Older generations might pine for the good-old-days when we weren’t tethered tightly to our digital devices. But, except for a rare few, we’ll keep using them, right?

Digital media tools help us do stuff we want to do. But, we are also learning of the costs, the losses, and the risks of our always-on tech lives.

This course uses up-to-date sources to examine the benefits and downsides of many of the technologies that have become commonplace to us such as: mobile devices and wearables, digital assistants, autonomous vehicles, social media, and augmented and virtual reality. We will also discuss topics like personal privacy, cyberbullying, and behavioral data mining, just to spice things up.

This course is for anyone who wants to thoughtfully engage in the technology world, even just our personal digital worlds, without feeling helpless or just numb to the implications. We can take more control, avoid many of the pitfalls, and make the tools serve us, rather than the other way around.

This course is part of our Bridge Builder series. The goal for this series is simple: to help students cultivate the capacity to show compassion, grow in empathy, share love with all people, and ultimately collaborate with others to provide solutions to problems in an increasingly complex world.  While this is not the case in most of our classes, the courses in this series require live attendance with video and audio capability to aid in discussion.