faculty

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.

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.

“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.”

***

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.”

***

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 ��«��Ƶ, 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.”

***

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.

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.

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

Bryan Semaan

“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 ��«��Ƶ 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 ��«��Ƶ Dushanbe Teahouse.

They’ve been learning the traditional art of ornamental painting—nakkoshi—from Maruf Mirakhmatov, who is visiting ��«��Ƶ 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 ��«��Ƶ’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 beloved ��«��Ƶ landmark is getting a refresh thanks to students who are touching up the complex paint job under the guidance of an artist from ��«��Ƶ’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 ��«��Ƶ.

“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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Questions about A.I.? Let’s Chat

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:16:06 +0000

Questions about A.I.? Let’s Chat Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 10/29/2023 - 18:16

By Joe Arney

When tools like ChatGPT entered the mainstream last winter, it was a moment of reckoning for professionals in every industry. Suddenly, the artificial intelligence revolution was a lot more real than most had imagined. Were we at the dawn of an era where professional communicators were about to become extinct?

Almost a year after ChatGPT’s debut, we’re still here—but still curious about how to be effective communicators, creators and storytellers in this brave new world. To examine what role CMCI plays in ensuring students graduate prepared to lead in a world where these tools are perhaps more widely used than understood, we invited Kai Larsen, associate professor of information systems at CU’s Leeds School of Business and a courtesy faculty member in CMCI, to moderate a discussion with associate professors Casey Fiesler, of information science, and Rick Stevens, of media studies, about the ethical and practical uses of A.I. and the value of new—and old—skills in a fast-changing workplace.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

"A.I. can seem like magic, and if it seems like magic, you don’t understand what it can do or not do.”
—Casey Fiesler

Faculty in conversation

Kai R. Larsen is an associate professor of information systems at the Leeds School of Business. He is an expert in machine learning and natural language processing whose thought leadership has been featured in the most influential academic journals.

Casey Fiesler is associate chair for graduate studies in information science. She shares her insights in technology ethics, internet law and policy, and online communities both in scholarly journals and in the public, especially through social media. She is a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Computer Science.

Rick Stevens is associate dean of undergraduate education at CMCI. His work explores ideological formation and media dissemination, including how technology infrastructure affects the delivery of messages, communication technology policy, and how media and technology platforms are changing public discourse.

Larsen: It’s exciting to be here with both of you to talk a bit about A.I. Maybe to get us started, I can ask you to tell us a little about how you see the landscape today.

Fiesler: I think A.I. has become a term that is so broadly used that it barely has any meaning anymore. A lot of the conversation right now is around generative A.I., particularly large language models like ChatGPT. But I do see a need for some precision here, because there are other uses of A.I. that we see everywhere. It’s a recommender system deciding what you see next on Facebook, it’s a machine learning algorithm, it’s doing all kinds of decision-making in your life.

Stevens: I think it’s important to talk about which tools we’re discussing in an individual moment. In our program, we see a lot of students using software like ChatGPT to write research papers. We allow some of that for very specific reasons, but we also are trying to get students to think about what this software is good at and not good at, because usually their literacy about it is not very good.

Larsen: Let’s talk about that some more, especially with a focus on generative A.I., whether large language models or image creation-type A.I. What should we be teaching, and how should we be teaching it, to prepare our students for work environments where A.I. proficiency will be required?

Stevens: What we’re trying to do when we use A.I. is to have students understand what those tools are doing, because they already have the literacy to write, to research and analyze content themselves. They’re just expanding their capacity or their efficiency in doing certain tasks, not replacing their command of text or research.

Fiesler: There’s also that understanding of the limitations of these tools. A.I. can seem like magic, and if it seems like magic, you don’t understand what it can do or not do. This is an intense simplification, but ChatGPT is closer to being a fancy autocomplete than it is a search engine. It’s just a statistical probability of what word comes next. And if you know that, then you don’t necessarily expect it to always be correct or always be better at a task than a human.

Stevens: Say a student is writing a research paper and is engaged in a particular set of research literature—is the A.I. drawing from the most recent publications, or the most cited? How does peer review fit into a model of chat generation? These are the kinds of questions that really tell us these tools aren’t as good as what students sometimes think.

