Download the full report in PDF here.

Experts Say the ‘New Normal’ in 2025 Will Be Far More Tech-Driven, Presenting More Big Challenges

A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people as greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation take hold in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Still, a portion believe life will be better in a ‘tele-everything’ world where workplaces, health care and social activity improve 

BY JANNA ANDERSON, LEE RAINIE AND EMILY A. VOGELS

[. . .]

Christine Boese, a consultant and independent scholar, wrote, “Thanks to the horrors of COVID-19, as we sit in our homes and take stock of our personal economic situations, make hard decisions, suddenly what is absolutely essential becomes clear. It is a reset, and – despite the horrors – it was long, long overdue. …

“It is in difficult times when we see the seams and frayed edges of our thin veneer of civilization, the illusions of the fractured U.S. health care system and even the severe limits to much-touted electronic medical records innovations. In times like this, we don’t have to look so hard to separate technology hype from reality. We face failing infrastructure across the U.S. Other countries have systems that work, at all levels, while ours falters. Without this horrific stress test, we would not be able to see, let alone correct for, these fault lines. That thin veneer of civilization balances precariously on a consumption engine, and American culture is literally consuming itself, even as Rush Limbaugh suggests we need to adapt to this self-consumption ‘like the Donner Party did.’ As with most absurdities, it comes with its own irony: Like the Roman Empire, we make little ourselves and instead consume the cheaply produced, slavery-inducing trifles created elsewhere, as if it fills some kind of deep emptiness inside. The extremis of the COVID-19 situation glaringly exposes several things that had previously been invisible:

• The actual power of mass media, even as channels multiply and become diffuse. One channel, Fox News, has created an entire class of people who are actively putting themselves at risk of death or lifelong health problems. As someone with relatives who have fallen prey to this external programming, I can attest that no rhetoric, no persuasion, no methods currently known to me can penetrate this closed belief set. What we are living in right now makes Leni Riefenstahl look like a mere piker.
• The manipulative panoptic power of interactive social media in the hands of malevolent agents. When I began to do internet research in the 1990s, I speculated that the active and interactive power of user-directed and navigated media would lead to a more aware and awake populace, even if not fully democratized. What I did not anticipate (and I am currently studying now) is the power of dark UX patterns driven by algorithmic assumptions, whether accurate or not, and, very soon, a real Pandora’s box of AI-driven machine learning.
• How dangerously hollowed out the U.S. infrastructure is, from endemic underfunding of systems and anything that requires attention to detail below the surface to business-school ‘top-line’ summaries of a management layer that flies above anything that takes more than five minutes to scan. Newspapers and universities were hollowed out first, the agents that created and fostered critical thinkers. The gutting of public education was the third leg of that stool. Remove anything that might question the status quo, that engages in detailed work (even engineering!) or requires long-term planning. Boeing itself fell prey to something that, from the outside, looks like the Agile-ification of all work, which must, despite protestations by the manifesto’s philosophy, degenerate into surface-level patch work and the delivery of marginal improvements called ‘features.’
• Lastly, how deeply distorted the cultural fabric of American life has become, when, upon being forced to actually live in our homes for extended months on end rather than merely using them as places to sleep and consume things because our primary away-from-home activity was work, we discovered how much our homes lacked in all those ‘things’ we own that actually enrich our lives. As livelihoods were put perilously at risk, many of us came to realize what we were being expected to die for and discovered that that was as hollowed out as everything else, driven by a churn to consume as a red herring to keep us from noticing how thin our lives were becoming, even as we all, as a society at large, have consumed ourselves into larger and larger sizes.”

New Imagining the Internet report: Looking at Predictions about Digital Life 2020 from 15 years ago!

• Cited in Pew Research on Internet & Technology, “Experts Say the ‘New Normal’ in 2025 Will Be Far More Tech-driven, Presenting More Big Challenges

• Digital Life 2020: An Analysis of 2005-2011 Predictions. News release: How do past predictions about the future of digital life in 2020 stand up today? Experts reflect and look ahead to the future.

• Cited in Elon University’s New Imagining the Internet report: Looking at Predictions about Digital Life 2020 from 15 years ago!

• New York Times Week in Review WK1: Ideas & Trends: Not-So-Brave New World: Sci-Fi TV Runs Aground

• Montana Journalism Review: Ethical Issues Between Blogging and Journalism

• Chronicle of Higher Education: Digital Dissertation Dust-Up: Film clips and hyperlinks in graduate theses raise tough copyright and open-source issues

Press Release: Panel discussion on social media set Feb. 16

RELEASED: Feb. 8, 2010

EAU CLAIRE — The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is collaborating with the Western Wisconsin Press Club to host a panel discussion on social media at 7 p.m. Feb. 16. The event is open to the public and will be held in the Communication and Journalism Media Center on the first floor of Hibbard Hall on lower campus.

Panel members will be:

• UW-Eau Claire alumna Chris Boese, an information architect for the New York City-based Web consulting agency Razorfish and a former writer for CNN.
• Dr. Mike Dorsher, associate professor of journalism at UW-Eau Claire and one of the founding editors of washingtonpost.com.
• UW-Eau Claire alumna Sara Boyd, a WCCO-TV Web producer.
• Jason DeRusha, a WCCO-TV reporter and blogger, who will participate via Skype.
• UW-Eau Claire alumnus Dan Lyksett, an online editor for the Leader-Telegram. He will serve as moderator.

The discussion will focus on how social media is shaping today’s newsroom and will answer questions about how social media can be used. Panelists will talk about professional and personal boundaries and issues to be aware of when using social media tools.

