It Is a Stereotype that Technology Makes People Detached from Each Other, says Professor

Can you imagine life without new technologies?

I'm old enough to remember life without them. But I don't miss it. If I would be in a position not having access to technology I would feel less comfortable. And if there would be no internet and no electricity I would feel like without water or heat. Many of the services we receive from new technologies become essential for regular day to day living.

How do new technologies change our lives in the 21st century?

If we were to fall asleep 20 years ago and wake up this morning there are large portions of our lives that we would not be able to recognize. Almost everything has changed, from how we work, how we create social connections to how we study and so far. The word I like to use is “disrupted”. Because everything has been disrupted and much more will be disrupted. Some of the changes are changes that we have no control over. Some of the changes are changes we need to take responsibility for.

Should we try to stop or at least slow the pace of the changes?

It's not a black and white question. There are some changes we should avoid and some that we should except gladly. But the truth is many negative things accompany the development of modern technology. There are some concerns about privacy and the loss of culture. The printed book is something we now recognize but our children would miss it. There are some concerns about employment because of many technologies replacing people. So yes, there are things we need to worry about. But we don't need to panic. What we should do is not allow moral panic or stereotypes to step in.

And still, in an interview for online magazine CTECH you said that you were extreme optimist about new technology and how they could make our world better. Why do you think so?

As I said, there are things we might want to just welcome and be happy that they happened. For example, you walked in here and turned the recorder on your smartphone. If we did our interview 20 years ago it would be completely different. I think if I would be given a choice to change place with my grandparents or my grandchildren I would definitely prefer to change place with my grandchild. The upcoming generation will live a longer, happier, healthier life. In large part thanks to technology. We have more opportunities to be interested and to presume our interests than the previous generation had. And yet there are challenges. I think my optimism is being supported by developments. The world is better overall – there is less hunger, less suffering, there is a better economy, more democracy. Technology makes our lives easier.

So aren't you concerned when you go for example to the restaurant and see two people looking at their smartphones instead of looking at each other?

It would be the same if they came to the restaurant and picked up a newspaper. I think this has an aspect of just being polite. Some people are not polite with their smartphones and they would not be polite with something else. But there are other aspects that we don't pay enough attention to. Among them is the fact that with smartphones people actually being social. I might be very deeply involved with my smartphone because I'm talking to my grandchild. It is not polite to you but I'm being social to someone else. The stereotype is that technology is dominated by people, it makes them detached from each other. It is important to understand that the attraction of the communication that technology labels is probably just as important and should be taken into account. Rather than creating pessimistic or fantastic conclusions about the future of using modern technology, we should focus on how to understand the new world and how to work with technology.

You are interested in a computer as a media. Can you describe more deeply what exactly you do in your work?

We all use the media – radio, television, cinema. All of those are now shoe-horning into a single device. The device becomes the window from which we consume the news, entertainment, knowledge, education and also our social connections. Society is at the beginning of a process of moving to the online environment. It is time to start asking what this means to society and how to work with this reality. And how do you research all this? Well, you need to be a programmer, you need to understand the technology.

So are you a programmer?

Oh yes. You need to understand visualization, database operation. I also need to understand psychology, sociology. The traditional disciplines were the built-in world before we had these phenomena of everything merging into one screen. Therefore I'm not interested in a particular discipline but I am interested in computers as a media and to do that you need to program, you need to think about people who are attending to this and the whole social environment.

What are you currently working on?

I'm working on quite a few projects, some of them are long term. I've been working on a big project focusing on the digital divide and difference between those who for social, economic and religious reasons don't have access to technology. And those who do look at those differences. And looking at interventions that can be made to close those gaps. I'm also looking at the design of online systems for large scale conversation. In a classroom, there might be 20 people talking. But what if we want a thousand people to talk at each other? Working on some building, some system that would allow people to talk and hear each other at the same time simultaneously has become an interesting challenge. This is useful for organizations, for decision making, for management and for learning in universities.

That seems similar to the Massive open online course you teach at Harvard.

I would describe MOOCs as the next generation of higher education. In MOOCs, there is a large scale of students attending lectures at a distance and asynchronously. However, there are some weaknesses. One of them is that MOOCs have an enormous drop-out rate. Most people who start do not complete them. And that's a problem we need to solve.

Do you know how?

I think there are several problems. One is that people are still customers to the old systems – they rather have a face to face presence because social presence plays a big role. We have not yet learned how to project social presence as well as do it in person. Another problem is that students are finding it hard to concentrate when they are alone. The traditional systems are not very good either. Students are physically in class because they force to be there but there is very little reason to believe that presence in class is any better than dropping MOOC. Also is not clean that most people who signed up MOOC classes want to complete the courses. People just want sample things, they want to try things.

You were a visiting professor at a lot of universities, even Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley. Do you have any favorite place?

I very much like coming back in Brno. This is my 5th time. I really enjoy hospitality here and your campus and its atmosphere. I have always given only individual lessons here so far, this semester I teach the whole course for the first time. The course is divided into four lectures, two were in November and two in December. So it's too early to make any conclusions about the students here. But I also like other places. If I didn't like a university, I wouldn't have visited it anymore. But most often I teach at universities in Israel.

What is your Political Culture/Clutter course at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University about?

It's actually about the topics we've discussed so far. Essentially, how the development of modern technology has changed our lives. In my lessons I try to engage students in discussions, I talk with them a lot. I also try to select the most interesting materials for reading, but I also use videos. In lectures, I discuss a total of eight topics that have changed modern technologies. It is distance and time, because in the age of the Internet people no longer need to be at the same time at the same place to make an appointment. This is also related to the overall change in how we communicate with each other. Our concept of privacy, attitude to printed books and control of our memory have also changed. We no longer need to remember things, because our devices remember them for us. Way od teaching has also changed considerably due to technology. The last topic is a change in the perception of truth. I devote the most attention to this topic in my scientific work, along with researching the transformation of communication. Fake news has been a very hot topic in recent years.

What about the censorship of the Internet, what do you think about this?

Unfortunately, freedom on the Internet takes its toll in the form of people's moral decline. Sometimes I find unacceptable comments that I would not like to see. If there were in the magic way of making censorship happen but only my side of censorship, not yours or someone else then I would probably support it. But that's not possible. And once you start to censor it gets out of hand very quickly. I would much more rather have freedom of speech with the cost of unpleasant communication. But still, if I have to decide between the life that is censored and polite or life that is not censored and where is freedom of speech, I would prefer the second.

This article is a translation of a Czech article by Denisa Marynčáková for the Atrium magazine.