Larsen: We’re talking a lot about technology literacy here, but are there any other aspects of literacy you think are especially pertinent when it comes to A.I. models?

Fiesler: There’s also information literacy, which is incredibly important when you are getting information you cannot source. If you search for something on Google, you have a source for that information that you can evaluate, whereas if I ask a question in ChatGPT, I have to fact-check that answer independently.

Stevens: I’m glad you said that, because in class, if a student has a research project, they can declare they’ll use A.I. to assist them, but they get a different rubric for grading purposes. If they use assistance to more quickly build their argument, they must have enough command of the literature to know when that tool generates a mistake.

Fiesler: And educators have to have an understanding of how these tools work, as well. Would you stop your students from using spell check? Of course not—unless they’re taking a spelling test. The challenge is that sometimes it’s a spelling test, and sometimes it’s not. It’s up to educators to figure out when something is a spelling test, and clearly articulate that to the students—as well as the value of what they’re learning, and why I’m teaching you to spell before letting you use spell check.

Expanded Remarks

Star Wars: The Frog Awakens

Larsen: That’s an interesting thought. What about specific skills like critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity? How will we change the way we teach those concepts as a result of A.I.?

Fiesler: I think critique and collaboration become even more important. ChatGPT is very good at emulating creativity. If you ask it to write a fan fiction where Kermit the Frog is in Star Wars, it will do that. And the fact that it can do that is pretty cool, but it’s not good, it tends to be pretty boring. Charlie Brooker said he had ChaptGPT write an episode of Black Mirror, and of course it was bad—it’s just a jumble of tropes. The more we play with these systems, the more you come to realize how important human creativity is.

Stevens: You know, machine learning hasn’t historically been pointed at creativity—the idea is to have a predictable and consistent set of responses. But we’re trying to teach our students to develop their own voice and their own individuality, and that is never going to be something this version of tools will be good at emulating. Watching students fail because they think technology offers a shortcut can be a literacy opportunity. It lets you ask the student, are you just trying to get software to get you through this class—or are you learning how to write so that you can express yourself and be heard from among all the people being captured in the algorithm?

Larsen: It’s interesting listening to you both talk about creativity in the age of A.I. Can you elaborate? I’m especially interested in this historical view that creativity is one of the things that A.I. would never get right, which might be a little less true today than it was a year ago.

Fiesler: Well, I think it depends on your definition of creativity. I think A.I. is certainly excellent at emulating creativity, at least, like Kermit and Star Wars, and the things A.I. art generators can do. One of the things art generators do very well is giving me an image in the style of this artist. The output is amazing. Is that creative? Not really, in my opinion. But there are ways you could use it where it would be good at generating output that, if created by a human, people would see as creative.

Stevens: We have courses in which students work on a new media franchise pitch, which includes writing, comic book imagery, animation, art—they’re pitching a transmedia output, so it’s going to have multiple modes. You could waste two semesters teaching a strong writer how to draw—which may never happen—or, we can say, let’s use software to generate the image you think matches the text you’re pitching. That’s something we want students to think about—when do they need to be creative, and when do they need to say, I’ve got four hours to produce something, and if this helps my group understand our project, I don’t have to spend those four hours drawing.

"It’s not that A.I. brings new problems to the table, but it can absolutely exacerbate existing problems to new heights.”
—Rick Stevens

Risky Business

Larsen: What about media and journalism? Do we risk damaging our reputation or credibility when we bring these tools into the news?

Stevens: Absolutely. The first time a major publication puts out a story that gets fact checked incorrectly because someone did not check the A.I. output, that is going to damage not just that publication, but the whole industry. But we’re already seeing that damage coming from other technological innovations—this is just one among many.

Fiesler: I think misinformation and disinformation are the most obvious kinds of problems here. We’ve already had examples of deepfakes that journalists have covered as real, and so journalists need to be exceptionally careful about the sources of images and information they report on.

Stevens: It’s not that A.I. brings new problems to the table, but it can absolutely exacerbate existing problems to new heights if we’re not careful on what the checks and balances are.

