In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

201 12 Reading in Print or Onscreen Better, Worse, or About the Same? NAOMI S. BARON American University Do Technologies Change Us? THE YEAR WAS 1968. The United States was finally gaining traction in the space race against the Soviet Union. In December, NASA launched the Apollo 8 mission that circled the moon. For the first time it was possible to see our planet from beyond a low-earth orbit. Photographs taken on that mission profoundly altered millions of people’s perceptions in ways unrelated to astronomy. The Soviet Union was no longer an abstraction on a Mercator-projected map but physically viewable as part of a single , contiguous globe. So, too, were China, India, Colombia, and South Africa. Those pictures from space offered a new sense of possibility for global engagement, which mushroomed in the following decades in such diverse forms as an explosion in international commerce, labor outsourcing, and concern about global climate change. In a similar way, with the development of information and communication technologies (ranging from telephones and artificial intelligence programs to robots and social networking sites), users of these technologies have been exposed to circumstances that may alter our perspectives on such issues as how humans interact with machines, how we relate to one another, and what it means to learn—and to know. To understand the types of potential changes we are talking about, I consider, in turn, four scenarios. The first is drawn from the work of Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turkle has written much on the attitudes of contemporary adults and children regarding relationships between real, animate objects and mechanical counterparts (Turkle 1995). Our example is drawn from her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. In November 2005 Turkle had taken her daughter Rebecca, then aged fourteen, to an exhibit on Charles Darwin at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. For the exhibition the museum had brought two giant tortoises from the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin had done some of his groundbreaking research contributing to the theory of evolution. Turkle writes, One tortoise was hidden from view; the other rested in its cage, utterly still. Rebecca inspected the visible tortoise thoughtfully for a while and then said matter-of-factly, “They could have used a robot.” . . . She said she thought it was a shame to bring a turtle all this way . . . when it was just going to sit there in the museum, doing nothing. Rebecca was both concerned for the imprisoned turtle and unmoved by its authenticity. (2011, 3) Turkle’s story highlights the contemporary question of whether the sophistication (and efficiency) of contemporary robots potentially challenges assumptions about the desirability of interacting with living beings. The second example comes from the work of media critic Howard Rheingold and involves social concerns that trace back to the late 1800s, when the telephone was introduced into private homes in the United States. Rheingold (1999) focuses his inquiry on the Pennsylvania Amish, who to this day do not allow telephones in their homes (Umble 1996). In an interview with an Amish man from Lancaster, Pennsylvania , Rheingold asked why he did not have a telephone. The man replied, What would that lead to? We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it. The larger social question, of course, is what about those of us who allow telephones not only into our homes but into our lives at large—talking with or texting someone else while sitting in a café with friends or transacting business at a bank? What kind of people do we become as we continually privilege interaction with an absent third party over conversation (or even shared silence) with the person physically before us? The third illustration concerns people’s personalities, and it comes from the work of Elias Aboujaode, a psychiatrist at the Stanford School of Medicine, specializing in obsessive-compulsive disorders. In VirtuallyYou:The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality , Aboujaoude examines the kind of people we become when we use technology —including the likes of websites, instant messaging (IM), Facebook, and Twitter: The Internet is . . . fundamentally changing us. . . . [O]ur online traits are unconsciously being imported into our offline life, so that our...

Share