Introduction to the seeing the consequences unit

Persuasive technologies are constantly getting better at taking advantage of our vulnerabilities to keep us engaged and influence our behavior. It’s the result of a race for attention that is creating disastrous consequences for our wellbeing, democracy, and ability to solve our biggest problems.

In this unit, you’ll learn:

By understanding the harms of persuasive technology, as well as the systemic forces that influence it, we can start seeing how to build a world built on humane technology that operates for the common good.

You’ve learned how the social media technology we use every day is shaped by a race for our attention to keep us engaged and to influence our behavior. You’ve also looked at how all that leads to negative effects on our mental health.

As it turns out, these products lead to a bunch of other big problems. But before we look at those, and think about the role of technology in a better future, we have to first reflect on what a good future means to us.

When you imagine your ideal future, what do you see?

That question might bring up goals you have for your career, relationships with friends and family, or for personal growth. It may also bring up hopes you have for our world: fairness, sustainability, peace, and happiness.

What would it take to make this future a reality?

We live in a time when many societies are reckoning with massive challenges such as growing wealth inequality, catastrophic impacts of climate change, discrimination, and a global pandemic we were utterly unprepared for.

Is today’s social media technology helping or hurting that goal? To answer that, let’s first look at our personal experiences with it.

In this final unit, we’ll zoom out from our individual experiences to discuss the consequences of social media for our society as a whole. We’ll learn about the thinking behind our broader social and economic systems, which drive many of the harms we experience. Then we’ll consider how they could be improved.