Tech & Consequences: Examining technology anxiety with CBC's Mainstreet

All this week, CBC Radio's Mainstreet takes stock of the anxieties people have about digital technology, including concerns about privacy and surveillance, bullying, and porn consumption. 

Today in the series Tech & Consequences, three academics worry the way people use the internet is narrowing their intellectual horizons, instead of broadening them. Here's some of what Dean Irvine, Tim Caufield and David Deane say in interviews airing on CBC Radio 1 on Wednesday at 3:05 p.m., 4:50 p.m., and 5:40 p.m.

Dean Irvine, English professor — interview airs at 3:05 p.m. AT

"I'll be honest — I don't subscribe to what I think is a naive notion that there is some sort of public sphere which everyone has equal opportunity to have his or her voice heard. I think what we see is very much a kind of channelling of particular voices and particular opinions, come to dominate.

"What we see rather than a multiplicity of opinion is rather dramatically opposite or extremely polarizing opinions coming into a state of conflict. Those sort of moments of crisis in which we see apples and oranges arguing over a particular issue, that is what online media sources seem to seize upon. The idea of nuance or deliberated argument … that sort of thing is completely lost in an instantaneous opinionated age."

"I don't think that people are some how making a choice to be opinionated. I think that we have created technology that invites that kind of instantaneous response that tends to group itself into fairly cohesive units and groups and organizations." 

Tim Caulfied, professor and author — interview air at 4:50 p.m. AT

"We have all these cognitive biases that shape how we view the world. An interesting thing with social media and technology is that it really amplifies that cognitive bias. Because you now can use the internet to confirm all of your views, you can use your echo chamber of friends that you have curated on Twitter to create a community that agrees with you.

"As an academic, you can tweet a study and make a comment on it and then you have this fantastic community that says, 'Caulfield you got that a little bit wrong, I think this study doesn't really say that,' or 'have you seen this study.'

"So that's one of the great things I think about social media — at the same time you can create a community that will confirm what other beliefs you have, so it can work in both directions. It kind of amplifies and polarizes both of those phenomenons. Once again we have a good and a bad on social media and I think what we want to do is kind of, again, foster the good and do what we can to minimize the bad."

David Deane, theology professor — interview airs at 5:40 p.m. AT

"There is a different mode of engagement where we are mining, flicking, clicking, mining, clicking, clicking. It's always chastening to read a sermon from the premodern era. There are expectations of the congregation that no preacher today would have. There were expectations for the congregation's capacity to understand ideas and to follow along that today we simply don't have… massive, sophisticated, lengthy sermons which would just traumatize congregations today.

"Again, we forget that Shakespeare is not lofty entertainment for the elite. Shakespeare is entertainment for the people. He's pop culture. We have Honey-Boo Boo, they have Shakespeare."