Backslash, the cultural intelligence unit of TBWA\Worldwide, conducted a proprietary quantitative survey regarding attitudes and behaviors towards established and emerging technology devices, platforms, and services.
The sample included 4,177 respondents across eight countries (Australia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, U.K. and U.S.) representative of population by age, gender, and regional distributions. It was conducted in December 2021.
Insights from the survey and much more is covered in Backslash’s newly-released zine, titled ED\GE: Can Tech Rewrite Its Wrongs? The zine uncovers tech’s harms through the lens of privacy, health, identity, and reality, and outlines clear opportunities for businesses to get on the right side of technology’s history.
82% of people agree that technology has benefited them by saving them time or money and making them more productive, less than one-third (30%) of people say those benefits outweigh the negative consequences. At the same time, the majority (52%) of people are concerned about the direction new technology is headed.
These concerns come as technology gets more immersive and further integrated into the most personal aspects of people's lives.
Though people are coming to resent tech’s hold on them, they also realize that they can’t live without it. With increased awareness around the negative effects of technology overuse—from health issues, to social disconnect, to decreased productivity—50% of people are making a conscious effort to reduce their screen time.
When it comes to the metaverse, one of the most-hyped future technologies, people’s hopes are quite high. Fifty-three percent of people are either excited or cautiously optimistic about the possibilities it will bring. Only 11% are worried that the metaverse will make existing technology problems worse.
When asked if they would rather have certain activities take place in the physical world or the metaverse, the physical world was preferred for every scenario. There is also a clear difference in the types of activities that people are willing to do virtually.
People are most open to practical activities like banking and financial planning (22%), work meetings (19%), education (19%), and shopping (17%) taking place completely or mostly in the metaverse. On the other hand, people want more meaningful experiences like vacations (77%), happy hours (67%), funerals (67%), and dates (64%) to stay completely or mostly in the physical world.
When it comes to figuring out who is primarily responsible for maintaining digital privacy and safety, results are mixed. 42% of people say the responsibility falls on individuals and their families, 27% say governments, 25% say businesses, and 6% say nonprofits.
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