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Public defenders: Is the PBS, NPR model better than commercial media amid polarization?

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 21:08:50 +0000

Public defenders: Is the PBS, NPR model better than commercial media amid polarization? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/22/2024 - 15:08

By Joe Arney

If you get your headlines from NewsHour or stream Fresh Air on your ride to work, you have a little-known Colorado experiment to thank.

In the 1930s, the Rocky Mountain Radio Council wanted to reach every student working in mountain mines, to ensure they received the same public education opportunities as in Denver. The group hit on program transcriptions that could be relayed over the air—basically, pressing shellac records—so that a student working in remote Golconda Mine, in Hinsdale County, benefited from the same curriculum as his peers in Denver.

That local consortium eventually became the Public Broadcasting Service. And the focus on public education that gave it its start continues to differentiate the mission of public news networks.

“It was just by chance that I moved out here, and so I loved finding out that the inception moment for all noncommercial media was actually the mining communities,” said Josh Shepperd, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information.

Last year, Shepperd published Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting. It’s notable as the first academic attempt to present communication studies and public broadcasting as historically connected enterprises, and it comes at a time when criticism of the media—especially related to politics—is running especially hot. Shadow has since won the Book Award from the Broadcast Education Association and has been a finalist or runner up for prizes from four other organizations, including the American Journalism Historians Association and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Not necessarily better—but different

“This book isn’t about saying one mode of media is automatically better, or that public media is perfect or a corrective to commercial media,” he said. “But I do think public media is different because of its mission to provide a forum for every kind of voice.”

“Everyone keeps saying public media is too state based, but commercial media seems to be much more of a mouthpiece for politicians right now.”
Josh Shepperd, associate professor, media studies

That’s different from most commercial media, “where the ethics are really tertiary to how the industry works. If there’s an audience for it, it’s good,” he said. “The idea that there is a necessity for every voice to be placed equally within a community is very important, even if I’m not sure that public media is always successful.”

In some countries, “public media” raises the specter of propaganda, like TASS or Xinhua. In the United States, PBS is insulated from such a threat, since affiliate stations don’t receive direct funding from the government.

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t political, because they are,” Shepperd said. But, he said, an endless news cycle revolving around politics and partisanship has warped the relationship between government and independent media: “Everyone keeps saying public media is too state based, but commercial media seems to be much more of a mouthpiece for politicians right now.”

Spend a few minutes watching Fox News or MSNBC and you won’t disagree. For Shepperd, it’s another effect of a polarized media market “where people think through the abstractions of their gatekeepers’ framing, instead of just looking at what’s in front of them in their own lives,” he said. “We allow issues of public interest to become obscured by demographic affiliations as we increasingly become categories and brands instead of people.”

How we got to that point is part of Shepperd’s next project, which will examine the history of decision-making at media industries to better understand the mechanisms radio, television and digital players use to make tough calls about programming and advertising.

It’s a different thrust, but one that still hearkens back to his interest in uncovering and preserving the history of communication studies, which Shepperd called the only discipline that hasn’t completely traced its own history.

An accidental pathway

“You can’t have a discipline that doesn’t know why it exists,” he said. “Understanding that history gives us a sense of why we ask and answer the questions the way that we do, and helps us answer questions about the ethics of the discipline.”

Shepperd got into this work almost by accident. He was studying theories around public life and civil society when a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he earned his PhD, inspired him to pursue his nascent interest in public broadcasting.

“She told me it was good to think about these ideas, but that you could actually have evidence, too,” he said. “In other words, the idea that how it works is just as fair of a question as how it should work.”

He was able to put Wisconsin’s extensive archives to work for his thesis, which paved the way for the book project. Shepperd is now co-writing the official history of NPR and PBS for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

It’s fitting work, as before Shepperd dove into this subject in earnest, “no one in the history of film and media studies or communication studies had ever asked where public media came from in scholarship,” he said. Commercial media, by contrast, has been widely examined by experts and thought leaders, “and the idea that we wouldn't apply the same kind of investigation to the public system, I think, is an ideological issue that we need to face within communications research.”

A CMCI thought leader has documented the history of public media—an important lesson in understanding how broadcasting works and could be improved amid partisanship.

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Recycle, reuse—rethink? How a fresh approach to storytelling could put plastics in their place

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:43:37 +0000

Recycle, reuse—rethink? How a fresh approach to storytelling could put plastics in their place Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/17/2024 - 07:43

By Joe Arney

We’re going about environmental storytelling all wrong.

When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, it became a rallying point for the nascent environmental movement—not because it was a scientific book (though it is), but because of its haunting opening pages that described a town where the birds and bees had vanished, fish were gone, fruit wouldn’t blossom, and disease ran rampant.

That scene moved people to ban pesticides and rethink humanity’s role in the larger environment. But, Phaedra C. Pezzullo said, until we figure out how to tell stories about today’s environmental crises—like plastic pollution and climate change—all we have are data that, alone, fail to move people to action.

“What many people are arguing is that the climate crisis is a crisis of imagination and of communication,” said Pezzullo, a professor of communication and media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information. “The idea is, we struggle to grapple with what is the climate—I can’t touch it, I can’t see it—so how do we tell stories that empower people, instead of only getting caught up in the data?”

