Consumer Reception of New Technologies

At a subconscious ievel, many of us revere our favorite internet search engines and would be lost without them. We experience Google, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, very much like a god. We greet many other technological innovations with a similar sense of relig...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of business anthropology 2020-08, Vol.10 (1), p.49-65
Main Authors: Beik, Russell, Humayun, Mariam, Gopaldas, Ahir
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial intelligence
Consumers
Consumption
Cybernetics
Disruptive innovation
Genetically altered foods
Internet
Malware
Monsters
Religion
Robots
Search engines
Technological change
Technology
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:At a subconscious ievel, many of us revere our favorite internet search engines and would be lost without them. We experience Google, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, very much like a god. We greet many other technological innovations with a similar sense of religious awe and reverence. However, we greet other new technologies with fear and foreboding. They take on monstrous proportions in the popular imagination and media treatments. Examples include atomic energy; the internet with its hackers, ransomware, and malware; social media with its election meddling and fake news; algorithms with unintended consequences like racial discrimination; and artificial neural networks and machine learning programs that seem to defy human understanding. As these examples suggest, there is no single pattern of technology reception, and our reactions evolve with time. Eventually most new technologies are domesticated and become normal. We examine these patterns of technology reception and derive implications.
ISSN:2155-6237
2155-6237
2398-3671
DOI:10.33423/ijba.v10i1.2922