IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022 - 57

Commentary
Social Influence and the Normalization
of Surveillance Capitalism: Legislation
for the Next Generation
Asimina Mertzani and Jeremy Pitt
Imperial College London, London SW7 2BT, U.K.
 Human personalities, cHaracters, and
habits are socially instructed and learned, traditionally
from others, but also with others [1]. Either
way, social influence plays a fundamental role in
human development [2], affecting individuals at
any age and from any background [3]. According
to Piaget's stages of cognitive development, in the
preoperational stage, the primary sources of such
influence are parents, teachers, and siblings, and
in subsequent stages, both peers and socially constructed
knowledge gatekeepers (i.e., schools and
newspapers) become increasingly important. In the
preoperational stage, infants demonstrate animism,
that is, they tend to assign life and feeling to nonliving
things. Consequently, they can believe that " The
Internet " is a real person and, being equally unable
to differentiate between advertising and other media
content, believe what " it " is telling them.
Even as infants progress toward adolescence
and the concrete operational stage, the impacts of
this form of social influence have a significant and
lasting effect on cognitive and social development
and these effects can be both positive and negative.
For instance, depending on the individual and their
social network, influences from peers and family can
either redirect the young individual away from negative
trajectories [4] or can equally likely direct them
toward hazardous habits and mindsets [5], [6].
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3173321
Date of current version: 14 June 2022.
June 2022
In contrast with the traditional approach that
describes social influence as a process of sources
looking for targets to influence, social influence has
two directions: there is also a process of targets looking
for sources by whom to be influenced [7]. Thus,
this second, less-well-recognized direction of social
influence is an important mechanism for individuals
to optimize knowledge processing and to learn
from/with others, but the absence of doubt and discrimination
in the young presents a vulnerability to a
source determined to manipulate and control.
Throughout the history of education, social influence
has played a significant formative role, but
recent developments in information and communication
technologies, and specifically in the fields
of networks and communication, combined with
advances in the understanding of psychology, neuroscience,
and neurobiology, have considerably
augmented the power of institutional social influencers.
Furthermore, they bypassed, to some extent,
the traditional (institutional) gatekeepers of such
influence (i.e., schools, universities, newspapers,
and so on). The extensive and uncontrollable use
of social media and technology, especially by the
young, then presents many hazards. For instance,
children are growing up being conditioned to delegate
to voice-activated virtual assistants the task of
information processing, diminishing their critical
thinking skills and reinforcing their belief in " it's
true (the Internet told me). " Given that children will
actively seek sources of influence, it is almost as if a
0278-0097/22©2022 IEEE
57
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2022