Larsen: How about beyond the news? What are some significant trends communicators and media professionals should be keeping an eye out for?

Stevens: We need to train people to be more critical at looking not just where content comes from, but how it’s generated along certain biases. We can get a chatbot to emulate a conversation, but that doesn’t mean it can identify racist tropes that we’re trying to push out of our media system. A lot of what we do, critically, is to push back against the mainstream, to try to change our culture for the better. I’m not sure that algorithms drawing from the culture that we’re trying to change are going to have the same values in them to change anything.

Expanded Remarks

Capitalism and computational power

Larsen: What’s a big question we’re not asking about A.I. and our work?

Stevens: I think the biggest question is, what does A.I. free us up to do that we haven’t been able to do before?

Fiesler: Agreed. Let’s say A.I. and automation really could replace a lot of jobs. So because of ChatGPT, you now need two copywriters to do the job of four copywriters. You could fire two copywriters, but another option is, your four copywriters work 20 hours a week instead of 40 and still get paid the same. Because it’s not like you’re making less money, or you put resources into building your own A.I. If this technology can replace some things we’re doing, that shouldn’t mean we don’t have jobs, it should just mean we have to work less.

Stevens: It’s actually in cultural producers’ interest for something like this to happen. There’s this assumption that, oh, we can do the work of four people with two people now, so let’s fire two of them. Well, better rested, more thoughtful workers can produce better, more thoughtful content. The content we create forms our social identity, so the more thoughtful we are, the better a society we’re going to have, because we’ve inspired people to think about their world differently.

Larsen: I have to tell you both, I’m very impressed with your level of optimism when it comes to A.I. Why don’t we end on an optimistic note, as well? What’s something you feel communicators should be excited about from the dawn of this new age of work?

Stevens: One thing communicators should be excited about is that these tools exist because the process of communication is valuable. Our ability to produce more culture is not a bad thing, we just want it to have a higher fidelity and have the values we want to have, and I think those are questions that thoughtful communicators can bring to the table and help shape.

Fiesler: I agree with that, as well. Young people in college are some of the most well positioned to make an impact on how this technology is going to influence our future, with the way decisions are made around how it’s actually going to change our lives and industries. There are ways in which some things that are happening are scary, but it’s an interesting time to be on the ground floor.

For A.I. to be useful, it needs to grow alongside communicators—not replace them. CMCI experts share their vision for a workplace with ChatGPT and other tools.

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#RecommenderSystems

Anonymous — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 03:52:26 +0000

#RecommenderSystems Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/27/2023 - 21:52

By Joe Arney

Digital recommender systems have long been a part of our lives. But those systems might be serving up inequality along with new music, viral videos and hot products.

Now, a leading expert on the technology powering these systems is turning his attention to the way news is recommended and shared.

“If a system only shows us the news stories of one group of people, we begin to think that is the whole universe of news we need to pay attention to,” said Robin Burke, professor and chair of the information science department.

Burke’s research studies bias in recommender systems, which tend to favor the most popular creators and products—usually at the expense of newcomers, underrepresented groups and, ultimately, consumers who have fewer choices. That’s problematic because these systems are proprietary, so researchers aren’t able to examine how they work.

“The people who do this kind of research in industry don’t publish very much about it, so we don’t know exactly what’s going on in terms of how their systems work, or how well they work,” he said.

A quick primer for the uninitiated: Recommender systems use data from individual subscribers to serve personalized content—art, news, commerce, politics—which may limit exposure to new ideas and influences.

It’s why the National Science Foundation awarded Burke and others, including associate professor Amy Voida, a nearly $1 million grant in 2021 to develop “fairness-aware” algorithms that blunt biases baked into recommender systems. And the NSF saw the potential to do something similar in news, leading to a $2 million grant earlier this year to build a platform for researchers eager to experiment with the artificial intelligence that powers news recommender systems.

A platform like this could be game-changing for academic researchers, who are locked out of the proprietary systems built and studied by tech and social media companies. And as more nontraditional providers become sources of news, understanding how these algorithms work is essential: You may think of TikTok as a place for music videos, but a Pew Research Center survey found one in four American adults under 30 get their news from the platform.

