Unanticipated and Unintended Consequences

Overview

In the prior chapter, you saw where Facebook took action to remediate an instance where their platform was used to spread misinformation through the use of synthetic media. When Facebook was first launched in the early 2000s, do you suppose they could have anticipated this scenario would have emerged?

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, do you suppose they anticipated that its habit of “hallucinating” would have put them in a legal position to defend themselves in a defamation suit? OpenAI knew that its product was imperfect in this way, but they launched it publicly anyway.

In your final paper for the course, you will describe what kind of problem we are encountering in contemporary mediated communication systems. One of the factors you will consider is accountability: Who is responsible for the elements of the systems we have studied? What were their intended goals? Were the collateral effects of achieving those goals anticipated, unanticipated, intentional, or unintentional?

In this chapter, you will review the Law of Unintended Consequences, which isn’t really a law in the scientific or legal sense. It is a concept used in sociology studies to explain how actions often cause effects that are both anticipated and unanticipated; intended and unintended. This chapter introduces a modern interpretation of this theory within the digital technology domain.

From a historical context, we have observed a number of unintended and unanticipated outcomes of events, legislation, and technological advances:

• The American Civil War led to the expansion of baseball as a national pastime.
• The Eighteenth Amendment outlawing alcohol consumption (Prohibition) produced the rise of organized crime, social intermingling of men and women in speakeasies outside of the home, and intermingling of whites and African Americans in nightclubs leading to the popular rise of Jazz music.
• The Ford Model T allowed common Americans to access private transportation leading to men and women experiencing new forms of privacy (and sex). The modern concept of the “date” was a collateral effect of widely popular access to automobiles.
• The participation of African American soldiers in WWII to liberate Europe cultivated the mindset to liberate themselves in America through civil rights action.

From a modern perspective, we can observe a variety of effects on society as mediated communication grows and permeates our lives, exponentially.

What should you be focusing on?

Your goal this week is to apply the matrix of Unanticipated and Unintended Consequences of Digital Technologies to examples of mediated communication systems so that you can evaluate how such consequences can be addressed.

Readings & Media

    Required     “Unintended Consequences” by Rob Norton, EconLib.org, (no date) (4 pages)

This article offers a synopsis of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a theory employed in the study of economics. It describes the main points made by the sociologist Robert K. Merton in his article, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.”

This article will help you to better understand the second article, below, which builds upon this theory as it applies in the modern digital domain.

    Required     “Play, Chat, Date, Learn and Suffer” (PDF) by Rosenbaum et al., Academic Letters, August, 2021 (6 pages)

This article breaks out the four combinations of consequences into quadrants that reflect different areas of accountability.

Figure 1. (Un)Anticipated and (Un)Intended Consequences of Digital Technologies

Table reproduced from Rosenbaum et al. (2021).

    Required     Podcast excerpts related to unintended consequences of the Internet’s growth and commercialization (9 pages total)