faculty

The roads net taken

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:10:55 +0000

The roads net taken Amanda J. McManus Wed, 05/28/2025 - 14:10

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

Robert Frost once wrote of two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and imagining his narrator eventually regretting whichever choice he made.

“I want to introduce a sense of wonder and marvel about what has happened—and what could still be possible.

Lori Emerson
Associate Professor
Media Studies

Lori Emerson is also fascinated by the road not taken. But unlike Frost, who is looking forward down those roads, she is looking backward, to the technology-related choices—around networks, protocols and structures—that led us to this moment.

And, especially, what we can learn from the choices we didn’t make along the way.

It’s something Emerson, an associate chair of media studies at CU Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, explores at length in Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which she published last month.

“I want to introduce a sense of wonder and marvel about what has happened—and what could still be possible,” Emerson said.

It can be difficult to imagine what something like the internet might look like in an alternate timeline. But in fact, just calling it “the internet” makes it feel like the preordained platform that we were inevitably going to get.

“The internet is just a network of networks,” she said. “There are other networks of networks, and there could be others in the future. What bothers me is this unquestioned narrative about the internet as this singular endpoint—that it only could have been created in the U.S. in the way in which it currently exists.”

A quiet activist

There is a quiet strain of activism in Emerson’s work that’s getting a little louder: She’s trying to be more outspoken at a time when technology is increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few major players.

“The future feels predetermined and has left most people feeling like they have no power to intervene, and we all just have to accept things as they are,” she said. “And so what I’m trying to do is poke holes in that ideology with very simple, compelling examples from the past.”

Simple and compelling are rarely adjectives used to describe an academic publication, but Emerson leaned on her background in experimental poetry and poetics to break a few boundaries. The result is a beautifully designed book that wouldn’t seem out of place among the vintage instruction manuals created for telephones and telegraphs from generations ago.

“Women played a huge role in the creation, adoption and maintenance of networks, from the telephone to the radio, but have been erased in favor of individual white guy inventors,” she said. “I wanted to create an alternate universe in a book that echoed that history you see in those cloth, hardcover, gold-foiled instruction books—but in a way that was feminized.”

Her book isn’t the only public-facing space where Emerson offers critical thinking around technology. CMCI’s Media Archaeology Lab started as a way for Emerson, the lab’s director, to collect Apple IIe computers in order to run an experimental kinetic digital poem in class. It has evolved to become an extremely thorough repository of obsolete, but still functioning, technology, from Ataris to Zip drives.

“The more we gathered, the more I became convinced that hands-on access to historical technology is essential to understand how it actually works,” she said. “You have to be able to use it, to take it apart. By doing so, you come to appreciate how we got to the point where these technologies were created, and imagine alternative presents and futures.”

New book, old story

The book is new, but the story of technology as a linear narrative isn’t. Beyond the lab, Emerson’s work has gone as far back as how rural communities created the party-line phone system by tapping the miles of barbed-wire fence spanning their properties. That kind of alternate network—one Ma Bell didn’t control—is something she wants readers to think about while questioning the narrative Silicon Valley has put forth as the internet’s origin story.

It’s almost a book that didn’t happen. Emerson was well past her deadline before realizing she had to narrow how deep her focus would go; “a full accounting of all the networks out there would never get finished,” she said.

As it was, the manuscript tripped some wires in China—censors objected to a part discussing how activists in the Tiananmen Square massacre used faxes to communicate with one another—which meant printing had to be moved to Turkey. As the materials arrived for printing, a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm struck, delaying production by almost a month.

Finally, her publisher declared it was going out of business after the first run of books was printed. A limited run is available, and Emerson plans to get it to a new publisher once the existing copies have sold.

“The whole thing has been one surprise after another, honestly,” Emerson said. “When you think about Chinese censorship—of course it happens, but to actually have it happen to you is something else altogether.”

She hopes readers appreciate the look and feel of her text, while maybe finding in it a reason to be hopeful about technology by re-examining its past.

“I hope people take from it a different sense of the history, and feel excited and empowered, rather than just absorbing the dominant narrative about how everything is terrible,” Emerson said.

Lori Emerson’s research work examines forks in the road where networks and technology diverged. Her new book argues technology as we know it isn’t inevitable—and should be open to reexamination.

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CMCI names its first endowed professor

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 28 May 2025 18:24:06 +0000

CMCI names its first endowed professor Amanda J. McManus Wed, 05/28/2025 - 12:24

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

She’s done pathbreaking research in technology ethics and internet law, has been featured in The Washington Post and NPR, and does extensive public scholarship as an outspoken expert on social media.

So, it’s no surprise that when it came to naming its first endowed professorship, the College of Media, Communication and Information turned to Casey Fiesler.

“When we created CMCI, we were energized by the vision of a college where we would study and teach not just a set of related disciplines, but the areas where those disciplines come together,” said Lori Bergen, CMCI founding dean. “Casey is a model for that. Her ethical and legal perspectives on important questions surrounding technology help us make sense of complex problems. And she is able to break down those complicated problems in ways that help the public ask more thoughtful questions about the platforms and tools they use each day.”

More: Building a better ‘bionic pancreas’

In July, Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at CMCI, will be named the William R. Payden Endowed Professor. The honor recognizes the demonstrated, sustained national reputation she has brought to her discipline, and comes with an annual research budget to continue her important work in social media platforms and online communities, education, and generative A.I.—especially from an ethics standpoint.

“She is able to break down those complicated problems in ways that help the public ask more thoughtful questions about the platforms and tools they use each day.”

Lori Bergen, founding dean

In fact, she’s created a public syllabus—consisting of her social media videos and select texts and other websites—to help others start thinking about the ethics of A.I. It’s still in beta, so to speak, but has attracted attention, including from teachers searching for relatable, approachable perspectives on these complex issues.