“We have put all this control over the public square of journalistic discourse into the hands of companies that don’t have any transparency or accountability relative to what they’re doing,” Burke said. “I think that’s dangerous. And so, it’s important to think about what the alternatives might look like.” That includes the business model itself, which is predicated on selling ads while keeping users on a platform.

If successful, this latest grant will build a robust system for live experiments on recommender systems that will eventually become self-funded through contributions from other researchers. He compared it to the way space telescopes and supercolliders have created a platform where experts can better understand the world around them.

“Unless you work at one of these companies, you don’t have any insight into how these systems work, or control over them,” Burke said. “I hope that, through this infrastructure, we’re able to understand how these things are governed, and for what objectives—and who gets to decide what those objectives are. That’s something I’m very interested in.”

Lisa Marshall (Jour, PolSci’94; MJour’22) contributed reporting.

Tech is shaping the way we understand the world around us. Do we understand the recommender systems influencing our worldview?

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#PatientInfluencers

Anonymous — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 03:40:23 +0000

#PatientInfluencers Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/27/2023 - 21:40

By Lisa Marshall (Jour, PolSci’94; MJour’22)

“Noticing a huge difference in my belly fat. It’s melting away!”

“Wildly happy after losing 70 pounds!”

“Just took my first dose. I’m nervous, but excited!”

In late 2022, TikTok was abuzz with such endorsements, delivered by hopeful dieters clutching blue syringes loaded with the diabetes drug-turned-celebrity “weight-loss miracle” Ozempic. The hashtag #Ozempic swiftly drew more than 1 billion views.

But as the craze went viral, diabetics worldwide faced dangerous shortages. Meanwhile, those using it off-label for its slimming qualities began reporting serious side effects, such as violent diarrhea and extreme facial thinning.

“This is a great example of the power of social media—and the unintended consequences,” said Erin Willis, associate professor of advertising, public relations and media design, and one of the few scholars studying a new kind of social media star—the patient influencer.

Her research has shown they often work closely with pharmaceutical companies, or are paid by them, and frequently offer advice about drugs even though they tend to lack medical expertise.

Ozempic is the most recent example of their power, but the phenomenon dates at least to 2015, when Kim Kardashian drew flack for endorsing a morning sickness drug, Diclegis, on Instagram without mentioning its many side effects. Federal regulators warned the drugmaker, the ad was taken down, and the government implemented new disclosure rules for influencers.

Eight years later, the phenomenon has continued to grow, bleeding into new platforms—like support groups for patients with specific medical conditions—where rules are open to interpretation and nearly impossible to enforce. That’s a concern for Willis: “There is virtually no research on this, and very little regulation.”

Willis has published some of the first academic papers exploring the patient influencer phenomenon, framing it as “the next frontier in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing.”

DTC marketing is the longstanding practice in the United States and New Zealand that allows drug companies to advertise to consumers, rather than through physicians. From a sales perspective, the practice is effective, according to Willis: 44% of patients who ask their doctor for a drug they see on TV get it.

But, as always, when it comes to social media, there are plenty of unanswered questions. “The fact that patients with no medical training are broadly sharing drug information should alarm us,” she said.

In her work, Willis interviewed dozens of influencers to better understand their motivations. While the influencers she spoke to appeared to have good intentions, she said some might omit crucial information, such as the availability of a cheaper generic option, or unintentionally disseminate misinformation. And consumers might be unable to distinguish between a personal post and a paid endorsement.

That said, she does see some upsides. Patients often know more than their doctors about what it’s like to experience a specific health condition, and sharing their personal experiences on social media can be comforting for others, while potentially helping them discover new coping strategies.

And unlike other forms of DTC advertising, social media enables followers to weigh in with comments sharing both positive and negative experiences with a specific therapy.

Willis hopes her new research will ultimately lead to a set of best practices for both patient influencers and the companies they work with.

“There is both value and risk here,” she said. “Like anything, it has the potential to become dangerous if we’re not careful.”