Interdisciplinary insights

Pezzullo’s interdisciplinary approach to the problem of plastics—the science of microplastics permeating the human body and the way of explaining that crisis in a way that inspires people to demand action—has helped her see a need for a fresh approach to how we talk about such complex problems.

It’s partly what moved her to start a podcast series, Communicating Care, and her most recent book, Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care, which was published last year. The book has generated significant attention as the media struggles to cover the plastics problem; since the summer, it has won three significant prizes from the National Communication Association: a Diamond Anniversary Book Award, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address and, significantly, the Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication, named for a prolific scholar who Pezzullo met years ago at a conference.

“It’s an honor to have this book recognized and affirmed by my colleagues with expertise in environmental studies, rhetoric, and across the entire field of communication,” Pezzullo said.

In some ways, Beyond Straw Men and Pezzullo’s search for impactful storytelling is the kind of scholarly work that’s uniquely possible at a place like CMCI. The college was created to address the complex challenges of today’s interconnected world, which require interdisciplinary perspectives to effectively engage.

It’s an approach that resonates with partners outside the university. In her role as director of ��Ƶ Boulder’s graduate certificate in environmental justice, Pezzullo has been working with Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment to help update its quantitative database of communities most affected by environmental damage. Undergraduates in a new class she’s teaching, Advanced Topics in Storytelling, Culture and Climate Justice, are updating story maps to help the state assess how the message it’s spreading about climate impacts local communities.

At CMCI, expertise in ‘how to move people’

“These stories need to be assessed so they can figure out if they are empowering residents,” she said. “Are they rich enough, compelling enough, moving enough? Or did we lean too hard on data that maybe is too dense for this audience?

“And that’s why the state would love more partnerships with people in CMCI who can help them build capacity for the storytelling component, because they spend so much of their own time in the weeds. There’s a thirst for research that understands the climate science, but also brings to the conversation an appreciation for how to think about audiences, context and how to move people.”

Part of that is finding ways to avoid confining stories about topics like pollution and climate to negative headlines, disaster movies, dystopian fiction and the like.

“We’re getting to the point with climate justice where you have to change attitudes, beliefs and the culture, and that means you need a range of stories—including comedies, as my colleagues I work with across campus have shown. We have to use a whole range of human emotions to change a culture.”

It also means those stories need broad appeal, so they aren’t just preaching to the converted.

“There’s a thirst for research that understands the climate science, but also brings to the conversation an appreciation for how to think about audiences, context and how to move people.”
Phaedra C. Pezzullo, professor, communication and media studies

“The argument of folks who are working on climate storytelling in the industry is any film or media content created for the present or the future that does not have climate change as part of its backdrop should be considered fiction, because it is a part of life,” she said.

The desperation to find the right storytelling techniques for plastics is easy to see in the endless drumbeat of bad news about plastics clogging rivers, causing floods; being burned, destroying air quality; and invading our drinking water, food supply and bodies. But like all good stories featuring hardship, this one has a protagonist we can easily root for.

“What I’m interested in right now is the idea of repair,” Pezzullo said. By that, she means material repair—in May, Colorado passed its third right to repair law, empowering consumers to fix, not flush, things like broken phones—but also repairing relationships, especially in the case of well-meaning partnerships where, say, an NGO promised a solution to a plastic problem in the global south that failed.

“How do we have accountability, but also find a way to forgive people for mistakes?” she said. “It’s very challenging right now to admit that people have made mistakes, and then—if they’re willing to do the work or willing to do the repair work, forgive them.

“And, of course, how do we repair the earth? That’s the most important question to me.”

A CMCI expert’s book has won a trio of awards for its attempt to change how we think about, and tell the story of, plastics pollution.

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If it ain’t ‘woke,’ does it need fixing?

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:15:54 +0000

If it ain’t ‘woke,’ does it need fixing? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/14/2024 - 09:15

By Joe Arney

Does “woke” make you broke? A new book from Tim Kuhn serves as a reminder that, while we might think of corporations as single-minded entities, they are in fact messy and complex—and that messiness often is where innovation takes place.

“Corporations often deploy purpose to create order, to fight complexity, because we typically think of a good organization as being orderly,” said Kuhn, a professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information.

“Purpose tends to be seen as this device that produces similarity, produces unity, produces a setting or a culture where everybody is on the same page. And that is a fantasy.”

So, when you see companies posting about pride or gun control, it doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly been taken over by “woke” warriors. Rather, it’s evidence of different perspectives and new avenues of thought being pursued within a larger organization. Those can produce more humane workplaces and foster innovation—which, together, can be healthy for the bottom line, Kuhn said in the book, What Do Corporations Want?: Communicative Capitalism, Corporate Purpose and a New Theory of the Firm.

Corporate purpose, Kuhn said, has often been framed as either producing profits or following principles. “Some versions of purpose can be a claim for morality, for your business to stand for more than shareholder maximization,” he said.

But believing corporations are only a single thing means “we’re missing an opportunity to understand their complexity and how they effectively serve a wide variety of purposes,” he said. “Saying that corporations just want profits, full stop, is perhaps way too simple, and does an injustice to both businesses and the good people who work in them.”