“Considering how much admiration and respect I have for everyone in the college, I’m beyond honored to be recognized,” Fiesler said.

The position comes with a small stipend, which Fiesler was interested in using to attract well-known speakers for guest talks—to expose students to great researchers—and to be able to pay student researchers for their contributions to her work, such as a grant-funded pilot project to create educational content on A.I. that’s delivered over social media.

“If that goes well, I’d like to be able to keep it going beyond the grant,” she said. “And if we were to do so, it would be important to make sure we’re fairly compensating our students for the work they do.”

Fiesler said she also attributes the successes of her research to collaborative work, particularly with the graduate students she’s worked with at the college. One of her former students, Shamika Klassen (PhDInfoSci’24), said having Fiesler for an advisor during her doctoral work “was like having a celebrity for a parent.”

“When I mention her name, people would say, ‘Oh, Professor Casey on TikTok,’ or ‘I watched her videos on YouTube when I was applying to graduate school,” said Klassen, now a user experience researcher at Google. “Casey is a testament to what public scholarship can be, in addition to being an incredible advisor and advocate of me and my work.”

More: Questions about A.I.? Let’s Chat

The endowed professorship was made possible through a donation from Joan Payden, a co-founder of the Payden & Rygel investment management firm, in memory of her brother, William Payden (Jour’57). Bill Payden was known for his curiosity, as he was a journalist, college professor, sports fan, cinephile, pianist, world traveler, and collector of aviation memorabilia and classic cars.

The family also created the Payden Faculty Excellence Award, which recognizes excellence in teaching and research or creative work, and the Payden Teaching Excellence Grants, which are awarded to faculty to support innovative teaching endeavors, such as new interdisciplinary courses, revamped classes that support enhanced student engagement, or to purchase resources or training to improve teaching and the student experience.

Casey Fiesler, whose perspectives on law and ethics in technology have given her national cachet, has been named the William R. Payden Endowed Professor at the college.

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Courting justice

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 28 May 2025 17:49:03 +0000

Courting justice Amanda J. McManus Wed, 05/28/2025 - 11:49

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18) and Nandi Pointer (PhD candidate, Media Studies)

Ask any of her students how they prefer to get their news, or search for recommendations, or learn about their favorite TV shows, and Sandra Ristovska will tell you that they go on TikTok.

Yet their educations—from the time they first set foot in a grammar school classroom—have focused on textual literacy, with almost nothing devoted to how video and photos are analyzed.

“We just assume that everybody intuitively knows how to understand images, because we don’t have to teach you an alphabet, or grammar,” said Ristovska, associate professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information. “But we know from research that people can watch the same image and arrive at a vastly different understanding about what that image says or does.”

More: Bringing student activism to TikTok videos

That’s fun when we’re overanalyzing a plot twist in Severance. But Ristovska’s work centers around what happens when videos make their way into a courtroom, where interpretations can influence a person’s guilt or innocence.

According to one estimate, video appears in about 80 percent of criminal cases, but no guidelines exist for how video can be presented as evidence in court. And that’s also the case for deepfake videos or media created by generative artificial intelligence.

“Anybody who’s seen a legal document knows they’re standardized—if it doesn’t look a certain way, it’s not going to be admissible in court,” Ristovska said. “But when it comes to video, different courts have different guidelines and understandings about what’s admissible.”

Ristovska has been an important contributor to scholarship in media and the law. At a daylong event in April, she helped steer the conversation around these topics while formally presenting the Visual Evidence Lab, a new lab at CMCI that will advance her work in this area.

The workshop, Justice by Video, brought together judges, attorneys, journalists, and scholars from the humanities, social sciences, law and STEM to develop new avenues for research and potential policy proposals around how to ensure justice is best served.

Ristovska’s personal history plays a role in all this, too. Growing up in what is now Macedonia during the Yugoslav Wars, she still recalls how footage from the fighting upset her parents—even if she was too young to understand the news bulletins interrupting her evening cartoons. As part of her graduate school work, she went on to study how footage from civilians and activists made its way to the United Nations’ criminal tribunal, in The Hague.

“I realized the law was an important place to be asking questions about video evidence,” she said. “Some of the citizen footage in the tribunal wasn’t verified through the person who shot it, which had never been the case before. And this footage was both establishing the truth in court while constructing a historical memory about the wars.”

Cross-disciplinary expertise

Sandra Braman, a professor of media and information at Michigan State University, said she was excited to participate in this event because of the range of expertise involved, including practicing judges as well as legal scholars and researchers from across the social sciences.

Braman has twice served as a visiting professor at CMCI, and is considered among the leading scholars in digital technologies and their policy implications. She was impressed with the agenda, which included small group discussions intended to stimulate cross-disciplinary discussion and a detailed reading list to review beforehand.

“Usually, when you go to the first conference of its kind, it’s just a chance to gather and talk generally about the topic,” Braman said. “Sandra has put together a very structured set of tasks that are actually very hard questions to guide us on visual evidence.”

Roderick Kennedy, who retired from the New Mexico Court of Appeals after serving as its chief judge, was part of an afternoon panel discussing the issues raised by Incident, a documentary of a police shooting in Chicago and the role security footage plays in creating a narrative explaining what happened.

Kennedy and Ristovska met through his work with the American Bar Association. Ristovska presented a series of webinars on video evidence and deepfakes to members. They also collaborated when she was a guest editor of an issue of The SciTech Lawyer last winter that took a deep dive on these issues.

Kennedy said video evidence presents similar challenges that he would see with eyewitness testimony throughout his career. Memory is unreliable, he said, as witnesses become suggestible when asked to remember details or are affected by the pressure to have a definitive answer for investigators.

“You have a single viewpoint, but it’s overlaid with other memories that can change things, and is subject to interpretation every time you recall it and restore it,” he said.

