#ThinkDifferent

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 18:55:40 +0000

#ThinkDifferent Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2024 - 12:55

By Joe Arney

Apple has never been afraid to “think different,” as its long-standing ad campaign has urged users. But different isn’t always better, as the tech giant found out when it infuriated the creative community with an advertisement for its latest iPad Pro model in late spring.

“In the current climate”—one in which artists face an uncertain future alongside generative artificial intelligence—“this was a bad idea, and super tone deaf,” said Steven Frost, an assistant professor of media studies at CMCI. And just weeks after the ad came out, Apple formally announced the integration of ChatGPT into iOS, compounding the misstep of an ordinarily savvy company.

Steven Frost, assistant professor of media studies

“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,” Frost said.

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 does-it-all iPad.

As a creator—Frost works both in digital media and as a textile artist—they understand the backlash the ad inspired, especially since Apple spent so many resources cultivating those creators as customers. But while they acknowledge the ad’s poor timing, Frost said it puts into stark relief the new reality artists must accept—either change the way they work, or risk obsolescence.

“There are definitely reasons to be suspicious of generative A.I.,” Frost said. “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 and learn how to be part of a collaborative process with those machines.”

Frost would know: They were doing art with algorithms a decade ago, manually feeding works by Gertrude Stein, RuPaul, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others into chatbots that mimicked the way those celebrities talked. So while they’re not afraid to tinker with these technologies, they do think companies that build in the A.I. space should disclose how those models were raised and their expected effect on creators.

It is, they said, the difference between imagining a future with collaborative technology, like The Jetsons, or a dystopian Black Mirror. And the companies creating these technologies need to be more collaborative, as well—not only in how we use these tools, but how and where we train them.

That lack of collaborative sentiment is what makes the Apple ad so chilling—even as it tries to evoke 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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#Chatterbots

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 18:40:51 +0000

#Chatterbots Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/05/2024 - 12:40

By Joe Arney

As an expert in generative artificial intelligence and ethics, when Casey Fiesler interacts with brands or commenters online, she’s very attuned to whether the person on the other end might actually be a chatbot.

More and more, regular internet users are having the same doubts. That’s because companies are increasingly turning to chatbots to solve problems, manage customer engagement—or because everyone else is doing it.

“I’ve heard from multiple people on social media who say the big conversations they have at work are about how to do A.I., because everyone feels like they have to integrate this new technology as quickly as possible—even if it doesn’t make sense,” said Fiesler, associate professor of information science at CMCI.

Chatbots have their use, Fiesler said. They can spark brainstorming sessions for a writer struggling with a draft, or create non-player characters in tabletop role-playing games. The problem, she said, “is the idea that chatbots and generative A.I. need to be doing everything, everywhere. Which is absurd.”

Don’t think so? Consider that chatbots have encouraged small-business owners to break the law (City of New York), advised using glue to help cheese stick to pizza (Google) and impersonated parents to offer reassurance about local schools (Meta).

“In the Meta case, to give them some credit, the account that responded to the parent was clearly labeled as being A.I.,” Fiesler said. “But at the same time, the idea that it might impersonate a parent should have been anticipated, because large language models are not information retrieval systems—they’re ‘what word comes next?’ systems. So, it’s inevitable you’re going to have some wrong responses.”

Social media interactions that should be between people are one case where Fiesler said chatbots should be off-limits; another is dispensing legal, medical or business advice. That’s not even considering the complex social and ethical concerns about A.I.—misinformation, labor rights, intellectual property, energy consumption—that are getting short shrift by an industry waxing poetic about the golden age this technology promises to usher in.

But moving slowly and asking thoughtful questions is not a strength of Silicon Valley, and companies fearful of being left behind are missing Fiesler’s bigger point about ethical debt.

“There’s this attitude of do this now, and deal with the consequences after we see what goes wrong,” she said. “But very often, the harm is already done.

“It blows my mind that these huge tech companies, with all their resources, could be surprised that all these things keep happening. Whereas when I describe some of these A.I. use cases to undergrads in my ethics class, they come up with all the things that could go wrong.”

