovation in our daily lives. Email and text messaging provide an instructive case in point. While they both enable flexible, immediate communication from any place, and at any time, there is increasing evidence that such forms of communication are a primary source of chronic stress in our lives (Barley, Meyerson, & Grodal, 2010), ultimately leading to increased workload and a widespread sense of overload (Boswell & Olson-Buchanan, 2007). Converging evidence suggests that the unpredictable nature of email and text messaging via mobile devices leads to a highly rewarding reinforcement schedule that engages the dopaminergic reward systems of our brains (Berridge & Robinson, 1998; Small & Vorgan, 2008). Indeed, a recent study that used an ecologically valid experience sampling method determined that the desire to use various forms of media (e.g., social networking, checking email, or surfing the web) were among the hardest urges for people to resist (Hofmann, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2012). Given that email and Internet access are inexpensive and virtually omnipresent, self-control failures in regulating one’s media consumption have the potential to escalate into pathological media abuse (LaRose, 2010; Song, LaRose, Eastin, & Lin, 2004), a condition sometimes referred to as “Internet Addiction Disorder” (Ng & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005).

Attitudes Toward Technology in Young Adults

Additional insight about how we perceive the impact of technology comes from considering how interactions with media vary among people in different age groups. Perhaps not surprisingly, tech and media usage currently tends to be highest among the “Net Generation” (Rosen, 2007) and younger generations, such as the iGeneration, who have followed (Rosen, Carrier, & Cheever, 2010), who have grown up in a rapidly evolving culture of computers, Internet, smartphones, and gaming platforms. A survey study found that high school students reported the greatest amount of media use (particularly in the realms of texting and online chat), whereas middle school students were the most frequent video game players (Rosen et al., 2013). While both media use and video gaming were somewhat lower in college students (Rosen et al., 2013), tech usage by this population is undeniably pervasive, with 73% of college students reporting that they feel unable to study effectively without some form of technology accompanying this activity (Kessler, 2011). Self-reported attitudes toward technology are overwhelmingly positive among teens and young adults, with the vast majority feeling that tech improves the quality of their lives (Rosen et al., 2013). An interesting paradox emerges, however, when such attitudes are juxtaposed against repeated observations of negative correlations between academic performance and time spent using tech and social media (Kirschner & Karpinski, 2010; Rosen et al., 2013). Other research suggests that many of the negative effects of media use stem from multitasking or task-switching costs that come as technologies compete for limited attentional and cognitive resources (Junco & Cotten, 2012; Sana, Weston, & Cepeda, 2013; Wood et al., 2012), although one study found a positive relationship between media multitasking and multisensory integration (Lui & Wong, 2012). Such complexities highlight the need for a greater understanding of how our brains deal with technology and multitasking if we are to devise effective strategies for coping with an increasingly complex landscape of consumer technology. We will address this topic in the second section of this chapter.

Concerns About Media Exposure in Children

When ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Psychology of Technology
• Part II: Children, Teens, and Technology
• Part III: Social Media
• Part IV: Multitasking
• Part V: The Media's Impact on Audiences
• Index
• End User License Agreement