‘A vertical learning curve’

A video won’t change its memory under pressure, but how it’s captured and edited can influence the way a jury interprets what happened. And while footage from police body cams or the smartphones of bystanders may get the most attention, Kennedy said the issue crops up elsewhere—even police interrogations. He shared a case involving a pathologist whose findings in a homicide were influenced by hearing a woman confess to the crime on camera.

Her confession, however, was preceded by an exhausting, seven-hour police interrogation. And because we’ve been conditioned to believe videos show reality—without considering how they were framed, trimmed, slowed down or otherwise edited—they have significant potential to mislead jurors.

“That’s the power of video,” Kennedy said. If you only show a jury the last minute or so of that interrogation, “all you see is a mother saying she killed her baby.”

The workshop wasn’t just about editing techniques that may introduce doubt. Invited experts also discussed deepfakes, an emerging challenge for courts that must catch up to the technology. Kennedy said judges and lawyers “have almost a vertical learning curve” when it comes to the technology.

“You have to learn the language of the technology experts before you can accuse somebody of using a deepfake,” he said. “And the experts aren’t taught how to speak legal, or the legal rules for putting their expertise in evidence.”

One thread of Braman’s research on information policy is the history of facts themselves.

“Our social orientation around facts provides the context within which we think about evidence,” she said. “And though we are talking a lot today about A.I. and the problem of deepfakes, the question of the authenticity and validity of digital information in general actually first arose as soon as the internet became available to the general public. We need to solve this problem yesterday.”

Ristovska said she was pleased to see members of the public attend to watch Incident and start thinking about video as a communication tool that is overdue for guidance.

“We’re not going to solve all the challenges around how people see video—we can’t do that with any type of evidence,” she said. “But I hope we can develop research-based guidelines that promote consistency, fairness and equality in the use of video as evidence.”

Video evidence appears in 80 percent of criminal cases, but a lack of consistent guidelines means there’s no standard for how media are presented in court. A workshop led by CMCI faculty may change that.

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Communication that moves

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:25:25 +0000

Communication that moves Amanda J. McManus Wed, 02/26/2025 - 11:25

By Joe Arney
Photos by Jack Moody (StratComm’24)

The study of communication, as José G. Izaguirre III knows, is more than just interpreting the words. It’s also about how those words are heard—in a speech or an article, or in a post or on a poster.

It’s why he leans so heavily on showing communication in its original form, whether in the classes he teaches at CMCI or in a new book examining the formation of the Chicano movement.

“As I was analyzing these different texts, I was just struck by the intentionality to make things look a certain way, which really enriched the communication I was studying,” said Izaguirre, assistant professor of communication at the college, who goes by Joe. “It was clear that those aesthetics were part of the story, too—the degree to which photography, illustrations and designs played a significant role in movements.”

"It is possible for different people to come together around similar concerns, articulate different visions, but still try to work together to accomplish something good.
José G. Izaguirre III
Assistant Professor
Communication

Izaguirre’s book, Becoming La Raza: Negotiating Race in the Chicano Movement(s), traces the beginning of the movement—which originated among striking farm workers in California—through its early years. His research examines the communications that organized Latin American voices into a global political power.

“The book highlights how race is always implicated in different political circumstances—while demonstrating that however much we try to get away from the language of race, it’s always there,” he said. “I tried to show the inescapability of race as a part of communication through a story about how Mexican Americans navigated racial dynamics and promoted a racial identity.”

A good example: “Chicano,” once a pejorative label, was itself reclaimed by the organization as it rejected assimilation and sought to assert its Indigenous roots. But while the movement united under one banner, it was never a singular voice. Izaguirre’s book shows how activists created a political power against the backdrop of the Cold War.

“I think the book highlights the importance of everyday activist movements, or even politically interested individuals who have concerns that are part of a broader community or communal concern,” he said. “It takes seriously these moments of everyday communication and spotlights them in ways that are maybe not typical.”

“Everyday communication” in the 1960s was, of course, very different than today, when demonstrations largely exist and are communicated in ephemeral digital spaces—what’s trending today is tomorrow’s relic. Much of Izaguirre’s source material was donated documents—leaflets, photos, newspapers and so on—that made this project possible.

It’s how he was able to present so many period pieces in his book, alongside close readings of iconic artifacts like the National Farm Worker Association’s El Plan de Delano, or the poem “I Am Joaquin.” And there is value, he said, in seeing how those pieces are designed, even if it’s text-based, like the Delano document, co-written by Cesar Chavez, to guide their march through California. It contains a list of demands and concerns that, Izaguirre said, are valuable to see in their original context—and language.

Another level of engagement

“When I show these materials in classes, I want to show that communication as close as possible to what it would have been like to encounter it at the time,” whether that’s a picture, a pamphlet or a speech, he said. “I wouldn’t call it an epiphany, but there’s some level of understanding that happens when I show them the whole document. Because it’s not just text pulled out of somewhere—it’s communication they can see for themselves.”

That also means students encounter the original communication in its original language. For much of La Raza, of course, that’s Spanish.

“I do show them an English version, so they understand the meaning of the words, but seeing it in its native language, they get almost the emotion of the words,” Izaguirre said. “Seeing the original document puts it in that cultural or historical context.”

It’s something he hopes readers and students consider in the context of modern political movements, from the iconography at campaign rallies to how people find one another and organize digitally. But he also hopes those readers will be challenged to rethink the narrative that movements—or communities—can be viewed singularly. The Chicano movement is a prime example.

“It can be harmful, to see communities being labeled in such a way that they’re cast as the opposition,” he said. “It’s easy to consolidate groups and label them as friend or foe. What’s harder is politics—which is really about building partnerships and opportunities for equal engagement.

“What I hope the book shows is that it is possible for different people to come together around similar concerns, articulate different visions, but still try to work together to accomplish something good.”