‘Dysfunction’ as a business driver

For businesses to pursue both purpose and profit—to walk and chew gum at once—is a good thing, because being open to multiple outcomes can help companies develop new lines of business. Chasing the idea that an organization must choose a single form of value often creates the dysfunctions managers think they need to neutralize.

“Purpose tends to be seen as this device that produces similarity, produces unity, produces a setting or a culture where everybody is on the same page. And that is a fantasy.”
Tim Kuhn, professor, communication

By way of example, Kuhn’s book mentions Coinbase, which operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. In 2020, as social tensions heated up from the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and a charged pre-election climate, CEO Brian Armstrong said there would be no political conversations permitted on workplace channels.

“And, as you can imagine, employees revolted,” Kuhn said. “Employees said, ‘This company is about shaking up the way the world works. Politics is core to who we are.’”

Coinbase offered severance to employees who left over the policy, and while the business was private at the time, making it hard to evaluate impact, Kuhn said this was an opportunity lost.

“What if you thought of strategy not as an attempt to create unity and a simple trajectory for your firm?” he said. “What if you thought of strategy as developing from the many possibilities for our future—the many voices that made up the organization? What new practices, what appeals to new audiences, might have emerged from that?”

Leaders, Kuhn said, “should be less fearful of conversations that stray from our predetermined purpose or strategy, and instead foster conversations that develop emergent, perhaps unanticipated, practices that could be considered part of our complex organization.”

Exit strategies

That sort of adaptability is crucial for corporations charged with innovating amid change and competition. Unfortunately, they don’t always get there. As part of his research, Kuhn observed a high-tech incubator in action. While the entrepreneurs housed there had big ideas about disruption, the accelerator’s model was laser-focused on exit strategies for the startups, as that’s where their money came from.

“That makes sense, in that we often think that’s the only way corporations think about value,” Kuhn said. “But as I spoke with many of these startups, they were interested in a variety of other forms of value. Many wanted to fight the corporate machine, were really interested in civic values or just wanted to do something technologically cool, whether it paid off or not.”

Instead, he said, they were pushed to sell out in ways that didn’t always make sense for the long-term viability of their companies, “and it was telling for me that there was a corporation—the accelerator— that was doing the pushing—a form of communicative capitalism that was making these nascent firms into something they didn’t want or need to be.”

The book is a collection of theoretical deep dives into how communication, purpose and authority intersect, but there are plenty of practical takeaways for leaders looking for an edge in innovation.

“Organizations are these conglomerations of humans, practices, places, things, passions, times, histories and so on,” Kuhn said. “If managers think their proclamations will directly produce the outcomes they want, they are probably not long for their positions. Because nothing is that simple.”

New research suggests communications outside of a business’ core purpose can stimulate innovation and new lines of activity.

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Demonstrative democracy: At forum, students show energy, curiosity about engaging with politics

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 21:32:25 +0000

Demonstrative democracy: At forum, students show energy, curiosity about engaging with politics Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/02/2024 - 15:32

By Joe Arney
Photos by Arielle Wiedenbeck

In sports, it’s often said, offense wins games, but defense wins championships.

For Cody Walizer, when it comes to politics, that’s inverted—good defense can win a debate, but it’s offense that wins elections. And that’s unusual because of how little time candidates spend on offense when they are sparring onstage.

“When someone has an opportunity to build, to go on the offense, but choose to play defense, that’s a bad sign for their position,” Walizer, an assistant teaching professor of communication in the College of Media, Communication and Information, said. “It’s also a sign maybe they’re trying to play these political games, as opposed to being a good debater.”

Walizer was one of nearly a dozen panelists speaking at a voter engagement fair put on by CMCI, ��Ƶ Student Government and the Office of the Chancellor, in association with ��Ƶ Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs. ��Ƶ 150 students attended on Tuesday night to ask questions about politics and elections, register to vote, and learn how to become involved in local elections.

Walizer was invited to participate because of his expertise in debate. He captained his high school debate team and has extensive experience coaching debaters, and said, “I can very firmly state that I have never seen a presidential or vice presidential debate that was a good debate.”

That’s because politicians rarely play offense, which Walizer described as constructing arguments and showing why your side is right. Instead, they play defense—deconstructing arguments and saying why the other side is wrong.

Three panels answered questions submitted by students ahead of time, which covered issues such as the role social media plays in political messaging, how ideology plays out with voters, and how students can involve themselves and help ensure electoral integrity.

Not taking sides

Leah Sprain, an associate professor of communication and director of the university’s Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement, co-moderated the event and frequently praised the quality of questions that students contributed.

Sprain studies democratic engagement, particularly how to support the ways people come together to make decisions on public issues—enabling participation, designing better meetings or rethinking civic norms. When she has worked to help other groups structure their meetings more effectively, she found participants may assume more knowledge about a particular issue than they actually possess.

“They wanted to hear more about how this election would have consequences throughout their lives,” Sprain said. “They were asking about how to make sense of politics, versus just taking sides on issues. That surprised me.”

Of nearly 200 student registrants, dozens submitted questions, “which is a proportion of interest you don’t typically see, especially when some people are registering for things like extra course credit.”

