Do we reluctantly accept digital tech?
From mushroom clouds to cloud computing, what can studies of public attitudes to nuclear technology tell us about our attitudes towards digital and data?
Our relationship with data and digital technology is complicated. Everyday we rely on devices like smartphones and laptops, live more of our lives through social media, and count on a growing array of platforms and systems like Google maps, contactless payments and cloud storage servers. Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we’re consuming more entertainment online, Zooming our colleagues and praying at the altar of big tech to deliver us from this crisis.
At the same time, we are remarkably distrustful of digital technology. We feel uncomfortable with how these technologies and the companies behind them gather data about us. We’re concerned about how that data is used and monetised for profit and power. In the UK, we’re uneasy that shady tech firms are getting a little too close to our National Health Service. Yet still, we are beginning to consider that controversial data-driven technologies are increasingly necessary — and acceptable — as these extraordinary circumstances make us reassess what we’re comfortable with.
This simultaneous embracing and caution about digital technology seems peculiar, particularly because of our tendency to describe things categorically. We want to think of how we feel about tech neatly; love or hate, not ‘it’s complicated’. But oversimplifying attitudes towards technology brushes the issue under the carpet. Making sense of our messy feelings about the digital world is important because it helps us understand how to make tech trustworthy. And being able to trust tech is vital for it to be successful.
In recent months data-driven solutions have been rapidly built to tackle the pandemic and staying home has meant going online. The need to understand our relationship with digital and data is all the more urgent. To help us build that understanding we can learn from fields which have studied public attitudes to technology long before Twitter and FitBit were ever imagined. After all, digital isn’t the only type of technology which has a turbulent relationship with society.
Nuclear reactions
After the first mushroom clouds appeared in the 1940s and the first nuclear power reactors hummed in the 1950s, there came a mix of hope and fear. The newly emerging nuclear technologies offered both mass destruction and a source of seemingly limitless energy. Understandably, public perspectives about this futuristic technology oscillated between anxiety of a nuclear winter and hopes for a bright, atomic utopia.[1] In the early days of its history, nuclear power was destined to change society as we knew it — for better or worse — just as digital is destined to do now.
Then, as the technology matured across the second half of the 20th Century, our relationship with nuclear power became more unstable. Support grew as the technology offered reliable means of electricity, while resistance kindled around the environmental impact of nuclear waste and the associated threat of nuclear war. The catastrophic events at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl further fueled resistance to nuclear power around the world, and from the mid-80s to the turn of the new millennium, nuclear power had little public interest or support.[2]
But in recent years, as the climate crisis has become a popular concern and memories of meltdowns and mushroom clouds fade, governments and industry have positioned the technology as a solution to both rising carbon emissions and rising demand for energy. Public perspectives have also shifted to assume that newer forms are safer and cleaner (despite events at Fukushima [4]), and that we must rely on carbon-neutral nuclear to combat climate change.
But hesitations remain, and attitudes towards nuclear power can’t be simply described as support or oppose. Like digital, our relationship with nuclear is complicated. This mixture of attitudes towards nuclear power has been extensively researched by social scientists. In 2008, a team of researchers coined a term to describe it: ‘reluctant acceptance.’[5] The term describes the fact that many of us know nuclear isn’t perfect, far from it, but because of growing carbon emissions and our thirst for electricity, we feel we’ve no-choice but to rely on it.
But what can ‘reluctant acceptance’ tell us about perspectives towards digital tech?
Depending on digital
Society’s simultaneous reliance on and suspicion of big tech is sometimes considered as a lack of digital literacy; we don’t know or don’t care how much data is being harvested from our devices and online activity. There are often claims that attitudes towards data are divided across generations. Older people, generally, are more privacy conscious and less willing to adopt digital solutions, while younger people are too busy tweeting and TikTok-ing to care about how their data is used. This argument expands to describe a gap in skills too: young people supposedly can’t read paper maps anymore due to an over-reliance on CityMapper.
However, as well as being a wild generalisation, such claims oversimplify the complexity in our relationship with data. We aren’t divided between the old Luddites and young first-adopters, or even the digitally averse and the digitally addicted. Rather, the majority of us have a conflicted combination of attitudes and behaviours towards data.[6]
Part of the reason for this is that our physical and our digital lives are growing intertwined. Moving around a city means relying on digital systems, as does making a bank transfer or buying new furniture. Interacting with our friends and peers means using digital tools, and accessing culture means streaming it online. Now, during the COVID-19 lockdown we’re all staying home and living lives through our screens even more. To not use these digital tools is to not participate in modern society.
As we come to rely on digital technology more and more, skepticism of those technologies — and the business models and data practices underpinning them — is growing too. But it’s not that some of us are skeptics while others are evangelists. We are all a little reliant and skeptical at the same time. Most of us don’t think about data all-day long, but still question the digital world while we enjoy its benefits. Even those at the extremes have conflicting thoughts: hardcore tech evangelists tweak their privacy settings while incognito skeptics tweet their criticism. But distrust and discomfort of big data and bigger tech isn’t just an interesting side-effect of this intertwining of the digital and real. Rather, it seems a distinct echo of the ‘reluctant acceptance’ we show to nuclear power.
Reluctant acceptance describes an attitude that both recognises the benefits of technologies on which we now rely and the compromises we must make to enjoy them. This seems an apt description of common sentiment about digital technologies. Research by doteveryone has found that almost half of the people they surveyed feel they have ‘no choice’ but to sign up to digital services despite concerns. This is telling. As the way we live our lives increasingly datafies and digitises, we are forced to put aside our reservations and adopt technologies to participate in society and access the services we need.
“During the COVID-19 lockdown we’re all staying home and living lives through our screens even more. To not use these digital tools is to not participate in modern society.”
Perhaps it’s not that young people don’t care about how their data is used, but that they care more about being able to interact with their friends and consume culture which can only be found online. Perhaps it’s not that we don’t care about big tech’s shady practices, but that we see no other way to access the things we need to live our lives. Perhaps attitudes aren’t split across the supporters and the opposers, but that most people simultaneously support and oppose different aspects of the digital world.
For digital and data, such conflicting attitudes and behaviours towards tech is no paradox. It is a reluctant acceptance that our lives are digital.
I research, write and talk about tech and society. To get in touch with me about this piece or any other writing, email me: appeppin [at] gmail [dot] com, or Tweet me: @aidanpeppin
References (not linked)
[1] Boyer, P. (1994) By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture At the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University North Carolina
[2] Bauer, M.W. (2015) Atoms, bytes and genes: public resistance and techno-scientific responses. Routledge advances in sociology 126. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
[3] Goodfellow, M.J., Williams, H.R., Azapagic, A. (2011) ‘Nuclear renaissance, public perception and design criteria: An exploratory review.’ Energy Policy. 39 (10), 6199–6210.
[4] Poortinga, W., Pidgeon, N.F., Capstick, S. and Aoyagi, M. (2014) Public Attitudes to Nuclear Power and Climate Change in Britain Two Years after the Fukushima Accident. Synthesis Report. London: UKERK.
[5] Bickerstaff, K., Lorenzoni, I. Poortinga, W., Pidgeon, N.F., and Simmons, P. (2008) ‘Reframing nuclear power in the UK energy debate: nuclear power, climate change mitigation and radioactive waste.’ Public Understanding of Science. 17 (2), 145–169.
[6] Turow, Hennessey, Draper. (2015). The Tradeoff Fallacy. Annenburg School of Communication, Univrsity of Pennsylvania. https://www.asc.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/TradeoffFallacy_1.pdf
