Amy Orben: ‘To talk about smartphones affecting the brain is a slippery slope’
The psychologist Amy Orben talks about the widespread fear that smartphones are harmful to our wellbeing – and the difficulty of proving it
Category Technology
Designing for digital well-being
Smartphone attachment is so prevalent that the fear of being without a phone has a name: nomophobia, writes Elizabeth Churchill in Interactions. What can be done to manage such unhealthy attachments?
Are smart homes undermining our sense of ‘home’?
CES indicates we're still a far way off seeing technology for the home that genuinely fosters our sense of comfort, wellbeing and community.
Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing
The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing, a multi-sited research project based at UCL Anthropology, employs a team of 11 anthropologists conducting simultaneous 16-month ethnographies in Ireland, Italy, Cameroon, Uganda, Brazil, Chile, Al-Quds, China, and Japan.
NYTimes Magazine special issue on the future of the internet
In this special issue, the New York Times Magazine has tried to see the internet and its likely future as best as they can, in the hope that - after decades as imagining it as a utopia, and then a…
User experience as legitimacy trap
The central charge to HCI is to nurture and sustain human dignity and flourishing. Why are HCI researchers and practitioners now on the wrong side of many of the problematic developments in the contemporary technology landscape?
[Report] Shaping Choices in the Digital World
This report addresses the entire digital ecosystem by giving some operational recommendations to strengthen the control and choice to which users are entitled.
[Book] Too Smart
In Too Smart, Jathan Sadowski looks at the proliferation of smart stuff in our lives and asks whether the tradeoff—exchanging our personal data for convenience and connectivity—is worth it. Who benefits from smart technology?
AI’s social sciences deficit
To create less harmful technologies and ignite positive social change, AI engineers need to enlist ideas and expertise from a broad range of social science disciplines, including those embracing qualitative methods, say Mona Sloane and Emanuel Moss in a comment…
The anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence
The algorithms that underlie much of the modern world have grown so complex that we always can’t predict what they’ll do. Iyad Rahwan, who directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, proposes…