Take two posts and call me in the morning: Social media’s new role at the pharmacy.

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Building a better ‘bionic pancreas’

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 16:12:13 +0000

Building a better ‘bionic pancreas’ Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/04/2023 - 10:12

How smart watches and mobile apps could transform life for Type 1 diabetics

By Lisa Marshall (Jour, PolSci'94, MJour’22)
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

In the not-so-distant future of Casey Fiesler’s imagination, the complex and burdensome task of managing Type 1 diabetes will be easier.

Instead of counting carbs, doing math and fiddling with her pump multiple times per day, she could essentially set it and forget it, only occasionally receiving nudges via her phone to take action.

When the geolocation device on her phone detects she’s at a restaurant, it might nudge her to snap a picture of what she’s ordering, then signal the pump attached to her abdomen to deliver just the right amount of insulin to metabolize her meal.

When her digital calendar shows she is at a Pilates class and her smartwatch senses she’s exercising, her pump might back off on delivery of the blood-sugar-lowering hormone.

Throughout each day, a sophisticated algorithm will hum silently along, combining data from her wearable sensors and mobile apps with survey data about her habits and real-time glucose monitoring to help keep her blood-sugar in check.

“Anything that helps people be able to think about their diabetes less would be an improvement in their quality of life,” said Fiesler, an associate professor in the Department of Information Science who was diagnosed three years ago. “It’s something you have to think about constantly.”

With a new $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Fiesler, Information Science Associate Professor Stephen Voida and collaborators from computer science and CU Anschutz hope to develop a “person-centered artificial pancreas” that uses real-time cues from our devices to move us closer to replicating the real thing—all while taking into account privacy concerns patients might have.

“What can a smartwatch or phone sense about your physical location or your social context or your activity history to help the system be smarter?” asked Voida, who studies personal informatics. “We’re trying to make the system more aware of all the different things going on in the real world so that it can be a better partner in delivering insulin at appropriate times.”

A unique burden for young patients

Unlike with Type 2 diabetes, in which the body makes less insulin and grows resistant to it, with Type 1, the pancreas makes little to no insulin at all.

That’s problematic for the 1.3 million people who have it because insulin ushers sugar from the bloodstream into the muscles for energy. If we have too little insulin, glucose can linger in the bloodstream damaging tissues. If we have too much insulin or blood glucose levels dip too low, we can end up feeling weak, or worse.

The disease is typically diagnosed in childhood, tasking young people with a daunting obligation.

“They are suddenly responsible for thinking like a pancreas: They have to think about what their blood sugar is doing and whether or not they need insulin, and there’s not much room for error,” said Laurel Messer, an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Pediatrics at CU Anschutz and an original collaborator on the project.

Each year, a fair amount of patients end up in the hospital with a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis. Others have seizures from hypoglycemia. Tragically, some occasionally die.

“The amount of stress diabetes puts on top of already-stressful adolescence is tremendous,” said Messer, who recently took a position with Tandem Diabetes Care, a supporter of the project, to develop technological solutions to make their lives better.

The emerging artificial pancreas

Sriram Sankaranarayanan, a professor of computer science and project investigator, notes that diabetes care has already come a long way.

“Type 1 diabetes is one of the few diseases where the treatment could be technological,” he said. “It sits at the convergence of health, human behavior, computer science and mathematics.”

half of Type 1 diabetics, including Fiesler, already use continuous glucose monitors , which attach to the body to track blood sugar levels, minimizing the need for painful finger pricks.

Roughly two-thirds of adults with the disease use a pump, rather than self-injecting insulin multiple times per day.

Algorithmic advancements now enable the monitors to talk to the pumps in an automated system known as an artificial or “bionic” pancreas. The newest systems even allow users to check their levels and self-administer insulin from their cell phone. But what’s still missing is information from the outside world.

“The only thing the system knows without me telling it is what my blood sugar is,” Fiesler said.

That’s where the gadgets come in.

“Anything that helps people be able to think about their diabetes less would be an improvement in their quality of life. It’s something you have to think about constantly.

