Unit 3: Modern Technology Introductory Materials

 Unit 3:  Modern Technology & Argument Unit Introduction

Video 1: Introductory (whole class) video:
Dog Receives  Prosthetic Legs:  Youtube )

Video 2: Link to CBS News Video (June 11, 2014)

What do mobile phones do to teenage brains? 

Article #1

New York Times Opinion

Supplementary Reading

How Evil Is Tech?

By David Brooks

• Nov. 20, 2017
•  
• Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted.  Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.

  Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want to go down this road. It will be interesting to see if they can take the actions necessary to prevent their companies from becoming social pariahs.  There are three main critiques of big tech.

  
  

  The first is that it is destroying the young. Social media promises an end to loneliness but actually produces an increase in solitude and an intense awareness of social exclusion. Texting and other technologies give you more control over your social interactions but also lead to thinner interactions and less real engagement with the world.

    
• As Jean Twenge has demonstrated in book and essay, since the spread of the smartphone, teens are much less likely to hang out with friends, they are less likely to date, they are less likely to work.Eighth graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who spend less time. Eighth graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent. Teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, like making a plan for how to do it. Girls, especially hard hit, have experienced a 50 percent rise in depressive symptoms.
• 
  

  The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing this addiction on purpose, to make 

  money. Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their products with “hijacking techniques” that lure us in and create “compulsion loops.”

  Snapchat has Snapstreak, which rewards friends who snap each other every single day, thus encouraging addictive behavior. News feeds are structured as “bottomless bowls” so that one page view leads down to another and another and so on forever. Most social media sites create irregularly timed rewards; you have to check your device compulsively because you never know when a burst of social affirmation from a Facebook like may come.

  
  

  The third critique is that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are near monopolies that use their market power to invade the private lives of their users and impose unfair conditions on content creators and smaller competitors. The political assault on this front is gaining steam. The left is attacking tech companies because they are mammoth corporations; the right is attacking them because they are culturally progressive. Tech will have few defenders on the national scene.

   

  Obviously, the smart play would be for the tech industry to get out in front and clean up its own pollution. There are activists like Tristan Harris of Time Well Spent, who is trying to move the tech world in the right directions. There are even some good engineering responses. I use an app called Moment to track and control my phone usage.

  
  

  The big breakthrough will come when tech executives clearly acknowledge the central truth: Their technologies are extremely useful for the tasks and pleasures that require shallower forms of consciousness, but they often crowd out and destroy the deeper forms of consciousness people need to thrive.

  
  

  Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy. Online is a place for information but not reflection. It gives you the first stereotypical thought about a person or a situation, but it’s hard to carve out time and space for the third, 15th and 43rd thought.

  
  

  Online is a place for exploration but discourages cohesion. It grabs control of your attention and scatters it across a vast range of diverting things. But we are happiest when we have brought our lives to a point, when we have focused attention and will on one thing, wholeheartedly with all our might.

  
  

  Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that we take a break from the distractions of the world not as a rest to give us more strength to dive back in, but as the climax of living. “The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, joy and reticence,” he said. By cutting off work and technology we enter a different state of consciousness, a different dimension of time and a different atmosphere, a “mine where the spirit’s precious metal can be found.”

  
  

  ...
   Article #2  Excerpt of
  

  "Benefits of Technology & the Right Kind of Screen Time for Children" May 10, 2018 12:09 PM

  Published by ID Tech - a summer stem academy for youth.

  
  When talking about the benefits of technology for children, does being a summer tech camp make us biased?
  
  Well, I wouldn’t say biased. If anything, it makes us informed.
  
  So, let’s clear the air.
  
  Are there cons to exposing kids to technology? Of course. Like all things, there has to be a good and a bad. But remember this—the bad usually stems from abuse and extremes. Eating pizza is good. Eating a whole pizza is bad. Sleeping. Also good. Sleeping all day? Typically bad.
  
  Sure, you can make the argument that such abuse wouldn’t even be an option if the thing being abused was never introduced in the first place.
  
  But if that is indeed how you’re thinking about kids and technology, I ask you, how do you avoid it? Do you go the other extreme and keep kids from technology altogether? How could you manage?
  
  Even if you were successful in maintaining such separation, doing so would be to strip kids of fun and entertainment, and more importantly, personal growth, skill-building, and the chance to land a lucrative job down the road.
  
  So, then, we land in the middle; balancing technology and life—ensuring kids soak up all that is considered good, and shielding them from what could easily turn bad with excessive use.
  Let’s look at the good.
  
  

  Benefits of Technology for Kids

  1. Technology allows for creativity & freedom of expression

  
  Kids have big imaginations; too big to be contained. Where in the past they only had art supplies like crayons and colored markers at their disposal to get those ideas out and into a conveyable form, they now have computers, tablets, and so much more to help them turn such thoughts into reality.
  Sure, they still have pens and paper, but now, instead of - or in addition to - drawing a picture, they can create a 3D animation, and then even send that animation to a 3D printer to allow it to take on a physical form. Who knows...their creation could be the prototype to a million dollar business.
  The skills learned from interacting with technology each have an attached creative form of expression. Coding is a skill, but programming a video game or mobile app is the expression.
  

