Social mood and technology

Society turns against technology during declining social mood. This story below is about a backlash against social networking technology and many peoples' constant use of mobile devices. The social mood perspective on the story is not that the negatives are a creation of declining social mood, it's simply that people are more likely to look at the negatives, rather than the positives, during declining social mood. Nothing has changed with the technology itself, the same negatives and positives were always there, what has changed is the mood of the people using the technology. And we have declining social mood for a reason, to balance out a period of positive social mood when the negatives were downplayed. This goes for technology, culture, politics, business, debt levels, etc.

Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US

But Turkle's book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications. "It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people," said Professor William Kist, an education expert at Kent State University, Ohio.

The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine. It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of "slacktivists". It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.

Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.

The backlash has crossed the Atlantic. In Cyburbia, published in Britain last year, James Harkin surveyed the modern technological world and found some dangerous possibilities.