Casey Fiesler
Associate Professor

How technology could make life better

While existing artificial pancreases are helpful for those who can afford them, there’s still a significant lag time between what the glucose monitor senses and what the pump does.
As a result, individuals must calculate how many carbohydrates they plan to eat about a half-hour before each meal and manually plug it into the system.

They’re also encouraged to let their pump know before they exercise, as it tends to lower blood sugar. A host of other things, from alcohol consumption to stress to menstruation, can also influence the insulin-blood sugar equation.

Some youth interact with their pumps 20 or more times per day. Others forget or are too embarrassed to mess with it, prompting disruptive alarms to go off when blood sugar levels begin to drift outside predictable ranges.

“If you’re getting beeped all the time, it’s very easy to get alarm fatigue,” Messer said. “We need to find better ways to get this information to people and not make them guess about what to do.”

The team has already begun to survey young patients from the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes to inform development of algorithms that can predict where blood sugar is headed, based on user habits and device data, and subtly nudge the user when needed.

For instance, a 20-year-old may be, according to her devices, feeling stressed and exhausted after studying all night and headed toward a blood sugar crash. The system might text her a reminder to eat a snack.

Sankaranarayanan doubts that a true set-it-and forget-it “bionic pancreas” will come any time soon: The real one can sense blood glucose level changes almost instantaneously and secrete fast-acting insulin in real time.

Replicating that will require not just technological fixes, but also faster-acting insulin and other medical advances.

But ultimately, Voida and Fiesler believe the person-centered artificial pancreas can paint a more holistic picture of what’s going on in a user’s life, incorporating things they might not even notice.

“This would enable the system to sort of get out of your way when you live your life without you having to continually do this dialogue back and forth,” Voida said.

Fiesler, who studies privacy and ethical issues surrounding digital technologies, is particularly interested in what young people will be willing to share, or not, in exchange for such a luxury. She’ll explore these questions through youth surveys.

For now, she’s incredibly grateful that she was diagnosed amid such a renaissance in diabetes innovation.

“I have trouble imagining what it was like to manage this before all of this technology,” she said.

Now she’s imagining an even brighter future, and through her work, helping to make it happen.

Living with Type 1 diabetes is demanding—patients must stay on top of their diet and exercise, even if they’re living with technology like insulin pumps or continuous glucose monitors. But information science faculty Casey Fiesler and Steven Voida are optimistic that with the help of holistic technology, this will change. They’ve received a grant from the National Institutes of Health, and, along with other university colleagues, hope to develop a “person-centered artificial pancreas.”

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Thinking forward, looking back

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 22:47:57 +0000

Thinking forward, looking back Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/07/2023 - 15:47

By Shannon Mullane (MJour’19)

Dawn Doty says she is always thinking forward, but when she received a lifetime achievement award, she took the opportunity to think back on her past—Tiger Woods and tyrannosaurus rexes, included.

Doty is an award-winning teaching associate professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design, and in 2022, she became the recipient of a new honor—the Swede Johnson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Public Relations Society of America, Colorado chapter. When she learned the good news, Doty was speechless.

“I was just blown away because I never really expected to win this award from PRSA Colorado,” she said. “I’ve known of many award winners in the past, and I just never had that in my sights. But it was a lovely surprise, and I am deeply humbled.”

During her 30-year professional career, Doty worked with corporations, global firms and nonprofits in Chicago, San Francisco and Colorado. Her clients were often high-profile and included the likes of Chipotle, Crocs, Southwest Airlines and the U.S. Air Force Academy. In 2016, she embarked on a new phase of her career and joined CMCI as CU’s first-ever, full-time public relations instructor for undergraduate studies.

Her first job was as a public relations coordinator for an arts council in Ohio in the late 1980s. By 1995, she landed her first position at a global firm, Ketchum Public Relations, which she describes as one of her most meaningful experiences.

“I was just over the moon because that was sort of the crème de la crème of jobs, to be in a global firm,” she said.

There, she recalled learning how to work with national clients—including some high-maintenance ones—and how to supervise teams. The key is learning from your best supervisors and recognizing that every person has different needs, Doty said.