A new book looks at the rise of the Chicano movement through the lens of communication, from speeches to newspapers.

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A better way

Amanda J. McManus — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 18:52:49 +0000

A better way Amanda J. McManus Tue, 02/25/2025 - 11:52

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

There’s a brick paver walkway that crosses 18th Street on the CU Boulder campus by the ATLAS Institute. Thousands of pedestrians use it each day, crossing the brick path while cyclists, e-scooters, buses, emergency vehicles and the occasional car wend their way down the street.

“Design is a powerful tool to make an impact, because then we’re not telling certain people they’re functionally not correct. Instead, we’re saying, how do we create an environment that actually matches the needs of the user?
Elena Sabinson
Director
Neuro D Lab

Is it a crosswalk?

From the description above, you might assume so. But there’s no signage warning drivers of pedestrian activity, or telling them to stop or yield. And you’ll find none of the striping associated with crosswalks.

“When the students describe it, they’re like, ‘It’s basically Frogger out there,’” said Elena Sabinson, an assistant professor of environmental design at CMCI and director of the Neuro D Lab, which explores the intersection of design, neurodiversity, equity and innovation. “That space of ambiguity becomes a place where conflict or confusion happens. The lab looks at how that affects everyone, but especially neurodivergent folks who might rely on clarity and clear signage to understand how to navigate things.”

Neurodivergence has become a global point of conversation as a movement builds to both recognize that each brain functions differently and to better understand how to design products, services, buildings and so on that serve everyone, instead of asking people to conform to the built environment.

“Design is a powerful tool to make an impact, because then we’re not telling certain people they’re functionally not correct,” Sabinson said. “Instead, we’re saying, how do we create an environment that actually matches the needs of the user?”

Elena Sabinson crosses the street in front of the CASE building. While the brick paver walkway looks like a crosswalk, it lacks striping and signage indicating it's safe to cross, which can confuse both pedestrians and drivers. Part of Sabinson's research work involves assessing wayfinding on the CU Boulder campus for confusing design cues.

A new direction for her work

Sabinson is uniquely suited to such challenges. As a PhD student at Cornell University, she was studying self-soothing technologies—especially in the area of soft robotics, like breathing wall panels that help people regulate their biorhythms during stressful experiences—when she received a diagnosis of autism and ADHD.

“That changed the trajectory of my research,” she said. “I’m still focusing on emotional well-being, but with this environmental lens of how to create inclusive, accessible products that are centered around self determination, agency and empowerment.

“I make a choice to say I’m an autistic-led lab, and I invite this type of conversation in by making that choice, rather than just being an autistic person doing research.”

Bringing students into her lab and giving them opportunities to engage these challenges will, she said, push her to question some of her own assumptions developed after years of working in the field. But it’s also creating opportunities to potentially reshape the campus, such as the wayfinding project examining features like the ambiguous campus crosswalk.

That work is partially funded by an undergraduate research opportunities program grant issued by the university. Earlier this month, Sabinson’s work was accepted by EDRA56, the influential conference of the Environmental Design Research Association. She’s looking forward to presenting it this May, in addition to helping drive conversations around making the campus easier to navigate.

“One thing we have as a research lab is access to students who are really engaged and passionate about this work, and who want to take on projects that can’t always happen in industry, due to timeline and budgetary constraints,” she said.

Industry feedback

Another thing she wants through both the lab and her classes is the chance for ideas from industry to influence her students’ innovation. In a course she teaches on fidgets and stims, one student created the Cacti Clicker, a plastic cactus with moveable segments. When you twist it, it makes a clicking sound, which isn’t always acceptable in a work or school setting.

“So the student redesigned it so some of the spins make noise and some don’t, so you can still get the sensation if you’re in a crowded space,” Sabinson said. “That’s an example of how we field test these products with people, get feedback—and learn to take feedback—to make their products better.”

It also doesn’t look like a traditional fidget toy. That’s also by design—it just looks like a cactus statue on a desk in Sabinson’s office.

“A lot of what I consider in my work, and that we talk about in class, is the social stigma around using a fidget—that a lot of people might want to, but they’re considered to be toys,” she said.

The bigger goal is to eliminate that stigma altogether—but in the meantime, she said, this product is an option for people who need it, while “just living on your desk and looking like a decoration.”

Can design help those with neurodivergence be more comfortable in their environments? A new lab is searching for answers.

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Elena Sabinson demonstrates using an inflatable sensory band in her office. Part of Sabinson's research looks at inflatable surfaces and products that can be used by people managing anxiety to make them more comfortable in their environment.

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Poll-arized

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 21:08:32 +0000

Poll-arized Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/16/2024 - 15:08

By Joe Arney

Deepfakes. Distrust. Data manipulation. Is it any wonder American democracy feels like it has reached such a dangerous tipping point?

As our public squares have emptied of reasoned discussion, and our social media feeds have filled with vitriol, viciousness and villainy, we’ve found ourselves increasingly isolated and unable to escape our echo chambers. And while it’s easy to blame social media, adtech platforms or the news, it’s the way these forces overlap and feed off each other that’s put us in this mess.

It’s an important problem to confront as we close in on a consequential election, but the issue is bigger than just what happens this November, or whether you identify with one party or another. Fortunately, the College of Media, Communication and Information was designed for just these kinds of challenges, where a multidisciplinary approach is needed to frame, address and solve increasingly complex problems.

“Democracy is not just about what happens in this election,” said Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies and an expert in the design and governance of the internet. “It’s a much longer story, and through all the threats we’ve seen, I’ve taken hope from focusing my attention on advancing democracy, rather than just defending it.”

We spoke to Schneider and other CMCI experts in journalism, information science, media studies, advertising and communication to understand the scope of the challenges. And we asked one big question of each in order to help us make sense of this moment in history, understand how we got here and—maybe—find some faith in the future.