Some of the liveliest discussion concerned social media’s capacity for good and harm, through generative artificial intelligence, advertising and the like. Sandra Ristovska, associate professor of media studies, and Alex Siegel, associate professor of political science, said elections have always been shaped by new technologies. Siegel said the railroad and telegraph helped create a national audience for Abraham Lincoln by offering more timely coverage of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

“They were asking about how to make sense of politics, versus just taking sides on issues. That surprised me.”
Leah Sprain, associate professor, communication

Bogus content isn’t new, Ristovska said, and recent research suggests we’re good at not letting it influence how we vote, but in India’s elections earlier this year, “deepfakes did contribute to sexual harassment of women, the intimidation of journalists and the intimidation of human rights activists in the country,” she said. “We need to be paying more attention to those things.”

Michaele Ferguson, an associate professor of political science, talked about an essay she has students write at the start of her undergraduate course on modern ideologies. Each student describes his or her ideology; she consistently finds students support a mix of free-market economics and social justice issues, like reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights.

That’s not a coalition you typically see in the United States, she said, as those issues are claimed, respectively, by the right and left of the spectrum. Ferguson said she’s intrigued by Vice President Kamala Harris’ attempt to signal support for both camps “as a way to peel away voters who would otherwise sit out elections or vote Republican.”

“It’s really exciting to me to see her doing the very thing that my class exercise would tell you is the strategy to win an election in the United States.”

Other presenters included Chuck Plunkett, director of ��Ƶ News Corps; Toby Hopp, associate professor of advertising; Patrick Deneen, a visiting scholar at the university’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization; Molly Fitzpatrick (PolSci’11), Boulder County clerk; and junior Grace Covney, a tri-executive with ��Ƶ Student Government.

Learning to lead through government

Tyler Rowan, another ��ƵSG tri-executive and a junior studying international affairs, said he hoped the energy of the room translated into active participants in the election.

He got into student government not for partisan reasons, he said, but because “I wanted to make the most out of school and learn how to lead. Student government has taught me that—it’s taken a majority of my time, but I’m very passionate about it and it’s the best decision I ever made.”

That youthful energy was exciting for Walizer to see, as well.

“The emotional intelligence students need to have to be asking things about how do I engage in politics in a way that’s healthy, how do I have conversations with my roommates in a way that’s respectful—those are not things I’ve seen asked in a situation like this before,” he said.

In addition to being open to all ��Ƶ Boulder students, the discussion was livestreamed to audiences at Colorado Mesa University, in Grand Junction, and Fort Lewis College, in Durango. It was followed by a live viewing of the vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz.

Lori Bergen, founding dean of CMCI, kicked off the event by encouraging students to seek out difficult conversations as a way to learn and grow.

“On our campus, we really are in a place where difficult conversations can and should occur,” Bergen said. “When we approach those with courage and curiosity and care and consistency, that’s when learning and growth and progress really happen.”

CMCI faculty panelists praised students for raising thoughtful, serious, nonpartisan questions about how to be active citizens.

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Make it STOP: Does replying to spam texts from politicians really block them?

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:21:47 +0000

Make it STOP: Does replying to spam texts from politicians really block them? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/26/2024 - 14:21

By Joe Arney
Illustration by Dana Heimes

Think your phone’s blowing up with spam text messages from candidates and campaigns?

Buckle up—you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Federal Election Commission’s final pre-election filing deadline for campaigns is Oct. 24. Expect a ton of texts as that date approaches, said Bridget Barrett, an assistant professor of advertising at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information.

What can you do to dodge the digital deluge? Not much, she said.

“This has been an extremely contentious election season,” said Barrett, who studies digital marketing and political communication. “Campaigns are chasing every advantage right now, and as long as texting continues to work, they’ll keep doing it.”

There’s no single way most people wind up on a list to receive campaign texts. Usually, she said, you gave money at some point, or you signed up for something without realizing that you were giving your number to a political organization. It might also be through a merchandise sale, or if you fill out an online poll.

“There are different national rules and state laws around list swapping among different companies and fundraising organizations, and many different data privacy laws at different levels—but once you’re on a list, you’re likely to get texts from people you did not directly opt in with,” she said. “It’s hard because there are so many ways for your data to be collected and then shared.”

“Campaigns are chasing every advantage right now, and as long as texting continues to work, they’ll keep doing it.”
Bridget Barrett, assistant professor, advertising

There are a few steps consumers can take to silence the annoying alerts. Replying STOP every time you get one of these messages will, eventually, cut down on the number of texts you get, “though it probably won’t stop them altogether,” she said.

Another step is to be discerning about giving out your information. “Consider using services where you can create burner email addresses, and think twice before handing over your phone number,” she said.

Barrett also advised consumers to register their phones through the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call registry, though candidates and campaigns are exempt from the protections it offers. Voters can also update their registrations to remove their phone numbers; however, she said, that is unlikely to be a source for texts like these.

Longer term, Barrett is watching the arms race between phones and campaigns—especially how political camps will respond as mobile service providers and handset manufacturers introduce better spam filters to protect user data.

She’s also interested to see whether campaigns start limiting this kind of outreach, especially if they see it’s turning people off.