  2. Technology aids in socialization and relationship building

  
  It’s not a scare tactic by any means, but the chances of your child finding other kids to interact and bond with over technology greatly outweigh the odds of them finding other kids who don’t use or like technology.
  Video games, social media, mobile apps—these are all hobbies and interests just like sports, reading, and more. The opportunity for socialization with tech, then, is twofold.
  For one, kids can share in such interests with other kids as consumers - just like they would over baseball cards or TV shows - and two, they can also connect within the technologies, over live chat during video game sessions, or on Facebook, and elsewhere.
  
  And even beyond that, if they want to take interests to the next level and build their own video games or learn to code in a camp or class setting, that’s another opportunity to forge solid relationships, as they’ll be collaborating and learning with like-minded peers.
  You never know where early childhood STEM exposure and the resulting relationships will lead your child. With each project, they’re essentially “networking” and gaining new tech allies as they make their way through school, and then on to internships and careers. It could all stem from a friend they met at cybersecurity camp or Fortnite camp.
  
  ...
  This article is continued here: https://www.idtech.com/blog/benefits-of-technology-for-children
  

   er program.

  
  
  
   
  
   Supplementary Article #3: 
   (Advanced Reading/ Multicultural Content)
  

  As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?

  
  

  

  By Tim Wu

  February 6, 2014

  
  
  Imagine that two people are carving a six-foot slab of wood at the same time. One is using a hand-chisel, the other, a chainsaw. If you are interested in the future of that slab, whom would you watch?
  
  This chainsaw/chisel logic has led some to suggest that technological evolution is more important to humanity’s near future than biological evolution; nowadays, it is not the biological chisel but the technological chainsaw that is most quickly redefining what it means to be human. The devices we use change the way we live much faster than any contest among genes. We’re the block of wood, even if, as I wrote in January, sometimes we don’t even fully notice that we’re changing.
  
  Assuming that we really are evolving as we wear or inhabit more technological prosthetics—like ever-smarter phones, helpful glasses, and brainy cars—here’s the big question: Will that type of evolution take us in desirable directions, as we usually assume biological evolution does?
  
  Some, like the Wired founder Kevin Kelly, believe that the answer is a resounding “yes.” In his book “What Technology Wants,” Kelly writes: “Technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency; Increasing opportunity; Increasing emergence; Increasing complexity; Increasing diversity; Increasing specialization; Increasing ubiquity; Increasing freedom; Increasing mutualism; Increasing beauty; Increasing sentience; Increasing structure; Increasing evolvability.”
  
  We can test the “Increasing” theory by taking a quick trip up north, to an isolated area south of the Hudson Bay. Here live the Oji-Cree, a people, numbering about thirty thousand, who inhabit a cold and desolate land roughly the size of Germany. For much of the twentieth century, the Oji-Cree lived at a technological level that can be described as relatively simple. As nomads, they lived in tents during the summer, and in cabins during the winter. Snowshoes, dog sleds, and canoes were the main modes of transportation, used to track and kill fish, rabbits, and moose for food. A doctor who worked with the Oji-Cree in the nineteen-forties has noted the absence of mental breakdowns or substance abuse within the population, observing that “the people lived a rugged, rigorous life with plenty of exercise.” The Oji-Cree invariably impressed foreigners with their vigor and strength. Another visitor, in the nineteen-fifties, wrote of their “ingenuity, courage, and self-sacrifice,” noting that, in the North, “only those prepared to face hardship and make sacrifices could survive.”
  
  The Oji-Cree have been in contact with European settlers for centuries, but it was only in the nineteen-sixties, when trucks began making the trip north, that newer technologies like the internal combustion engine and electricity really began to reach the area. The Oji-Cree eagerly embraced these new tools. In our lingo, we might say that they went through a rapid evolution, advancing through hundreds of years of technology in just a few decades.
  The good news is that, nowadays, the Oji-Cree no longer face the threat of winter starvation, which regularly killed people in earlier times. They can more easily import and store the food they need, and they enjoy pleasures like sweets and alcohol. Life has become more comfortable. The constant labor of canoeing or snowshoeing has been eliminated by outboard engines and snowmobiles. Television made it north in the nineteen-eighties, and it has proved enormously popular.
  
  But, in the main, the Oji-Cree story is not a happy one. Since the arrival of new technologies, the population has suffered a massive increase in morbid obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. Social problems are rampant: idleness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide have reached some of the highest levels on earth. Diabetes, in particular, has become so common (affecting forty per cent of the population) that researchers think that many children, after exposure in the womb, are born with an increased predisposition to the disease. Childhood obesity is widespread, and ten-year-olds sometimes appear middle-aged. Recently, the Chief of a small Oji-Cree community estimated that half of his adult population was addicted to OxyContin or other painkillers.