Chatbots are showing up everywhere, and bringing all the shortcomings of generative A.I. to places an expert says it doesn’t belong.

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#GreenAds

Anonymous — Wed, 08 May 2024 22:54:20 +0000

#GreenAds Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/08/2024 - 16:54

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

Her experience in advertising and public relations means Saima Kazmi knows the power of a good story to change minds and hearts.

Now, as she completes her doctoral studies at the ��«��Ƶ, she’s trying to understand a story with the potential to shape the future of the planet.

Kazmi (PhDStratComm’24) studies green advertising campaigns that prompt people to make choices that support sustainability and environmental well-being—effectively using the advertising playbook, which is so good at urging people to buy things, to encourage less consumption.

Specifically, her research examines why consumers tend to reject such prompts.

“People see an environmental message, and they immediately shut down,” she said. “There is always pushback when you’re asking people to change their behavior, but I really want to understand what it is about sustainability that causes those cognitive barriers to raise.”

She’s studying different messaging strategies that can overcome that resistance to change—work that will continue now that she’s accepted a role as an assistant professor at the University of Oregon for the fall.

“I’m so grateful, happy and honored to work at a place where they have so many sustainability initiatives,” Kazmi said. “They have a whole communication department working on climate science, which is exactly the type of people I want to work with to move my research forward.”

You have three minutes

Academic research sometimes gets a reputation for being too theoretical or esoteric to effect meaningful change. Kazmi said she knows that isn’t an option for her work, which is part of why she competed in CU ��«��Ƶ’s Three-Minute Thesis—a competition in which graduate students are challenged to describe their research to a general audience in no more than three minutes. She was one of two students from the College of Media, Communication and Information to advance to the final round of the competition, which concluded in February.

“I thought it would be a lot like my job search, where you’re giving research presentations—but I had all this jargon and messaging that was tailored for faculty and search committees,” she said. “You have to think—if my grandmother was in the audience, how would I be able to get her to understand this?”

A voracious reader and seasoned advertising expert—as a consultant, she did work for brands like Unilever and Nestle—Kazmi found a way to make her pitch a relatable story, which helped her search for jobs and defend her dissertation.

“I was talking about this whole phenomenon of water being drained from the Colorado River for agriculture, and I shaped it almost like a dystopian novel, where we knew what was happening but people ignored all the messages,” she said. “Learning how to get my point across to a general audience was so valuable to me.

“Only 1 to 2% of people get to be researchers and create knowledge. And if that knowledge is not accessible, we’re missing out on an opportunity to have an impact.”

Saima Kazmi (PhDStratComm’24)

Far-ranging research implications

Harsha Gangadharbatla, professor of advertising, public relations and media design and associate dean of faculty development at CMCI, said Kazmi will have no trouble creating impact at a place like Oregon. And he ought to know, having taught there for five years before coming to CU ��«��Ƶ, where he eventually became one of the college’s founding chairs.

Gangadharbatla described Kazmi, whom he advised, as especially hardworking and dedicated, in addition to doing interesting research that has such wide-ranging implications for different industries.

“When she takes something up, she sees it to the very end, which is admirable in and of itself,” he said. “But she’ll also do well on the tenure track because she’ll have a sustained, focused body of work with very real implications—not only to different areas, like advertising, public policy and sustainability in general, but for us all.”

Kazmi called Gangadharbatla a powerful influence on her career—particularly his love of teaching—and said faculty and peers helped smooth an academic journey that included the challenges of virtual work amid the pandemic and raising three small children while her husband worked overseas. Gangadharbatla said it was “amazing, how she cared for her family by herself while taking courses, writing a dissertation and teaching,” and joked that “my partner and I have two children, and between the two of us we’re struggling to survive.”

For Kazmi, success was about her willingness to work hard and the community of which she was a part.

“So many people in CMCI guided me on publications and helped prepare me for the job market,” she said. “And my classmates, too—they’re going through the same struggles that I did, and they’ve become friends as we all go on to such different next steps in our careers.”

Advertisers are very good at getting us to buy things. A PhD graduate wants to use the same playbook to encourage more sustainability and less consumption.