“No one is concerned about that right now, because they’re still seeing a return on their investment,” she said. “There might be a postmortem in the future to look at whether this is sustainable—on the right, we did see some burnout and a decrease in donations after the 2016 election—but right now, the only concern is getting people elected.”

A CMCI expert offers advice on taking back your phone this election season.

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We’re not going to agree. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:22:24 +0000

We’re not going to agree. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/19/2024 - 09:22

By Joe Arney

How do you get that neighbor, relative or coworker to change their mind about abortion, gun control or immigration?

You won’t. And Matthew Koschmann wishes you’d stop trying.

The associate professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information said our personal experiences should have taught us by now that those who don’t agree with us won’t be swayed by us correcting the information that’s led them to their beliefs.

“If anything, it’s the opposite,” Koschmann said. “We live in a very information rich—if not gluttonous—environment, and more information does not necessarily make us change our minds. … Most of us don’t say, ‘Oh, thank you for correcting me on my assumptions about the world.’”

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk to each other, a theme Koschmann returned to during Monday’s Difficult Dialogues series hosted by the university’s Center for Humanities & the Arts. He was part of a panel examining political polarization and how to stay good neighbors at a time of deep division in the United States.

“If you can’t talk about something, you can’t fix it,” said Jennifer Ho, director of the center, in opening the discussion. “So, how do we find a way forward—how do we stay good neighbors, no matter what results happen in November or in January?”

Polarization and the press

“If we bring it back to experience, it can be a moment of sharing, rather than a moment of debating positions of things that are very personal to us—which is very difficult.”
Angie Chuang, associate professor, journalism

The panel also featured Angie Chuang, an associate professor of journalism at CMCI and a former journalist whose research looks at race and identity, especially as presented by the media.

“The news media is part of the problem,” she said. “It informs people, and creates this rich source of information, but it oftentimes polarizes people.”

It’s a problem that’s arguably gotten worse in the digital age, as the number of publications and platforms has mushroomed. Instead of the mid-19th century penny presses, clickbait proliferates through alternative news sites.

“The news media is not there to improve our national dialog or improve our nuanced understanding,” Chuang said. “There are individual journalists who are trying really hard, and there are organizations trying to fight this—but as a marketplace, it is trying to get advertising money. Understand that, and you become a savvier media consumer.”

Chuang and Koschmann were joined on the panel by Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, as well as moderator Michaele Ferguson, an associate professor in the university’s department of political science.

If you’ve tried to have conversations with people who don’t share your views, you know how difficult the proposition can be. Chuang said our social identities—race, gender, sexuality, religion and others—are seen as essential to who we are, so when that becomes the topic, discussion quickly veers off course.

“If I were to say, ‘Michelle, your views on the economy and foreign trade are just totally ignorant, and I can’t even understand why you think the way you do,’” Chuang said to Ferguson, “it comes off differently than if I say, ‘Michelle your views on race are completely ignorant.’

“If I say, tell me your experience based on your identities, that is a different conversation than, ‘Why is your position on policing or affirmative action the way it is?’ If we bring it back to experience, it can be a moment of sharing, rather than a moment of debating positions of things that are very personal to us—which is very difficult.”

Defusing disagreements

As the mayor of a city with a well-publicized progressive bent, you might expect Brockett’s days are spent on friendly territory, but spoke about the difficult conversations he’s had with residents on any number of issues. He defuses such situations by offering to learn about how the other person formed their viewpoint, and sharing materials that demonstrate where he’s coming from.

It doesn’t always work, he said. Once, he sent a peer-reviewed paper to a resident to shine light on an issue, which she countered by sending a thesis proposal from a master’s student that she found online.

“On almost any topic, you can find something to support a position, any position, somewhere on the internet,” Brockett said. Online, he said, “many of us are accustomed to getting feedback loop, hearing the same viewpoints over and over again—and then it becomes inconceivable to you how other people might think something different.”

The panelists agreed that those difficult conversations are worth having because when you find a moment of connection, it’s authentic and validating. Just don’t go in expecting to bring people around to your ideological corner.

“If you are interested in being influential and persuasive in implementing change in your community, the most effective thing you can do is not explicitly try to change people’s minds,” Koschmann said. “Try to live a beautiful life of human flourishing, that is attractive and winsome, that draws people to you—and then people say, ‘What’s going on, tell me more about your interests and why you’re happy.’”

Two CMCI professors took part in a community roundtable to explore how we can stay good neighbors amid intense polarization.

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Data dump: Meta killed CrowdTangle. What does it mean for researchers, reporters?

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 17:54:54 +0000

Data dump: Meta killed CrowdTangle. What does it mean for researchers, reporters? Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/23/2024 - 11:54

By Joe Arney

In Brian C. Keegan’s telling, the loss of tools like CrowdTangle and Pushshift—which allow researchers to study user behavior and how information is shared on social media—is like particle physicists one day waking up to find out they can no longer access the Large Hadron Collider.

“I have grad students interested in how online extremism works, the consequences of political polarization, whether content moderation is actually effective at stopping hate speech,” said Keegan, an assistant professor of information science at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. “To be able to understand questions like these requires access to data from these platforms—and restricting it imperils our ability to be impactful in our work.”