***

Newsrooms have been decimated. The younger generation doesn’t closely follow the news. Attention spans have withered in the TikTok age. Can we count on journalism to serve its Fourth Estate function and deliver fair, accurate coverage of the election?

Mike McDevitt, a former editorial writer and reporter, isn’t convinced the press has learned its lessons from the 2016 cycle, when outlets chased ratings and the appearance of impartiality over a commitment to craft that might have painted more accurate portraits of both candidates. High-quality reporting, he said, may mean less focus on finding scoops and more time sharing resources to chase impactful stories.

How can journalism be better?

“A lot of journalists might disagree with me, but I think news media should be less competitive among each other and find ways to collaborate, especially with the industry gutted. And the news can’t lose sight of what’s important by chasing clickable stories. Covering chaos and conflict is tempting, but journalism’s interests in this respect do not always align with the security of democracy. While threats to democracy are real, amplifying chaos is not how news media should operate during an era of democratic backsliding.”

***

After the 2016 election, Brian C. Keegan was searching for ways to use his interests in the computer and social sciences in service of democracy. That’s driven his expertise in public-interest data science—how to make closed data more accessible to voters, journalists, activists and researchers. He looks at how campaigns can more effectively engage voters, understand important issues and form policies that address community needs.

The U.S. news media has blood on its hands from 2016. It will go down as one of the worst moments in the history of American journalism.”

Mike McDevitt
Professor, journalism

You’ve called the 2012 election an “end of history” moment. Can you explain that in the context of what’s happening in 2024?

“In 2012, we were coming out of the Arab Spring, and everyone was optimistic about social media. The idea that it could be a tool for bots and state information operations to influence elections would have seemed like science fiction. Twelve years later, we’ve finally learned these platforms are not neutral, have real risk and can be manipulated. And now, two years into the large language model moment, people are saying these are just neutral tools that can only be a force for good. That argument is already falling apart.

I think 2024 will be the first, and last,
A.I. election.”

Brian C. Keegan
Assistant professor, information science

“You could actually roll the clock back even further, to the 1960s and ’70s, when people were thinking about Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed, and recognizing there are all these environmental, regulatory, economic and social things all connected through this lens of the environment. Like any computing system, when it comes to data, if you have garbage in, you get garbage out. The bias and misinformation we put into these A.I. systems are polluting our information ecosystem in ways that journalists, activists, researchers and others aren’t equipped to handle.”

***

One of Angie Chuang’s last news jobs was covering race and ethnicity for The Oregonian. In the early 2000s, it wasn’t always easy to find answers to questions about race in a mostly white newsroom. Conferences like those put on by the Asian American Journalists Association “were times of revitalization for me,” she said.

When this year’s conference of the National Association of Black Journalists was disrupted by racist attacks against Kamala Harris, Chuang’s first thoughts were for the attendees who lost the opportunity to learn from one another and find the support she did as a cub reporter.

“What’s lost in this discussion is the entire event shifted to this focus on Donald Trump and the internal conflict in the organization, and I’m certain that as a result, journalists and students who went lost out on some of that solidarity,” she said. And it fits a larger pattern of outspoken newsmakers inserting themselves into the news to claim the spotlight.

How can journalism avoid being hijacked by the people it covers?

“It comes down to context. We need to train reporters to take a breath and not just focus on being the first out there. And I know that’s really hard, because the rewards for being first and getting those clicks ahead of the crowd are well established.”

“I can’t blame the reporters who feel these moments are worth covering, because I feel as conflicted as they do.
Angie Chuang
Associate professor, journalism

***

Agenda setting—the concept that we take our cues of what’s important from the news—is as old an idea as mass media itself, but Chris Vargo is drawing interesting conclusions from studying the practice in the digital age. Worth watching, he and other CMCI researchers said, are countermedia entities, which undermine the depictions of reality found in the mainstream press through hyper-partisan content and the use of mis- and disinformation.

How did we get into these silos, and how do we get out?

“The absence of traditional gatekeepers has helped people create identities around the issues they choose to believe in. Real-world cues do tell us a little about what we find important—a lot of people had to get COVID to know it was bad—but we now choose media in order to form a community. The ability to self-select what you want to listen to and believe in is a terrifying story, because selecting media based on what makes us feel most comfortable, that tells us what we want to hear, flies in the face of actual news reporting and journalistic integrity.”

“I do worry about our institutions. I don’t like that a majority of Americans don’t trust CNN.

Chris Vargo
Associate professor, advertising,
public relations and media design

***

Her research into deepfakes has validated what Sandra Ristovska has known for a long time: For as long as we’ve had visual technologies, we’ve had the ability to manipulate them.

Seeing pornographic images of Taylor Swift on social media or getting robocalls from Joe Biden telling voters to stay home—content created by generative artificial intelligence—is a reminder that the scale of the problem is unprecedented. But Ristovska’s work has found examples of fake photos from the dawn of the 20th century supposedly showing, for example, damage from catastrophic tornadoes that never happened.

Ristovska grew up amid the Yugoslav Wars; her interest in becoming a documentary filmmaker was in part shaped by seeing how photos and videos from the brutal fighting and genocide were manipulated for political and legal means. It taught her to be a skeptic when it comes to what she sees shared online.

“So, you see the Taylor Swift video—it seems out of character for her public persona. Or the president—why would he say something like that?” she said. “Instead of just hitting the share button, we should train ourselves to go online and fact check it—to be more engaged.”

Even when we believe something is fake, if it aligns with our worldview, we are likely to accept it as reality. Knowing that, how do we combat deepfakes?

“We need to go old school. We’ve lost sight of the collective good, and you solve that by building opportunities to come together as communities and have discussions. We’re gentler and more tolerant of each other when we’re face-to-face. This has always been true, but it’s becoming even more true today, because we have more incentives to be isolated than ever.”

