Abstract:
Integrating a theory of social change, culture, and human development with earlier theoretical work on media effects, this article explores developmental implications—social, cognitive, and neural—of the march of media through historical time and across geographical space. It draws on studies employing a variety of methods—content analysis, focus group, survey, field, lab, and fMRI experiments. While before‐after comparisons are valuable but rare, there are a number of other research designs that allow us to infer effects of the historical introduction and expansion of a particular communication technology. In this theoretical article, I first present an overview of the theory and then use it to analyze and discuss the effects of three examples of emerging technologies: mobile phones, social networking, and multimedia.
