Emerging Technologies: Theories, Futures, Provocations

Chapter One

The Purpose of these Provocations

Nicholas David Bowman

For the sake of argument, let us adopt the view that technologies are broadly understood as tools that augment or even replace established processes and procedures in the pursuit of helping us “accomplish our goals ‘better’” (Westerman et al., 2019). In doing so, we could we could even define technologies as inherently provocative. Such a position could be viewed as a softer form of technological determinism (see Chandler, 1995) that recognizes how technologies disrupt status quo—as technologies are introduced into various contexts, they challenge and displace the norms of those same contexts. In this way, technologies provoke by their very existence: they evoke strong responses (some emotional, some rational, and some a mix of both) and they compel reactions from users. Likewise, there are various models that explain how we react to, learn about, and eventually adopt various technological innovations—from Rogers’ (2003) work on the diffusion of innovations theory to unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh et al., 2013). At a sociological level, technologies are commonly met with moral panics over their presumed disruptions (Cohen, 1973), but also with ebbs and flows of enthusiasm from and disillusionment with the promises of technologies not quite met—for example, analysis firm Gartner’s hype cycles.¹ Moreover, and with few exceptions, scholars are typically far behind the emergence of technologies and thus studying them from a point of disadvantage (as will be illustrated later in this chapter, see Orben, 2020)—technological innovations follow exponential growth functions, while trajectories of scientific inquiry follow more logarithmic patterns.

Just as technologies challenge our ways of doing things in various areas of our daily lives, the same holds true for the role of emerging technologies and established scientific canon. In my own career (about 20 years if we include graduate school, as of this writing), I’ve seen the emergence of low-cost virtual reality, social robots, online video games, wearable technologies, and on-demand streaming entertainment services—each one challenging established methods and presumptions of what it meant to “go online” (from a text-prompt screen to an immersive digital world), “talk with others” (as this never quite included a machine partner), “play video games” (shifting from 16-bit game boards to persistent online worlds populated by 100s of other human players), and “choose a movie” (from a finite selection of plastic VHS tapes to a seemingly infinite and on-demand library of films stretching back to the careers of Charlie Chaplin and James Cagney). Admittedly, my futurist orientation tends to encourage embracing over resisting these shifts (although I do still hang on to so-called “retro” video games), but these shifts are not so easy to make—and they provoke compelling questions.

For communication and technology scholars, we see ongoing debate and discussion about the role technologies have played in challenging the centrality and presumed criticality of nonverbal communication in our daily interactions. Nonverbals are so central to communication that they are part and parcel of how we define the concept. As a (former and forever) Mountaineer, I borrow McCroskey and Richmond’s (1996) explication of communication as the process by which we stimulate meaning in the minds of others using both verbal and nonverbal messages. This definition is informed from decades of scholarship into nonverbal communication, from an often-repeated statistic from Mehrabian and Ferris (1967) suggesting that more than 90% of human communication was nonverbal, to scholarship into the importance of nonverbal fluency in children (Mayo & LaFrance, 1978). These studies and many others were essential to reinforcing the importance of face-to-face interactions precisely because they allowed for nonverbal content, and research into nonverbal communication continues strong into the twenty- first century (see collections from Manusov & Patterson, 2006, and Matsumoto et al., 2016).

If we rewind about 100 years from that definition, we can see communication technologies developed rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that challenged our reliance on nonverbals for all interactions. The first telephone call took place in 1876, with Alexander Graham Bell’s now famous line, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you” (Powers, 2023). Only two years later, a telephone was installed in the White House by U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, and the first telephone exchange was built in Deadwood, South Dakota (and soon followed by exchanges in Connecticut and San Francisco; Holland, 2007). Fast-forwarding a few decades, the development of early internet technologies in the 1960s facilitated the adoption of email systems and various other forms of electronic communication (Sherry & Bowman, 2008; Bowman et al., 2023), each with their own cultural and social norms and roles (Malloy, 2016) and nearly all lacking basic nonverbal information. These technologies are commonplace today and likewise, research into computer- mediated communication is an immensely robust area of scholarship—research journals such as Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and New Media & Society are among the most prestigious in media and communication scholarship (at least, as of this writing), and investments into social media scholarship are commonplace.

Also commonplace? Critiques and concerns, ranging from an inability to focus on face-to-face conversations as a result of being constantly connected (Turkle, 2011) to a fear that mediated interactions have replaced in-person engagement (Twenge, 2017); these are among a bevy of concerns that texting and messaging have unceremoniously overtaken and overpowered more proper forms of face-to-face communication. In a sense, telephones and social media were provocative because they challenged our “gold standard” of face-to-face communication likely engrained from centuries of human communication (Westerman et al., 2019). Removing nonverbals from human interactions feels awkward and insincere, because we place inherent value in physical presence and mindfulness. As such, when people disengage these mechanisms that are part of our engrained script for human-to-human interaction (Edwards et al., 2019), it feels wrong and as such, there is a readily available culprit: the disruptions driven by the technologies.²

Yet, we have roughly 150 years of experience engaging in live communication with each other, assisted by communication technologies that variably filter out myriad nonverbal cues from our conversations (see Daft & Lengel, 1984). Moreover, and as noted by LaFrance (2015) and Thompson (2016), many of the concerns over social media are remarkably similar to those same fears offered by the telephone: that we would communicate both too much and without context, and that our communications (and possibly, our psyches) would be irreparably harmed. Although few would argue the telephone did not impact human communication, few would claim that these effects have been overall undesirable—by the start of the twenty-first century, a common meme around a lack of wireless access is: “No wifi. Talk to each other. Call your mom” (emphasis added), and social commentators celebrate when phone calls are used instead of text messages (Yahoo Health, 2015). When it comes to the telephone, what was once disruptive, harmful, and gauche is now cherished, reassuring, and proper.