Then, while working with Burson-Marsteller, Doty helped McDonald's create an educational campaign focused on a tyrannosaurus rex fossil, named “SUE.” The fossil, discovered in South Dakota, was acquired in partnership with the Field Museum of Chicago and is still available for viewing.

“I feel like that’s a neat legacy project. I did it back in the day, but still, kids are going to see it and just find it marvelous and wonderful,” Doty said.

At Foote, Cone & Belding and Burson-Marsteller, she recalled working with the Tiger Woods Foundation and seeing how fans mobbed around the golf celebrity. Later with Linhart Public Relations, her team was a finalist for a PRWeek Award for its work with a different client, Crocs. It was one of the top awards in the field and a source of pride for a firm of their size, Doty said.

After receiving her lifetime achievement award, Doty met with CMCI to share her career highlights, keys to working in public relations and tips for students launching careers of their own.

What made you want to go into public relations?

Doty: I was an education major, oddly enough, at UD (University of Dayton), and I went in and did student teaching at a really tough, inner-city high school. I said to a teacher, “So how do you motivate students?” She looked me in the eye and started laughing and said, “Motivate students?” And at that moment, I really paused and said, “Oh my gosh, this probably isn’t for me.”

My uncle’s partner was an executive at a company in Dayton, Ohio, and I remember talking to him about business. I think he was the one that first suggested public relations. Then I looked into it, and we did have a communications program at UD, so I just switched my major.

How did you feel before graduating as an undergraduate?

Doty: I was so excited to work. I was ready to wear a suit and have a briefcase. I was pumped, I really was. I was so excited about it, and I think I’ve never really lost that enthusiasm, quite frankly. I love work, I do. If you’re doing the right work, I think it’s really interesting and doesn’t feel like work.

I always tell students, too, if I’m talking about my career. You can see, I wasn’t trying to climb any kind of ladder. I wasn’t trying to become a chief communications officer. That was not the path I was on. I didn’t want that. So I always looked for what is interesting to do, and that is how I built my career.

Does your career connect to your work with students?

Doty: Completely. I had a student tell me yesterday that—because of a class she was just in with me, PR Strategy, and her Strategic Writing for PR class—she said, “I finally feel like I really love this profession and really get it.”

It’s when students say that to me, I think, “OK, they’re ready.” And that’s a magical time to me because you see it click, and it really needs to click. It is really hands-on work. So when students can really grasp that, I think they’re really well prepared for what’s next. And I love that. So my career completely informs how I teach.

What do students give back to you?

Doty: So I’ll never forget (when the pandemic started): The first thing I said to our PRSSA student board was “You guys, what are we going to do to be part of the solution for what we’re dealing with right now?” I could see students kind of getting stressed about it a little bit. But I think in the end, it taught them this lesson that, if you’re in communications, when crisis hits, that’s what you’re going to do: You’re going to say, “OK, I’m going to work with my team,” and “How do we need to communicate with our stakeholders to make sure that we manage our way through this?”

That was a real moment of pride for me with students, and I think it taught them really important lessons. I was really proud of what they did. I think when you can get students in this proactive mode, that they’re being part of the solution, it really helps them cope.

Do you have any advice for students as they launch their own careers?

Doty: I start the semester and end the semester with my three important things. Two of those important things are what I think are really important for lifelong advice.

One is the grit theory that Angela Duckworth created. It’s all about putting effort into your life because that really helps you with your achievement. It’s effort, not talent. So I always remind them: If you can put in the effort, I think you will go far.

The second is a line of poetry from Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I remind them that they’re here to figure that out. They’re young adults. They’re on their own. They’re trying to figure out their lives, and I think that’s super important for them to remember and to just hold on to.

The third, that’s servant leadership, a whole different thing. It’s my way of saying, I’m here for you. . . . If my students aren’t successful, that means that I’m not being successful either. I always say, “If you ever need me after class ends, just ask me—because that’s what I’m here to do, is really support you.”

Teaching Associate Professor Dawn Doty received the lifetime achievement award from the Colorado chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. She sat down with CMCI to share anecdotes, tips and keys to working in public relations.

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