One of the features, and one of the disastrous features, of modern society, is that, in our laziness, we depend upon prodders and encourage a vast system of prodding. The underlined sentence in the excerpt is an example of a :

straw man argument
hasty generalization
logical appeal

because the author
responds to an argument that has not been made
appeals to the audiances sense of logic and reason
gives no real evidence to support her claim about society