Larry D. Rosen — The Wiley Handbook of Psychology Technology and Society

Автор: Larry D. Rosen
Название книги: The Wiley Handbook of Psychology Technology and Society
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Психология
Страницы: 588
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

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
In the beginning (c.1969) there was the ARPANET, which provided an interconnected
network for Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to connect
universities
that had defense department contracts and other professionals doing
government
work. Initially, only a couple of universities were online but more came
quickly. Before long ARPANET split into MILNET for military work and NSFNET
and several other government‐based networks and in a matter of less than 20 years,
the Internet was born. What followed was quite literally an explosion from connecting
over a 300‐baud‐rate modem where you placed your phone in a rubber coupler,
listened
to the beeps and buzzes, and then watched as character after character
emerged slowly on a dot matrix printer. To someone who was there it was magic.
People who had the Internet in the early 1980s were able to access ARCHIE,
GOPHER, MELVYN, and USENET and find information and people far and wide.
The communication was slow, but it was thrilling. Principal investigators working on
grants were able to connect online in an ongoing discussion. Wading through many
lines of old messages was required in order to get to the new ones, but it was amazing
to be able to leave a message for another PI and find a response a day or so later. It has
been an interesting ride from the early 1980s to current day and those nearly three
decades have seen the slow buildup of the text‐based Internet through the 1980s until
the development of the World Wide Web and Mosaic in the 1990s, which allowed us to
use a graphical environment to go far beyond the simple line‐based system that we had
just grown accustomed to in the past decade. Mosaic turned into Netscape Navigator –
which also included a simple tool to build your own website – and Navigator begat a
string of browsers, each with their own quirks and possibilities. Browsers needed a
means of finding information and so search engines were born. Search engines such as
Alta Vista and Lycos and other metasearch engines such as WebCrawler and Dogpile
provided a means to search the Internet by searching the search engines. Eventually, in
the late 1990s Google was introduced and all the other search engines that followed
provided intense competition for our eyeballs and questions.
All of what people could do online needed to be done on a rather large, by today’s
standards, desktop computer, which began with the IBM PC and Apple series until the
desire to have a computer that was portable led to laptops such as the IBM‐PC
Convertible, Apple PowerBook, and entries into the portable computing field by
Compaq, Toshiba, Commodore, and others. As demand for portability increased,
smaller and smaller “laptops” emerged including Netbooks and eventually Chromebooks.
When even smaller devices were desired, personal data assistants (PDAs) emerged on
the scene, including the early versions of the Palm Pilot and the BlackBerry, which
allowed Internet access and other functions typically done on a computer system
But that was not enough for us and when in 1999 the Japanese company NTT
DoCoMo released a “smartphone” that incorporated the qualities found in a cell
phone or mobile phone – which had been in existence for several years but did not
allow Internet access – the world changed dramatically. While the Japanese embraced
their smartphone, it was not until Research in Motion released the BlackBerry that
smartphones took off in America in the early 2000s. And took off they did! Within a
scant 10 years we have gone from a society that embraced the Internet on machines
that either resided semi‐permanently on a desk or sat somewhat uncomfortably on a
lap to a small device that nearly every person in America carries in their pocket or
purse. While cell phones – those without all the advanced features of smartphone –
were the standard until the early 2000s, the smartphone has become increasingly
more popular. According to Statista,1 a company that compiles statistics from around
the globe, 11% of the 2008 U.S. population owned a smartphone and that has
increased to 81% in 2015. eMarketer,2 a digital marketing, media, and commerce
company, estimates that there are nearly 2 billion smartphone users in the world and
that two‐fifths of all mobile phone users own a smartphone. eMarketer predicts that
by 2017, 50% of mobile phone users worldwide will be using a smartphone.
The smartphone has certainly been a game changer in our world and because so
many of us now carry a powerful Internet computer – complete with dozens of
applications that do anything from shop to play music to provide video to literally
anything you can imagine – all day long and, for many, all night long, too. The
purpose of this handbook is to provide a snapshot of how this ubiquitous online
access to information, communication, entertainment, products, and so much
more has affected us on a variety of levels. The literature on the psychology of
technology is too broad to cover in one publication, even one with 30 chapters.
Nonetheless, the chapters that follow examine the impact on all aspects of our lives
and provide, in many cases, an outlook for the future and, in others, a prescription
for maintaining mental and physical health. We have ventured around the world
to provide readers with the most up‐
to‐date research and scholarship from Australia,
Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United
States.