***

Early scholarly works waxed poetic on the internet’s potential, through its ability to connect people and share information, to defeat autocracy. But, Nathan Schneider has argued, the internet is actually organized as a series of little autocracies—where users are subject to the whims of moderators and whoever owns the servers—effectively meaning you must work against the defaults to be truly democratic. He suggests living with these systems is contributing to the global rise of authoritarianism. In a new book, Governable Spaces, Schneider calls for redesigning social media with everyday democracy in mind.

If the internet enables autocracy, what can we do to fix it?

“We could design our networks for collective ownership, rather than the assumption that every service is a top-down fiefdom. And we could think about democracy as a tool for solving problems, like conflict among users. Polarizing outcomes, like so-called cancel culture, emerge because people don’t have better options for addressing harm. A democratic society needs public squares designed for democratic processes and practices.”

***

It may be derided as dull, but the public meeting is a bedrock of American democracy. It has also changed drastically as fringe groups have seized these spaces to give misinformation a megaphone, ban books and take up other undemocratic causes. Leah Sprain researches how specific communication practices facilitate and inhibit democratic action. She works as a facilitator with several groups, including the League of Women Voters and Restore the Balance, to ensure events like candidate forums embrace difficult issues while remaining nonpartisan.

What’s a story we’re not telling about voters ahead of the election?

“We should be looking more at college towns, because town-gown divides are real and long-standing. There’s a politics of resentment even in a place like Boulder, where you have people who say, ‘We know so much about these issues, we shouldn’t let students vote on them’—to the point where providing pizza to encourage voter turnout becomes this major controversy. Giving young people access to be involved, making them feel empowered to make a difference and be heard—these are good things.”

***

Toby Hopp studies the news media and digital content providers with an eye to how our interactions with media shape conversations in the public sphere. Much of that is changing as trust and engagement with mainstream news sources declines. He’s studied whether showing critical-thinking prompts alongside shared posts—requiring users to consider the messages as well as the structure of the platform itself—may be better than relying on top-down content moderation from tech companies.

Ultimately, the existing business model of the big social media companies—packaging users to be sold to advertisers—may be the most limiting feature when it comes to reform. Hopp said he doubts a business the size of Meta can pivot from its model.

How does social media rehabilitate itself to become more trusted? Can it?

“Social media platforms are driven by monopolistic impulses, and there’s not a lot of effort put into changing established strategies when you’re the only business in town. The development of new platforms might offer a wider breadth of platform choice—which might limit the spread of misinformation on a Facebook or Twitter due to the diminished reach of any single platform.”

***

Images have always required us to be more engaged. Now, with the speed of disinformation, we need to do a little more work.”

Sandra Ristovska
Assistant professor, media studies

CU News Corps was created to simulate a real-world newsroom that allows journalism students to do the kind of long-form, investigative pieces that are in such short supply at a time of social media hot takes and pundits trading talking points.

“I thought we should design the course you’d most want to take if you were a journalism major,” said Chuck Plunkett, director of the capstone course and an experienced reporter. Having a mandate to do investigative journalism “means we can challenge our students to dig in and do meaningful work, to expose them to other kinds of people or ideas that aren’t on their radar.”

Over the course of a semester, the students work under the guidance of reporters and editors at partner media companies to produce long-form multimedia stories that are shared on the News Corps website and, often, are picked up by those same publications, giving the students invaluable clips for their job searches while supporting resource-strapped newsrooms.

With the news business facing such a challenging future, both economically and politically, why should students study journalism?

“Even before the great contraction of news, the figure I had in my mind was five years after students graduate, maybe 25 percent of them were still in professional newsrooms. But journalism is a tremendous major because you learn to think critically, research deeply and efficiently, interact with other people, process enormous amounts of information, and have excellent communication skills. Every profession needs people with those skills.”

Where do we go from here? CMCI experts share their perspectives on journalism, advertising, data science, communication and more in an era of democratic backsliding.

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The race to make tech more equal

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 21:54:10 +0000

The race to make tech more equal Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/14/2024 - 15:54

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

Back when Bryan Semaan’s mom had a Facebook account, doomscrolling wasn’t part of her vernacular.

The Iraqi culture she was raised in compels celebration of accomplishments and milestones, “so any time someone posted something, she felt she had to interact with it,” Semaan said. “That personal engagement runs very deeply through our culture.”

But it became exhausting for her to keep up as her network swelled into the hundreds, so she deactivated her account. For Semaan, it’s a fitting metaphor for his research—which challenges the assumptions tech developers make about the users of their products and services. And it’s the kind of problem he wants to study through the Center for Race, Media and Technology, which the ��Ƶ unveiled in the spring.

“The people developing these technologies are in Silicon Valley—so, mostly male, mostly white,” said Semaan, director of the center and an associate professor of information science at CMCI. “A lot of the values we bake into these technologies are being forced onto people in different cultures, often creating problems.”

As a first-generation American, Semaan said he identifies with the liminal moments faced by others living between worlds—immigrants, veterans, refugees, people of color or Indigenous people—and the challenges of adopting to Western societal structures. Technology plays a big part, and the discipline’s blind spots are a key focus of Semaan’s research, which asks how these tools can create resilience for people in those liminal moments, such as a climate refugee fleeing disaster or a queer teenager anxious about coming out.

To kick off the center, in March, CMCI welcomed Ruha Benjamin, a professor at Princeton who’s developed her scholarship around what she calls the “New Jim Code”—a nod to both the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and the biases encoded into technology. Benjamin, he said, “focuses on how people consider technology to be a benign thing, when in fact it isn’t—tech nology takes on the values of those who create it.”

Fortunately, Semaan said, we’re at a moment when society is recognizing the importance of equity and justice, while seeing technology as a problem, a solution and a thread tying together the great challenges facing humanity—political polarization, disinformation, climate change and so on.