Earlier this month, Meta announced it was shutting down CrowdTangle, one of the most effective tools for understanding how Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms work and how disinformation is created and spread on the company’s platforms.

That’s a blow to researchers, watchdogs and journalists who will be less able to track how disinformation, hate speech and other poisons pollute the social media atmosphere—but in the context of business decisions, there are strong financial and reputational benefits to obfuscating its operations. Not only is the platform sitting on mountains of data that can be licensed to companies building models to train generative artificial intelligence, Keegan said, “it’s easy to imagine a world where Meta doesn’t want its name attached to a paper about how neo-Nazis are using Facebook groups to organize themselves.”

The economic case for ‘privacy washing’

“The loss of these data tools imperils our ability to do that kind of scholarship and is ultimately a detriment to democracy and civic institutions.”
Brian C. Keegan, assistant professor, information science

It’s becoming a more common story, as platforms that once made their data public are increasingly erecting paywalls, blocking APIs or cutting deals with A.I. companies. Often, those platforms mask their motivations behind what Keegan calls “privacy washing,” citing concerns about safeguarding user data in justifying the removal of key features for research labs, newsrooms and the public.

This particular example comes at an inauspicious time, with digital disinformation ratcheting up ahead of Election Day and more Americans than ever getting their news from social media.

“To address the challenges we’re up against, that are happening in real time, that we see journalists trying to grapple with, requires different models of publicly engaged scholarship, beyond just academic papers that take a year or two to publish,” Keegan said. “The loss of these data tools imperils our ability to do that kind of scholarship and is ultimately a detriment to democracy and civic institutions.”

It’s not just the media or public at large that are affected. When these tools are taken offline, it hurts the quality of the online communities, as well. Keegan has volunteered as a moderator on Reddit, and said PushShift—which Reddit limited access to beginning last summer—was vital to forming context about user behavior that could determine whether someone was having a bad day, or whether that person was truly a bad actor.

Classroom impact

That’s a challenge as a moderator, but it’s having a bigger impact on his professional life, both as a researcher and teacher. He can use case studies from the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle to show how fake news circulated, and the role of actors like Cambridge Analytica, “but that data and those strategies are now eight years old, and those contexts no longer exist—we’re in a different world now,” Keegan said. “Can we prepare our students to be better engineers, managers, artists and citizens with such old case studies?”

Meta purchased Crowdtangle in 2016, and Keegan acknowledged that the tech platform isn’t required to make its data publicly available. “But researchers have built our careers, infrastructure and programs on assumptions that we’d have access to these tools, so to have that rug pulled from under us has been profoundly disruptive to our ability to provide transparency, engage and ask critical questions,” he said.

Keegan hopes to learn more through a grant he’s pursuing from the National Science Foundation. If awarded, he hopes to study the consequences of actions like Meta’s in the scientific research community.

“When that data disappears, how does that impact scholarship?” he asked. “Can we measure how research methods changing, the way we collaborate, the strategies we’ll need to develop to make sure we’re able to ask critical questions?”

Without access to social media data, disinformation and hate speech may get easier to spread—and harder to detect.

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Class acts: CMCI’s new faculty bring new ideas on A.I., identity, culture to Boulder

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 20:16:32 +0000

Class acts: CMCI’s new faculty bring new ideas on A.I., identity, culture to Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/22/2024 - 14:16

By Joe Arney
Photo by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm'18)

When asked why they choose the University of Colorado Boulder, students and faculty alike tend to cite its location, along with academic prestige, research successes and access to opportunity.

That was a big draw for Joe Izaguirre III, as well. But it wasn’t the mountains he had in mind when he signed on as an assistant professor of communication at the College of Media, Communication and Information.

Izaguirre studies how political power influences Latin identities from the lens of public rhetoric and rhetorical histories. Plenty of the source material for his book includes texts produced by activists who lived in the Colorado area.

“I hadn’t thought of this, but I’ll be able to hand-deliver the book to families who participated, instead of just dropping it in the mail,” he said. “It feels like an opportunity to have a more personal connection to the things I’ve been studying.”

Izaguirre is among the seven new tenure-track faculty joining CMCI this fall. The college also is welcoming seven nontenure-track faculty, including new appointments for professors who previously held different roles.

“I’m so excited to welcome our new faculty to CMCI,” said Lori Bergen, founding dean of the college. “As the media, communication, design and information landscape continues to dramatically change, the new perspectives these professors bring will ensure our students get a cutting-edge, immediately applicable education.”

“It was a great experience, as an instructor, to be able to work with students who were that interested in learning and participating.”
Dinfin K. Mulupi, assistant professor, journalism

Design thinking

For the first time, this year’s incoming cohort includes faculty from the environmental design program, which formally integrated with CMCI over the summer. Though there are no changes for current students, faculty in the program are enthusiastic about the chance to collaborate with colleagues eager to explore new applications for their work.

Martín Paddack, a teaching associate professor who joins CMCI and ENVD following seven years at Howard University, has a wealth of interests around architecture and sustainability, including participatory design—“understanding how we identify where there is need and trying to create connections with community for design.”

“I always try to inculcate into students that it’s not about coming up with an idea and saying, here’s the answer,” said Paddack, who also is founder and principal of the Washington, D.C.-based DesignMAP firm. “It comes down to communication—asking the right questions and really listening so you can identify where the needs are. If you are prescriptive, and don’t listen to your community, that’s when design starts to fail.”

