Consumer Reception of New Technologies

Abstract

At a subconscious level, many of us revere our favorite internet search engines and would be lost without them. We experience Google, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, very much like a god. We greet many other technological innovations with a similar sense of religious awe and reverence. However, we greet other new technologies with fear and foreboding. They take on monstrous proportions in the popular imagination and media treatments. Examples include atomic energy; the internet with its hackers, ransomware, and malware; social media with its election meddling and fake news; algorithms with unintended consequences like racial discrimination; and artificial neural networks and machine learning programs that seem to defy human understanding. As these examples suggest, there is no single pattern of technology reception, and our reactions evolve with time. Eventually most new technologies are domesticated and become normal. We examine these patterns of technology reception and derive implications.