Can you remember life before cell phones?
A time when if you wanted to get in touch with someone, you had to leave a message, and (gasp!) wait until they returned home to call you back?
A time before digital contact lists, when you memorized your friend’s phone numbers?
A time when if you planned to meet someone at a specific time and they were late, you’d just have to hang around until they got there?
It’s hard to imagine, but just give it a try: can you remember life before you had a device with you, at all times, everywhere you go?
Today’s post is about the gadget that has wormed its way into the life of over 80% of American’s lives, and explores what it’s like to live in a world where quiet, un-connected moments are few and far between, increasingly replaced by the twitter of texts and cell phone chatter. Guest poster SCU student Chris Kelly explores this everpresent issue in his article Smartphones Distract From Reality, writing that cell phones are “changing the way we think about free time.” Chris’s article, ahead.
Read more »
What does it mean to be green?
Just ask Team California, a group of undergraduate students from Santa Clara University and California College of the Arts who were recently awarded 3rd place in The Solar Decathlon competition in Washington D.C. for their tremendous achievements in building a sustainable, solar-powered, energy-efficient home. Today’s post is written by Santa Clara student and Team California member Preet Anand, who has been working on this project along with his team for over 20 months. In it, Preet describes the technologies utilized in the award-winning Refract House, the experience of competing in The Solar Decathlon, and the message driving Team California’s success: Green living doesn’t have to be a compromise. Preet’s post, ahead.
Read more »
Did you know that with $399 and a tube of your saliva, you can find out your genetic predispositions for disease, personality traits, and what medications might work best for you? Or with $149, you can check out your genetic family heritage? How about that for less than $1,000, you will soon be able to get your entire genome mapped?
And what does this mean to you? It seems fair to say that currently, most people don’t concern themselves with their genetic profiles in their day-to-day lives. Surely we read about genetics in the media: what genes are linked with what traits, what advancements are being made in the field of medicine with the growing knowledge of genetic information. But our society certainly doesn’t conduct itself like the science-fiction movie Gattaca, where each person is branded with his or her genetic likelihoods from birth and assigned societal roles accordingly. We are generally oblivious to our own genetic profiles, and pay selective attention to findings about genes mostly when faced with a pressing health problem. For the most part, we carry on our lives with little knowledge about our own genetic makeup and what that information might tell us about ourselves.
This, however, is changing.
Read more »
Strapped for cash (or have some time to kill)?
Here’s a deal for you: If you can figure out how to control the bubble size in carbonated beverages, or can find a novel approach to protecting corn from insect damage, the website Innocentive will broker a deal where your idea could be purchased for $20,000.
Or maybe chemical compounds aren’t your thing? Head over to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk program, and make $1 for identifying in 100 pictures whether the person in the photo is male or female, or earn 5 cents for every city and country you match with the correct overseas zipcodes.
Still need more work? If you successfully pass the interview process at LiveOps.com (also known as the “contact center in the cloud”), you could soon be a call-center employee taking someone’s drive thru order from the Jack-in-the-Box from across town, simply sitting at home on your couch connected to the drive-thru module via your laptop.
Each of these is an example of Ubiquitous Human Computing, a term coined by Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain used to describe the trend to network and distribute mindpower as a fungible resource on the web.
Last Week, Zittrain came to speak about this topic at Santa Clara University in his lecture entitled “Minds For Sale”, where he dynamically discussed the myriad of issues we are faced by this new wave of the internet.
Out of the many interesting topics Zittrain covered, a few ideas stood out to me:
Read more »
“It’s not science fiction. Nowadays prospective parents cannot only know the sex of their unborn child but also learn whether it can supply tissue-matched bone marrow to a dying sibling and whether it is predisposed to develop breast cancer or Huntington’s disease — all before the embryo gets implanted into the mother’s womb.” -Esthur Landhuis
Have you heard of “designer babies”? Or perhaps you saw or read My Sister’s Keeper, a story about a young girl who was conceived through In Vitro Fertilization to be a genetically matched donor for her older sister with leukemia? The concept of selecting traits for one’s child comes from a technology called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a technique used on embryos acquired during In Vitro Fertilization to screen for genetic diseases. PGD tests embryos for genetic abnormalities, and based on the information gleaned, provides potential parents with the opportunity to select to implant only the “healthy”, non-genetically diseased embryos into the mother. But this genetic testing of the embryo also opens the door for other uses as well, including selecting whether you have a male or female child, or even the possibility of selecting specific features for the child, like eye color. Thus, many ethicists wonder about the future of the technology, and whether it will lead to babies that are “designed” by their parents.
Today’s post is an exploration of the ethical issues raised by prenatal and preimplantation genetic diagnosis, written by Santa Clara Professor Dr. Lawrence Nelson, who has been writing about and teaching bioethics for over 30 years. Read on to examine the many ethical issues raised by this technology.
Read more »
Be honest: how many other things are you doing right now?
Are you in the midst of responding to your e-mail, while casually browsing the web, scanning your friend’s most recent Facebook updates, chatting on Gchat, and mid-article on your favorite news site or blog?
Go ahead and count them: how many windows are open on your computer right now?
And what else are you doing? Are you listening to music, watching TV, or half-talking to a friend nearby? Is your cell phone within a hands reach, ready to be answered the instant you hear a text message or phone call? Or perhaps you’re even reading this on your cell phone, on your way in between classes or meetings, biding time while waiting for the next thing to require your attention?
No, this isn’t a post about Big Brother watching you; it’s about a term we all know too well: Multitasking. We have become, as writer Christine Rosen says, “mavens of multitasking,” glued to our technological gadgets, driven by our seemingly endless to-do lists of tasks. My post today asks, how have all the technologies we use – the cell phones, computers, PDAs, e-mails, and the like– accelerated the extent to which we multitask? And more importantly, what effect has it had on the way we live our lives? Read more »
“Help loving couples conceive a child! Seeking egg donors with a clear health history, GPA 3.6+ and above 1350 on SAT. Must play a musical instrument. $10,00 Compensation.”
