Exploring the virtues and vices of technology

A new course urges psychology students to ponder technology?s effects.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

A pioneering doctoral course at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) seeks to dislodge psychology?s devil-versus-angel views of technology in favor of a more balanced perspective.

The course, Psychological Perspectives on Technology, is the first on technology theory in CSPP?s doctoral program. In fact, it?s the first psychology graduate course of its kind countrywide, says Alan Swope, PhD, the CSPP professor who taught the course to a class of 14 students for the first time last spring semester.

The course was worth two credits and met weekly for two hours over 15 sessions. Swope plans to teach an expanded version of the course in the fall of 1999.

Highest on the list of topics covered in the course is the dearth of psychological research on technology and polarity among those psychologists who are researching its effects. Students discussed psychologists? tendency to either hail computers, cell phones and faxes for enabling speedy communication or to link them with stress, addiction and anxiety and say people need help detaching from them. In the course, Swope urged students to think more objectively about technology and to find ways people can use technology to maximize human relationships and minimize stress. He asked students to consider the choices technology has "offered and taken away from you."

By thinking through technology issues in their own lives, students will be better prepared to help their clients shape their own technology choices, says Swope. "We are a profession caught up in the pace and rhythm of a decidedly technological society, and we need to step back before promulgating solutions and treatments. We bear a responsibility as psychologists to rethink how the individual relates to these technologies."

Taming the high-tech tempo

Throughout human history, people have invented devices that boost comfort and convenience, from the wheel to television and radio, says Brian Walder, a clinical psychology doctoral student who took Swope?s course. But with the rise of the computer, "technology is changing a whole lot faster and affecting our lives more dramatically," he says. Coming from a background in film and media, and himself immersed in the aura of nearby Silicon Valley, Walder took Swope?s course to probe those effects.

"I wanted to know what it means for someone to be walking around attached to a beeper, cell phone and fax," says Walder. "A lot of people in the class thought that sort of [attachment] causes more stress than it saves."

Students had a chance to air their views on technology in a required final paper. Aside from issues of technology?s positive-versus-negative influence, their papers focused on other topics on the course syllabus, including people?s co-evolution with machines, machine delusions in psychopathology and the influence of fast-paced technology on people?s sense of self.

There?s a tendency for people to overidentify with our mechanically and technically driven environment?to forget that they?re human, says Swope. "What brought it home to me was a client of mine with anxiety problems?an 11-year-old boy who drew a picture of a computer when I asked him to draw himself," says Swope. "He was trying to squeeze himself into the technological values of speed, efficiency and power."

Some people thrive at that fast technological pace. Others can?t slow down and find it interferes with their health and relationships, he says. That can lead to alienation, an aspect of the course that fascinated another of Swope?s students, Louis Roussel. When people blur the line between technology and their physical being, they perceive human bodies as mere shells or casings, he says. Many expect friends and family members to operate with the same mechanical efficiency as their computers, says Roussel. To counteract such alienating effects, course guest-speaker Allen Kanner, PhD, advocated a practice he calls "low-tech" nights. The idea is to spend several machine-free evenings a month with family or friends. You turn off the radio and television and play board games, walk or read aloud together instead, suggests Kanner, associate faculty member at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif. "You reclaim the capacity to connect with other people without technology," he says.

Technology?s positive points

Walder doesn?t think low-tech nights would necessarily enhance human connection. Rather than considering technology a threat to human relationships, Walder views it as "another way for people to express themselves.

"People project their fears and hopes onto technology just like they do onto relationships," he says. He believes we can mold technology into a positive force with therapeutic benefits. A student of geropsychology, Walder says technology can help older adults maintain close contact with their families. They can talk daily with their children in Internet chat rooms and download pictures of their grandchildren off the World Wide Web, he says. Students in the class noted other beneficial Internet uses, such as running a web-based business for extra money or developing a web site to support students with disabilities.

Computers can also bolster people?s sense of autonomy, says Roussel. They wait to receive instructions and respond immediately to our commands, he notes. They also teach us information according to personal pace and allow us the opportunity to try new identities in various Internet role-playing games, he says.

Toward objective theory

Walder says the main message he gleaned from Swope?s course is the need for more psychological research on the impact of technology.

"That way, we can help make policy decisions about technology rather than letting all the decisions be made by businessmen and others who don?t study its effects on people," he says.

Walder?s only criticism of the course was his perception of a slight antitechnology bias. "It?s not as simple as ?Bill is evil,?" Walder says.

Defending Swope?s objectivity, though, is his CSPP colleague Phillip Cushman, PhD, who notes Swope?s call for impartial study of technology and his treatment of it as a profound historical happening. Cushman says he also teaches about technology, incorporating it into his history of psychology course. And he encourages other psychology professors to teach technology-related courses as well.

"It?s hard to develop a historical and political vision about something we?re so immersed in every day, but it?s extraordinarily important that we do," he says. Such scrutiny casts light on the invisible, he says.

"Technology affects the way we think about everything from the environment and nuclear weapons to ethnicity, working conditions and immigration," says Cushman. "It?s a cultural and historical framework that has profoundly shaped how we live and think of ourselves, our notions of right and wrong, what?s possible and impossible. It affects us in ways we can?t even begin to articulate."