Orben (2020) referred to these patterns of as examples of a Sisyphean cycle of technology panics. Key in these cycles is that scholars are rarely the ones to arrange initial concerns. For example, Cohen (1973) argues that moral panics are often reflected in news media content that identifies patterns of deviance—this can be seen in newspaper headlines about telephones and social media, especially those published near the onset and early adoption of the technologies. Elson and Ferguson (2013) argue more broadly that such “panic creation” is instigated when segments of society perceive a threat. From both perspectives, and in looking at the parallels between technological panics between telephones and social media, we see a common pattern insofar as the implied threats of a new technology provoke action among political and social actors, who promise to investigate and legislate (Orben’s “political outsourcing” stage). Across several moral panic models (Cohen and Orben, for example), this is usually where scientific research gets involved. However, there are (at least) two crucial flaws with this timing. The first is that it encourages a more prescriptive form of science in which the technological threats are presumed valid and thus, these normative beliefs “substantially influence scientific research, and its results are readily used as confirmation for what has been suspected” (Elson & Ferguson, 2013, p. 32). One can see this in scholars that cite a combination of usage statistics and newspaper headlines—usually citing edge case exemplars and anecdotes—as a core justification for the science to follow. These approaches are often atheoretical, or rely on a sort of equivalence logic comparing a given technological panic to a known threat: arguments often found in scholarship on addictions that loosely borrow frameworks that “pathologize everyday human behaviors” (Aagaard, 2021, p. 559; also see Scott, 2018). The second, and one that is especially highlighted by Orben (2020), is that in our rush to address the panics raised, we often lack proper theoretical and methodological approaches necessary to study the nascent technologies. From a theoretical perspective, we might rely on existing theories of media effects that are not calibrated to understand the unique features and affordances of new technologies.³ We can see these issues in the time lags associated with studying extended reality technologies, in which technologies developed in the 1960s (augmented reality) and 1980 (virtual reality) were facing ambiguity around remarkably basic concepts, such as defining notions of interactivity and virtual reality. For example, Steuer (1992) reminded us that virtual reality had to be understood independently from a “goggles and gloves” perspective, recognizing that the technologies of the day would not always be the single modality for entering digital places. Yet even in that work, the concept of presence as an “illusion of non-mediation” inside digital worlds (Lombard & Ditton, 1997) has been consistently and contentiously debated. As recently as Rauschnabel et al. (2022), scholars are still debating both (a) the basic theory and concept of presence and (b) updating and redefining the work in the face of new technologies⁴—the included chapter by Klein and Ahn (this volume) provides a much more detailed and persuasive argument, including the provocative question: “how important is presence to extended reality, anyways?”

To connect all of this back to the example of nonverbal communication, we can see an evolution of thought from an early presumption that social skills would be eroded to updated theorizing suggesting that people can, in fact, communicate effectively in cue-lean environments. For example, social information processing theory suggested that cue-lean online communications (i.e., text based) might just require more time as users process and respond to information (Walther, 1992, 1993). Not long afterward, the hyperpersonal model of communication (Walther, 1996) argued that in some cases, a lack of nonverbals can hasten interpersonal connections, especially when communicators optimize their messages for intended effects while also idealizing each other during interactions (a theoretical position going strong into the twenty-first century) (see Walther & Whitty, 2021). Of course, even as our theorizing about cue-lean conversations eventually expanded to be more descriptive (and less prescriptive) of the underlying phenomenon, we also saw the emergence of teleconferencing systems that both replicate and do not replicate those same nonverbals (Baeilenson, 2021), and already the same nonverbal arguments are being used in the contexts of Zoom anxiety and related discussions (Degges-White, 2020). The cycle thus repeats.

We should emphatically state that there is nothing wrong with studying the potential harms of technologies. Some might even argue that at the core of (media) psychology is a recognition that humans have a complicated relationship with technologies, and Giles (2003) especially notes that psychological research tends to be problem oriented. And perhaps it should be, given that the consequences of missing a threat are too severe to be ignored. At the same time, it’s also important for us to take stock in the impetus for both the questions we are asking (of ourselves, and in our research) and our processes for answering those questions. The all-too-common cycle of technological panics brings to question how much we truly are “standing on the shoulders of giants” (to borrow an adage from Sir Isaac Newton, often leveraged as a discussion about the importance of replications to iterative and additive science; Bowman, 2023). Verdoux (2009), writing in defense of moral imperatives to critically study technological evolutions, argues that we should engage in a proper historicizing of the problems that we are studying:

Rather than a triumphant series of overcoming the problems that impede human well- being, the history of technology presents itself as a protracted succession of problem generating episodes in which previously non-existent or less serious problems are either newly introduced or reintroduced/exacerbated by technology (respectively). The first might be described as the creation of problems ex nihilo (completely novel problem creation) and the latter as the creation of problems de novo (a novel form of an old problem emerges; pp. 53–54).

All of this is to say that researchers need not wait for the next technological panic to motive scholarship into technologies. In a sense, the purpose of the provocations in this book is to disrupt cycles identified by Cohen (1973) and Orben (2020), and rather than let the technologies provoke us, we need to provoke the technologies. It is with this in mind that the volume was organized.