Video clips on how newsrooms have used social media in the past, including CNN’s coverage of Iran, also will be featured.

The UW-Eau Claire department of communication and journalism is contributing to the support of the program.

 

By Sara Nemec

On Tuesday, Feb. 16, members of the Eau Claire Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Western Wisconsin Press Club presented a panel of experts who addressed the use of social media in print and broadcast news today.

Dr. Christine Boese, information architect and former writer for CNN, Sara Boyd, web producer and writer for WCCO, Jason DeRusha, reporter and blogger for WCCO, and Dr. Mike Dorsher, associate professor at UW-Eau Claire and one of the founding editors of The Washington Post’s website, made up the panel. The discussion was moderated by Leader-Telegram online editor Don Lyksett. The event was held in the CJ Center in Hibbard Hall, with all panelists present except DeRusha, who joined the discussion via Skype.

The SPJ president, senior Jenny You, said the organizations presented the panel discussion in hopes of educating journalism students on how professionals use social media and what guidelines to follow when using it themselves.

According to an about.com definition, social media includes “the various online technology tools that enable people to communicate easily via the internet to share information and resources. Social media can include text, audio, video, images, podcasts and other multimedia communications.”

A national survey conducted by George Washington University and Cision found that a majority of journalists routinely use social media sources when researching stories.

The online survey, conducted in the fall of 2009, found 56 percent of the 371 print and web journalists surveyed said social media was important or somewhat important for reporting and producing stories. Of those who utilize social media, 89 percent said they use blogs for their online research.

The panel discussion ranged from the pros and cons of using amateur video and other content found on social media websites, whether or not concrete guidelines for using social media could be made and how some newspapers and television stations are using social media to draw in their audience and even find sources for stories.

DeRusha said he routinely uses his Twitter account as a promotional tool to capture his audience’s interest and to learn about issues that could be newsworthy. He also said he thinks his audience likes the fact that they can contact him.

“… You show people that you’re listening to the opinions of the people out there, not just the elite,” he said.

However, Dorsher remained skeptical as to how reliable social media websites can be.

“No one knows if you’re a dog on the Internet,” Dorsher said.

Throughout the discussion, the audience members were able to pose questions to the panel. Senior Jake Johnson asked about the emergence of social media website users being cited as sources in the news.

“Suddenly we care about what anyone who has a Twitter account says,” Johnson said.

Boyd responded to Johnson’s question, saying it was a “tricky thing to balance.” She said that while social media users’ opinions should not substitute for experts’ opinions, they could still be useful to gather and report on the opinions of locals.

At the end of the event, the panelists were asked to sum up their thoughts on social media. Boese said she thought social media was helpful to journalists by “bringing in (the audience’s) voices.”

Boyd said social media, when used in a positive way, is an asset to journalists. She said it was important for journalists to find a way to not spam their users with constant messages and to use the websites wisely.

This article was originally published in a Feb. 18 issue of The Spectator. Nemec is a junior print journalism major and a news editor for The Spectator.

Tensions Between Academic and Corporate Research: Critical Directions for the Future

This roundtable examines tensions between academic and corporate approaches to Internet research.  By creating a space for a critical reflection about the future direction of academic research, this roundtable seeks to overcome the too oft-held assumption that the term critical reinforces a chasm between disinterested academic research and corporate research is instrumental and therefore suspect.  Drawing on the personal perspectives across a range of researchers employing very different perspectives, methods, scales, and contexts, but whose careers have all bridged the academic/applied gap, this roundtable seeks not consensus, but a heightened awareness of challenges facing the research agenda for scholars associated with the Association of Internet Researchers.

Panelists:

Annette N. Markham, Ph.D. Senior Development Specialist, E-Learning, Wisconsin Department of Corrections; Senior Research Fellow, Internet Research Ethics, Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

danah boyd, Microsoft Research

Holly Kruse, Assistant Professor, Communication, University of Tulsa

Christine Boese, Ph.D. Independent Researcher. Information Architect, Razorfish

John Monberg, Assistant Professor, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University

Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical is the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), an international association for students and scholars in any discipline in the field of of Internet studies,  held 7-10 October 2009, in Milwaukee, WI, USA.

Notes (not too extensive) and Works Cited from my talk at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, titled “Are Human Beings Becoming Dumb Terminals? Implications for Deep Structure Interfaces.”

(Boxes and Arrows podcast is unfortunately unavailable for Day 3 Morning Sessions due to technical difficulties)

• Montana Journalism Review: Ethical Issues Between Blogging and Journalism

• University of Minnesota: Into the Blogosphere: The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution

• ACM Hypertext 2000: Making a Successful Case for a Hypertextual Doctoral Dissertation

• The Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Electronic Chat Spaces: The Politics of Men as Other: (1999)

• First “Born Digital” dissertation to be accepted in U.S.: 1998 (as cted in Chronicle of Higher Ed: 2005)
  

Responsibilities: Wireframes (redesign already in progress when I joined the team); Site Map; Flows; Design and Structure of Wiki intranet document space; Integration of Wiki docs with RallyDev Agile Specs and Feature/Bug Tracking system; Functional Specs; Management of QA process and functional QA through launch.

Responsibilities: (Proposed UX/Creative redesign already complete when I joined the team); URL Remapping Master Document; Functional Specs for entire site (except premium content), including rules and interactions for all page/sport/community/personalization templates and modules. Sole author of about 200 pages of documentation for the proposed redesign, written in two months, April-May 2008.