Computer Comforts

I'm currently teaching a Computer Information Science course and as part of our work, we are thinking through and writing about how innovations in technology are transforming society. My students are more or less "traditional" college students, ranging in age from late teens to early 20s. As a core course for a number of majors, my students range from freshmen to seniors.

I'm not sure whether my students are a representative example for their age group (and we are in the same generation after all), but it seems to me that they are much more comfortable with technology and data collection than my more immediate peers (or maybe graduate students are by nature somewhat leery?).

The Amazon Echo was announced a few weeks ago, and I showed my students the product video available on Amazon. In response to this, I offered prompts in a Google Doc for my students to collaborate on in real time as an in-class low-stakes writing assignment. One of the questions I asked was a binary -- how is the Amazon Echo cool and how is it creepy? My question was perhaps influenced by the various journalists who used the same adjective to describe the Echo.

In our discussion that followed, it became clear that they did not find the product to be very creepy at all, and only added the text of "it listens to you" as an afterthought when I asked them if they thought Amazon may be engaging in covert big data marketing by recording every family conversation through Echo (I'm not sure if this is their intention, but consider the backlash around XBox One's data collection through the once-required Kinect peripheral).

Instead, as you can see above, my students are more concerned about technology dependence, which runs throughout their collective class blog. They are worried about face-to-face interaction going extinct, about the narcissism and disconnection surrounding selfies, and about not being able to remember phone numbers by heart anymore (seriously). But they also recognize the relative comfort they, and many humans, feel with technology.

One blog post by a student discussed cyber bullying and provided quite disheartening statistics that did not surprise the class. In the comments on cyber bullying, one student wrote:

"Since it is behind technology, you are not actually with the people so these bullies don't see how it affects them [the victims]."

Bullies and harassers tend to be quite comfortable with no immediate repercussions to their behavior, as also revealed in a recent survey as well as the GamerGate controversy (in response, Twitter is modifying its harassment policies). In an effort to curb cyber bullying, many of my students suggest that young teenagers shouldn't be on social media at all, and that parents should keep a closer eye on their kids (I wonder if they would feel the same way if they were 14 now).

And it is not just cyber bullies who are comfortable working with machines instead of people -- The Economist reported that studies testing Creative Technologies' virtual psychologist "Ellie" reveal that patients who believed (truthfully) that they were interacting with an artificially intelligent virtual therapist were more forthcoming with personal information than those who believed (falsely) that the avatar was a puppet being controlled by an off-site human. What is interesting to me is that each of the human subjects were aware they were participating in a study that would be monitored by fellow humans, but were still quite comfortable talking to a computer despite being recorded for analysis by people.

This last point may explain the attitudes of my students -- can they be perfectly happy thinking that it is just the computer collecting data and only some far-off humans that they do not know and do not need to interact with lefy analyzing the data? Is it because the data collection, like cyber bullying, is not giving any immediate feedback and the data that the students, as users, would be providing are only being collected by a void before it is spit out again, perhaps unbeknownst to them as a suggestion to buy product X?

Still, they may do well to read some of the long privacy policies that come along with "smart" devices, just to see how potentially terrifying they may be.