"These bigger challenges are going to require people thinking together at a much grander scale, which means changing how we work.

Bryan Semaan

He’s optimistic that the Center for Race, Media and Technology will collect the broad perspectives needed to make, as he put it, “the intractable problems tractable.”

“What I imagine for the center is encouraging collaborations among the experts we bring together,” he said. “And I’m really hoping my research direction changes as a result of getting to work with the amazing people I’ll meet.”

If it’s collaboration he wants to get out of the center, Semaan’s successes to date have been more about tenacity. Early in his career, he said, some of his colleagues tried to steer him from migrants and veterans, dismissing his interest in making technology equitable as “a diversity ghetto.”

That didn’t deter him—and, with the benefit of hindsight, those rejections made him a better scholar.

“In my research, the people you work with are incredibly vulnerable, or are so busy surviving that they can’t talk to you,” he said. “You have to be passionate about that work, and prepared for long-tail effort before you make progress.”

The work of the center will be a long game, but if successful, Semaan said, it will put CU Boulder at the center of the conversation around purposefully designed technology.

“It dovetails with the university’s broader mission around diversity,” he said. “It’s not just saying we’re going to increase diversity—it’s the issues we are approaching and the support we are building for different scholars across the university. Because these bigger challenges are going to require people thinking together at a much grander scale, which means changing how we work.”

A new center at CMCI is organizing faculty thought leadership to answer big, systemic questions about technology’s role in issues of social justice.

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Brushing up their skills

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 21:05:17 +0000

Brushing up their skills Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/13/2024 - 15:05

By Malinda Miller (Engl, Jour'92; MJour'98)

High up on scaffolding, students meticulously paint bright floral patterns on the west side of the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse.

They’ve been learning the traditional art of ornamental painting—nakkoshi—from Maruf Mirakhmatov, who is visiting Boulder from Khujand, Tajikistan, for six months.

“I really want to get into art restoration or just restoration overall, especially with bigger buildings,” said Kaija Galins, a junior architecture major. “My favorite part has been to watch each step of the way, like the sanding, laying down the charcoal and the tracing process.”

Galins is one of 17 students who over the summer took a course on restoration of the Dushanbe Teahouse with Azza Kamal, an associate teaching professor in the Program in Environmental Design and a former historic preservation commissioner.

Students studied cultural heritage and preservation, practiced painting techniques in the classroom, and applied those skills to onsite restoration under Mirakhmatov’s guidance.

Kamal said the students also learned about the urgency to account for embodied carbon in new construction and restoration, as well as the value of refurbishing and recycling materials so they don’t end up in the landfill. A gift from Boulder’s sister city in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the teahouse’s intricate carvings, painted woodwork and ceramic panels were created by more than 40 artisans, including Mirakhmatov’s grandfather.

“It’s important work, because there are only a couple people in Tajikistan still doing this,” said Mirakhmatov, a fifth-generation artisan. “For me, it’s easy because it’s in my blood, and every day when I’m painting here, I’m enjoying it.”

A student paints a section of the wall.

Students work on restoration at the teahouse.

Azza Kamal, right, works with a student on a corbel design.

Students practice painting techniques in class.

The corbels under the roofline have been repainted, while restoration of the lower panel is still underway.

Maruf Mirakhmatov paints white outlines on a floral design. The Program in Environmental Design, the city of Boulder and the Boulder-Dushanbe Sister Cities Project partnered to bring Mirakhmatov to Boulder for six months.

A beloved Boulder landmark is getting a refresh thanks to students who are touching up the complex paint job under the guidance of an artist from Boulder’s Tajikistan sister city.

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#TechEthics

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 19:44:07 +0000

#TechEthics Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/02/2024 - 12:44

By Joe Arney

Not many computer scientists have signs reading “Rage Against the Machine Learning” in their offices.

But in Evan Peck’s case, it’s a perfect symbol of why he was so excited to join the information science department of the College of Media, Communication and Information this fall.

“I love being here because CMCI draws students who want to use technology in service of something they already care deeply about, and not for its own sake.

Evan Peck
Associate professor, information science

“I started to believe that some of the most pressing problems our society is wrestling with don’t require deeper technical solutions, but a reimagining of the ways we’re using technology,” he said. “I was looking for deeper connections to social sciences and community-focused work—and I think that’s what information science excels at, shifting the lens of the technical in service to the community and society.”

Peck joined the ��Ƶ this fall from Bucknell University, meaning he’s gone from being a Bison to a Buffalo. More than that, it gave him a chance to join a college and department that is more closely aligned with his evolving research interests, which center on information visualization—especially the way data is communicated to the public.

Establishing trust around data

He already appreciates being surrounded by faculty and students who are experts in fields like media studies and communication.

“I’m fascinated by how we encourage people to trust data, understand it and respond to it,” Peck said. “While we can advance science enough to offer compelling solutions to societal problems, we continue to share those insights to the public without an understanding of people’s cultures, beliefs and background. That’s a recipe for failure.”

If you think about some of the public health messaging you saw during the pandemic, you’ll probably remember the frustration of getting information that wasn’t helpful or didn’t reflect reality. Peck, for instance, lived in central Pennsylvania during the lockdowns. In the summer of 2020, his rural county hadn’t seen a day in which more than two people tested positive, but because most COVID maps reported risk at the state level, high caseloads in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh made all of Pennsylvania look more infectious than it was.

That degrades trust in experts, he said, “and when cases spiked in my county about a month later, I believe it had eroded trust and willingness to react to that data.”

He has taken his interest in this area to some interesting new arenas, including extensive interviews with rural Pennsylvanians at construction sites and farmers markets, to better understand how they interpreted charts and what information was important to them. The resulting research received a best paper award at the premier Human-Computer Interaction conference, has been cited by the Urban Institute and others, and helped cement his interest in information science.

