Human Technogenesis: Cultural Pathways through the Information Age

The chapters in this volume demonstrate that the recent wave of innovation and adaptation to information technologies, giving rise to a new form of "human technogenesis," is fundamentally transforming our everyday interactions and potentially reconstructing the nature and process of human development. Human technogenesis is the constructive process of individual and sociocultural innovation and adaptation to the everyday interactions with information technologies, which significantly affects the developing and the developed mind. The technologically driven information economy is reshaping everyday human behavior and sociocultural environments. Yet our paradigms for understanding human development within a cultural framework are guided by traditional and dichotomous ideas about the social world (for example, individualism collectivism, egocentric sociocentric, modern traditional, Western Non Western).
As the impact of information technologies permeates all aspects of our lives, research in human development and psychology must face the digitally, connected social environments as its laboratory, filled with naturally occurring experiments, whether it is the speed at which we now communicate in the home or workplace, the far reaching access children have to a wide array of information previously unavailable, or the vicarious anonymity with which we are able to participate in each other's lives through the new media tools. This volume begins the necessary discussion on how researchers will need to recognize the technology's impact on human development in their work and practice. This is the 105th volume of the Jossey Bass quarterly report series "New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development".