Paddack brings a diverse set of interests—architecture, sustainability, social responsibility, writing, painting, woodworking—to the classroom, as well as a global perspective: He was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Peru and Uruguay before moving to D.C. as a boy. He also taught in South America and completed a painting residency in Barcelona. He helped set up a fabrication lab at Howard to ensure students developed both practical architecture experience.

“That’s something I really like about environmental design at ��Ƶ—the focus on how we can apply sustainable principles across four different areas, and an emphasis on doing hands-on fabrication so that students learn the theory, but also how to apply it,” he said.

‘Great experience’ connecting with students

Most new faculty who join CMCI say they feel an instant rapport with professors in their departments, which makes the college feel like home well before they start. That was true for Dinfin K. Mulupi, as well, but she felt an equally strong connection to the journalism students she taught as part of the interview process.

“I was fascinated by their interest in learning the research behind journalism practices,” said Mulupi, a native of Kenya who came to CMCI via the PhD program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

A discussion she led critiquing news coverage of immigration, Mulupi said, sparked so much insightful discussion that she felt bad moving on to the next topic.

“It was a great experience, as an instructor, to be able to work with students who were that interested in learning and participating,” she said. “When you’re a professor, you are creating knowledge with your students, and they were so attentive and involved that I know it will be a privilege to teach them.”

Mulupi’s research looks at sexism and sexual harassment in newsrooms, and came from working on her thesis as the #MeToo movement gained momentum. She was among the first scholars to explore the topic in Kenyan newsrooms; her work has since expanded to more than 20 countries.

It’s an important topic at a time when the news industry is contracting, as “when you have a newsroom culture with sexism, harassment, racism and bigotry, you lose talented journalists who don’t feel safe and included,” she said. “I am also focusing on solutions, especially exploring how we can build safer, more inclusive newsrooms that produce news content that serves the diverse needs and interests of a wider audience.”

Pooja Iyer, who joined CMCI from the University of Texas Austin, where she completed her doctoral work in the spring. She’s also doing timely work, researching the ethics around how advertising firms collect and use data in the course of connecting to consumers.

“In my industry days, I realized my own cognitive dissonance—asking how granular we could get on a target audience while having ad blockers on my computer,” said Iyer, an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design. “I believe the advertising world can play a more ethical role in how and why they’re using data, and how they’re protecting customers—because there isn’t enough literacy around this.”

It’s something her student will need to consider as they graduate, she said.

“Whether you’re in creative, account management, media planning, it doesn’t matter—you will be working with data,” Iyer said. “So, how can we best empower you to be ethical about the use of that data? As educators, that really needs to be front and center for our students.”

Incoming professors bring an interest in cutting-edge topics at a time when the media landscape is undergoing dramatic change.

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Crushing creativity? That’s one way to think different

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:27:15 +0000

Crushing creativity? That’s one way to think different Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/21/2024 - 10:27

By Joe Arney

As a college student 20 years ago, Steven Frost had a poster of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign hanging in their Alfred University dorm room.

That campaign touted the company’s quest to be something other than a tech titan. It was about supporting creatives like Frost, who saw computers as tools to unleash their artistic potential. Advertising to support the campaign highlighted icons like Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso and Amelia Earhart to celebrate the “crazy ones” whose vision and determination set them apart from the rest.

For Frost, one of Apple’s latest ads is threatening to undo a lot of the goodwill the “Think Different” campaign created in the artistic community.

The “Crush!” ad is 68 seconds of watching symbols of humanity’s creative achievements—sculpture, paint, music, film, video games, novels, photography—destroyed in an industrial compactor, which then opens to reveal the company’s shiny new iPad Pro.

“I can see the logic behind the ad,” said Frost, assistant professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. It looked to them like an attempt to play off the viral videos showing everyday objects crushed under car tires—“but in the current climate, this was a bad idea, and super tone deaf.”

“Everything exists in a context, and in the context of a place where A.I. is literally replacing creatives, this was not the moment for this ad.”
Steven Frost, assistant professor, media studies

The current climate, of course, is one where artists are forced to ponder a future where generative artificial intelligence can create screenplays, images, designs and so on with just a few user prompts. In May, the company took the unusual step of apologizing for the ad and reportedly canceled plans for a national television campaign.

“What’s interesting is, less than two months after the ad comes out, Apple announces they’re integrating ChatGPT into iOS,” Frost said. “Everything exists in a context, and in the context of a place where A.I. is literally replacing creatives, this was not the moment for this ad.”

Seeing the use case for A.I.

Frost is not only an expert in media studies, they also are a creator who works in both digital and physical media. They are an accomplished textile artist who brings a passion for weaving to classes as well as Slay the Runway, an annual fashion creation and exhibition event for Boulder-area LGBTQ+ teens.

But while they’re critical of the Apple ad, Frost is more upbeat on the use of generative A.I. than you might expect. In fact, they worked on a project in 2016 that put a novel twist on speed dating. Called “Screen Dating,” the exhibit featured 12 screens that participants could cycle through, interacting with “celebrities”—actually chatbots trained on the works of Gertrude Stein, RuPaul, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others—to see what it would be like to interact with an algorithm.