“I had a moment of realization,” Peck said. “I could spend my whole career as a visualization researcher and still have zero impact on my community. So how do we engage in research that has a positive impact on the people and community around the university?”

It’s not the only area he’s looking to create impact. Peck describes himself as an advocate for undergraduate research opportunities, especially for students searching for a sense of place within their degree programs.

“It’s a mechanism for helping students explore areas that aren’t strongly represented in their core academic programs,” Peck said. “I saw this as an advisor in computer science for nearly a decade—I advised students who wanted to think deeply about how their designs impacted people, but in a curriculum in which people were a side story to their technical depth.”

An eye to ethics

He also created an initiative around ethics and computing curricula at Bucknell that’s been adopted by computer science programs everywhere. If a question was presented in an ethics context, students came up with thoughtful answers—but that reasoning did not extend into other assignments or their careers. It’s a story that’s familiar for anyone thinking about the addictiveness of social media platforms or the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence

Some computer science programs offered a single ethics course, “but it was so isolated from the rest of their technical content that students wouldn’t put them together,” Peck said.

In response, he added more ethical and critical thinking components to the core technical curriculum, and developed a set of programming assignments in which students wrestle with a societal design question in order to accomplish their programming goals. He currently has a grant through Mozilla’s Responsible Computing Challenge to continue that work at CU Boulder.

“It’s about connecting the dots and building habits. Students need to understand that the system I’m programming is going to have implications beyond Silicon Valley,” he said. “How can we get you to think about the human tradeoffs beyond the aggregated rules you’re creating?”

It’s the kind of question he feels renewed vigor about pursuing in the Department of Information Science.

“I love being here because CMCI draws students who want to use technology in service of something they already care deeply about, and not for its own sake,” Peck said.

“Computer science knows how to build marvelous systems, but not always how to make them work fairly or responsibly for diverse people and communities,” he added. “I think our department goes beyond the idea of ‘how do we build it,’ to think critically about who we’re designing for, who technology empowers, who it privileges, who it disadvantages.”

“Rage Against the Machine Learning” isn’t just a sign in Evan Peck’s office. It’s an emblem of his career pivot.

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#ShakeItOff

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 22:16:11 +0000

#ShakeItOff Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/29/2024 - 15:16

By Joe Arney

Even by her standards, Taylor Swift has had a busy couple of months.

When she wasn’t winning Grammys and dropping hints about her next album, Swift was making headlines for her appearances during NFL games, her supposed role as an elections-interference psyop and lyrics that, when decoded, suggested she is queer.

What is it about Swift that has so many people, even her fans, seeing red?

“This is something that is continually churning with me because I hadn’t taken Swift seriously as an artist—reproducing the historical practice of dismissing or devaluing women’s work,” said Jamie Skerski, who studies how narratives are shaped and mediated by institutions, audiences, and cultural norms. “I was part of the problem.”

“What is so threatening about even the speculation that Taylor might not be Miss Americana? Answer: Everything as we know it.

Jamie Skerski
Associate chair, undergraduate studies

“But it’s something very visceral, and I think Taylor taps into this sense of female empowerment, of anger, of frustration, of recognition, of systems that continue to try to take women’s rights away,” said Skerski, associate chair for undergraduate studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the ��Ƶ.

Perhaps nowhere is the phenomenon more apparent than “Traylor”—the Travis Kelce-Swift romance that’s dominated pop culture throughout the football season. When Swift attends Chiefs games, she is typically shown on screen for less than a minute of a three-plus-hour telecast, but male football fans have furiously labeled her a distraction from the action. Skerski pointed out that other distractions, like military flyovers and cheerleaders, don’t attract nearly the same amount of outrage.

The Traylor relationship, she said, offers an opportunity to explore questions about the entertainment industry, gender and fandom—especially around the “fantasies of straight white men” whose loves of sports betting and fantasy football are validated through societal norms.

“It’s culturally acceptable when white-collar men seek escapism, entertainment and social capital in the commodification and dehumanization of mostly Black bodies for personal pleasure,” since that reflects dominant racial power relationships, Skerski said.

“But when Swift fans engage in a version of fan fiction—daring to imagine Taylor as playing for the other team—it is condemned, belittled and dismissed. This is a moment to ask, whose fantasies are allowed to exist, and why?”

The idea of Swift playing for the other team isn’t new—the so-called Gaylor community on Reddit and TikTok has been collectively analyzing her lyrics for years—but it entered the mainstream in January when a New York Times guest essay waded into the fray with a 5,000-word read of Swift’s life and lyrics, imploring readers to consider that her songwriting offers “a feast laid specifically for the close listener.”

The bigger question, it argues, is not whether Swift is gay, but the obstacles to coming out in our celebrity culture and what queer people owe one another.

“How might her industry, our culture and we, ourselves, change if we made space for Ms. Swift to burn that dollhouse to the ground?” Anna Marks, an opinion editor for the Times, wrote in the column.

The point hit home for Skerski. “If a celebrity needs to navigate cultural norms of acceptance, that’s the bigger question,” she said. The idea that Swift’s work can have multiple meanings and influence different audiences “would break everything,” she said, as it would challenge the way our culture characterizes and reinforces identity norms.

Still, a lot of angry Swifties took to online comments to vent their frustration on the singer’s behalf, lashing out at the Gray Lady for becoming a gossip girl as well as the author, who wrote a similar piece about Harry Styles in 2022. Not allowing Swift access to her own identity is at best a misguided attempt at allyship, Skerski said—and at worst, “the fan outrage reinforces a culture of protective paternalism that is invoked to control women’s bodies.”

“What is so threatening about even the speculation that Taylor might not be Miss Americana?” she said. “Answer: Everything as we know it.”

What is it about Taylor Swift that has so many people—even her fans—seeing red? A communication scholar says it's a theme she knows all too well.

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