Have you seen an ad like this in your local college newspaper? Chances are if you leaf through the classified sections of any elite university, you’ll find one just like it. The advertisements, placed by couples or agencies looking for women to donate their eggs to be used to help couples conceive through In Vitro Fertilization, appear in college classifieds across the country. They are notoriously featured at Ivy League schools, often targeting high achieving women with superior grades and test scores, offering anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 for highly qualified donors. Many call for specific qualities in their donors: “Donor ideally has artistic skills, as intended mother is a talented oil painter and piano player,” reads one.
Read more »
What happens when the pictures and content you post online for friends to see is also viewed by a potential employer?
The question has become of particular importance in recent years, where photos, profiles, and online commentary are being factored into who gets hired–and fired–in the workforce.
Close to 50% of companies report doing background checks on their candidates by searching through online content, and claim to have not hired candidates based on finding “provocative photographs,” “content about drinking or using drugs,” or even “poor communication skills” demonstrated on their online profiles. For recent college students joining the workplace, this is particularly a problem, because they often have this type of “unprofessional” content on their profiles from their time in school.
Read more »
Here’s a challenge: can you read this whole post without getting distracted? Can you resist the urge to skim each paragraph for the “gist of it”, and instead read each sentence carefully, reflecting on its meaning, even thinking about how it might apply to your life?Chances are this might take some work: if you are accustomed to reading on the web, you’ve likely also grown accustomed to the online reading style known as the “F-shaped pattern“, where when you open a webpage, you read in an F-shape quickly from left to right across the top, and then scan the middle until you get to the bottom, absorbing a few main ideas but not truly engaging with any of them. It’s a quick and easy way to catch the major points, enabling you to get an overview of everything presented, perhaps giving you the sense of comprehension. But as the research shows, it’s likely that you are absorbing very little.
And when you’re websurfing, reading for entertainment, or perusing blogs, maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re just skimming. But as the internet is increasingly the source for all our content – the news we read, the research we do for work and school, the entertainment we enjoy– we must ask the question: how is the internet changing the way we read, and the depth with which we take in information? What are the implications for society if the deep, reflective thinking associated with reading is replaced by the “web-page graze”?
Read more »
Nanotech Self-Assemblers. Genetically Engineered Offspring. Full Immersion Virtual Reality. Robots That Can Think.
It’s easy to dismiss many of these “future technologies” as the stuff of science fiction, existing only in the ‘advanced’ societies we’ve seen rendered in the movies. But Ray Kurzweil, famous futurist and author of “The Singularity Is Near,” believes we are at a precipice of a technological revolution where nanotechnology, information technology, and artificial intellegience will, over the next few decades, develop at such a fast rate that the human race will soon be faced with a fundamentally restructured way of living. He declares that we are entering into “an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today–the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.
Read more »
Advances in our understanding of the brain – and subsequently, in our understanding of how to manipulate it—are raising profound moral and ethical questions going into the 21st century. How do we evaluate our course of action in the brain sciences in a morally principled and responsible way?
In his lecture, “Autonomy and the History of American Bioethics” at Santa Clara in May 2009, Bioethicist Albert Jonsen explained that we are facing unchartered ethical territory in the field of neuroscience which previous bioethical frameworks are ill equipped to handle.
Global climate change, sustainable energy, being “green.” These are terms we hear everyday – but what do they mean, and why are they important?
Historically, ethical frameworks have rarely considered our moral obligations to “nature”– the planet was too vast and seemingly unalterable to be considered in our decision-making. Concerns for destroying the food chain, changing the climate patterns, or poisoning soil that would affect people for thousands of years to come were simply not considered because the planet seemed impervious to mankind’s actions.
But technology has changed everything. From nuclear power to genetic engineering to global warming, humans now have the ability to Read more »
In the United States, technology is deeply integrated into nearly every aspect of maintaining and treating health. What influence do these technologies have on how we diagnose, treat, and view disease? How does technology shape the way we approach and treat health overall?
It is undeniable that medical technologies have saved countless lives and contributed to great advances in medicine. But famed integrative medicine doctor Andrew Weil takes the view that medical technologies have drawbacks that are not often acknowledged. He says:
Read more »
Today, it’s hard to find a person who isn’t glued to his or her Blackberry, iPhone, iPod, or other preferred technological gadget. One recent study found that people spend an average of 8 hours staring at a screen each day. But what effect is being “plugged in” having on the way we live our lives, and how we interact with each other? What is the impact of being so wired into technology?
On The Technological Citizen, we will be exploring a variety of topics related to the impact that mainstream technologies have on our daily lives. How has the internet, e-mail, cell phones, and MP3 players impacted the way we spend our time? The way we interact with other people? How might these technologies be reshaping our attention spans, our learning styles, and the overall way we think? Have these technologies enhanced the human experience, or diminished it?
Tune into the blog to read reflections on living in the technological age.
The Technological Citizen is a forum to explore and exchange ideas about the issues that arise from modern technologies. A wide variety of topics will be explored, including the ethics of cognitive enhancement, genetic testing, and biotechnologies, as well as the way in which technology impacts our relationship with other people, the environment, and ourselves.
Postings will fall under five basic categories:
Technology and Society
Technology and The Environment
Neuroethics
Ethical Issues in Health and Biotechnology
The Future of Technology
If you are interested in seeing all the posts on one particular topic, please click on that topic heading under “Categories”.
Thanks for checking out the blog! I look forward to hearing your ideas about these topics.