Notably, exhibit creators Frost and Joel Swanson—a faculty affiliate at CMCI—fed the chatbots text, rather than engage in the wide-scale scraping OpenAI and others have used to teach their chatbots.

“There are definitely reasons to be suspicious of it,” Frost said. “But while I know it’s a really unpopular opinion, in order to stay relevant, we all need to evolve. Otherwise, what happens to artists when we can just ask a machine to make a postcard, a poster? Those people are going to have to learn new skills, learn how to be part of a collaborative process with those machines.”

Transparency on teaching models

Part of that, of course, involves those technology companies being more honest about the tools they’re creating—their potential to displace creatives, yes, but also how they were trained. Frost envisions A.I. as a collaborative tool in line with The Jetsons or Knight Rider, as opposed to Black Mirror. It’s no surprise, then, that they want companies to be more collaborative, as well.

“What if tech companies were transparent about how and where their chatbot was trained?” they said. “It’s like if I’m buying junk food—if I see sugar free, I know it’s unhealthy, but it makes me consider that it was manufactured, that there was a process. So, for an A.I. model—what’s in it? Is it soy? Where was it grown?”

Collaboration with companies is also important, they said, because relying on regulation is not the only option.

“At this point, it’s more like thinking of different ways of approaching how those models are trained, and making sure that creatives whose works are getting pulled into these learning models get paid for the work they’ve done,” Frost said.

Perhaps that’s what most troubles them about that Apple ad. Because its tone reminded Frost of another commercial that seized the public imagination 40 years ago.

“The ‘1984’ ad was a breakthrough in that it reimagined what computers could be used for, and a literal breakthrough in that there’s violence and destruction at the center of it,” Frost said. “This ad is clearly referencing ‘1984.’ In a sense, they’re showing how far they’ve come and that they do all these things right, but the tone couldn’t be further from the young, upstart artist protagonist in the original ad.”

A creator and scholar says a much-hated Apple ad is standing in for a larger conversation about how tech companies build and deploy A.I.

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Open(AI) and shut: What ChatGPT deals with media outlets mean for the future of news

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 19:57:13 +0000

Open(AI) and shut: What ChatGPT deals with media outlets mean for the future of news Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/07/2024 - 13:57

By Joe Arney
Photo of Patrick Ferrucci, below, by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

Patrick Ferrucci has seen this movie before.

A former reporter and current chair of the journalism department at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, Ferrucci studies the institutions, businesses and technologies that are rapidly reshaping the discipline.

So when he learned The Atlantic and Vox Media agreed last week to license their journalism to ChatGPT creator OpenAI, he thought back to agreements traditional publishers once signed with Facebook, Google and Twitter—deals that augmented audiences while wrecking revenue.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Maybe they see a monetary infusion at what’s undeniably a difficult financial time for the media. But we’ve seen this before, and each time, that financial infusion doesn’t benefit the actual journalism.”

ChatGPT was hailed as a breakthrough when it arrived in the winter of 2022, able to respond to questions and create content that was seen as a value add for businesses and individuals. Some of the shine has since worn off as creators and artists have accused the company of stealing their work to train the chatbot to write more convincingly—the large-language models ChatGPT are trained on enormous amounts of data that come from novelists, poets, journalists, even regular users of social media platforms who post content and comments.

“We’ve seen this before, and each time, that financial infusion doesn’t benefit the actual journalism.”
Patrick Ferrucci, chair, journalism

While he criticized the short-term benefits at the potential cost of long-term viability, Ferrucci said there could be other advantages for media companies that sign up with OpenAI.

“It could allow the journalism industry to get an understanding of what those tools can do,” he said. “And if they get a head start with those tools, and learn to implement them into their processes early on, it will give them a leg up on companies that fought against it.”

A different tactic: See you in court

Representing those companies fighting against it is The New York Times, which last year sued OpenAI after changing its terms of service to prevent A.I. systems from scraping its work. At the time, Robin Burke, a professor of information science at CMCI, called ChatGPT’s honeymoon period “a free ride, because nobody was paying attention to what they were doing. Now, I think it makes sense that the organizations producing content are thinking, ‘Do I really agree with this as a usage of my work?’”

It’s a fair question, but Ferrucci said he expects we’ll see more deals like this going forward.

“There are companies that can do investigative journalism because it doesn’t matter if you sue them,” he said. “And there are others who essentially self-censor because the threat of a lawsuit, no matter how frivolous, could destroy the business. If you show these news companies some money, I don’t think all of them can afford to look away.”

Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at CMCI and an expert in ethical and legal issues surrounding technology, said of all the copyright suits against OpenAI, the Times may have the most compelling case, since the paper was able to show examples where ChatGPT appeared to respond to user prompts with copyrighted material from the newspaper.

But for her, the most interesting issue isn’t copyright.

“I think the more profound thing is this idea that you used my work to build a technology that will replace me,” she said. “That’s why so many people are upset. It feels like a violation—you’re using my art to build this technology so that you don’t have to pay artists anymore.”

Licensing deals OpenAI signed with The Atlantic and Vox Media have CMCI experts asking questions.

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