Main Body
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 stemming from 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 social 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 to experience 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.
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
| Consequences | Anticipated | Unanticipated |
| Intended | Management is aware of positive, negative or perverse outcomes that will emerge from the commercialization of digital service
Management can eliminate or minimize the negative or perverse outcomes that emerge during or after commercialization because they are strategically prepared to do so. |
Management is aware of positive, negative, or perverse outcomes that will emerge from the commercialization of a digital service.
Management can eliminate or minimize the negative or perverse outcomes that merge during or after commercialization; however, it fails to do so because they are operating unethically. |
| Unintended | Management is unsure of the positive, negative, or perverse outcomes that may emerge from the commercialization of a digital service.
Management is committed to eliminating or minimizing the negative or perverse outcomes that emerge during or after commercialization because they are organizationally responsive. |
Management is unsure of the positive, negative, or perverse outcomes that may emerge from the commercialization of a digital service.
Management lacks a commitment to eliminating or minimizing the negative or perverse outcomes that emerge during or after commercialization because they are (or choose to be) blind to the problem. |
Table reproduced from Rosenbaum et al. (2021).