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Making the digital less discriminatory

Anonymous — Mon, 06 May 2024 21:59:25 +0000

Making the digital less discriminatory Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/06/2024 - 15:59

By Joe Arney

Three words you do not want to tell Shamika Klassen: No, you can’t.

Klassen (PhDInfoSci’24) vividly recalls attending a seventh-grade math and engineering camp where she got to hear from a scientist who described what a PhD was. To Klassen, who’d fallen in love with technology, it sounded like a dream opportunity.

“But then he ended his little speech with how it’s really hard to get a PhD, especially if you’re a minority—so you shouldn’t try,” Klassen, who is Black, said. “So, I raised my hand during the Q&A. I said, ‘My name is Shamika. I just wanted you to know, I’m getting my PhD.’”

More than two decades later, Klassen’s mic-drop moment arrived in May, when the first-generation student graduated with a PhD from CMCI. In doing so, she became the university’s first Black student to earn a doctoral degree in information science—a discipline she discovered almost by accident, but one that prepared her to join Google’s Bay Area offices as a user experience researcher.

“As I got older, that excitement I had about technology turned into curiosity about how it was falling short of these aspirations and dreams and imaginations that we had for it,” the soft-spoken scholar said. “I wanted to be part of the bridge between where technology is and where it could be.”

Klassen studies where technology misses its professed ideals, and the kinds of people it leaves behind. Specifically, she invites Black women, femmes and nonbinary people to imagine a better, more equal future—part of a concept she calls technowomanism, which she said is “me asking how we can use ethical frameworks that are rooted in the Black feminism traditions when we’re talking about technology.”

For instance, an early project compared Black Twitter to the Jim Crow-era Green-Book; both offered Black users a sense of community in unfriendly places. As she interviewed participants about what a real Black Twitter—a social network designed by, and intended for, Black users—could look like, she started asking larger questions about the research ethics of public data.

“It was a great opportunity to talk about the history of research in Black communities,” Klassen said. “Instead of just parachuting in, extracting data and leaving, could we build relationships with these communities, and be more honest and sincere about our intentions?”

That kind of ethical perspective is why her doctoral advisor is so eager to see what Klassen accomplishes at Google.

“As an ethicist who spends a lot of time critiquing big tech, one of the things that makes me feel better about everything is when people like Shamika go to work in big tech,” said Casey Fiesler, associate professor of information science. “Because having people who care so deeply, and who have different kinds of perspectives and lived experiences, is how change starts to happen.

“I think Google is exceptionally lucky to have her, and the rest of us are exceptionally lucky to have her at Google.”

Klassen knows a thing or two about luck: She considers herself fortunate to have been raised by a single mother, Mary Shelton, who worked tirelessly to support her four children, of whom Klassen is the eldest.

“She has been the most incredible figure in my life,” Klassen said, sharing a story from her Stanford days of being invited to give a talk at a math camp in Texas, but without enough time to visit her San Antonio home.

“My mom got off work at the post office and drove straight to San Marcos from San Antonio—in her uniform—so she could see my talk,” Klassen said. “We didn’t have a lot of money. But we did have that incredible support from someone who made all kinds of sacrifices that helped me get where I am today.

“I hope she’s proud of me. But I also hope my mom and the rest of my family can see my story and be inspired to do something that they want to do.”

At Google, she’s trying to inspire others to rethink technology. The job is, she said, “the opportunity of a lifetime” and follows an internship where she studied assistive technologies that use artificial intelligence to better understand how to help people with disabilities.

“I want to be able to center marginalized voices in the design and development of technology,” Klassen said. “And I know that being a voice in the room advocating for these things is a big responsibility.”

A PhD graduate’s ethical takes on tech have landed her at Google, where she hopes to shape conversations about shaping the digital world for users.

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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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#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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#ChangingFirefightingCulture

Anonymous — Wed, 10 May 2023 18:29:42 +0000

#ChangingFirefightingCulture Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/10/2023 - 12:29

By Claire Cleveland

For eight summers, Jody Jahn earned money for college working as a wildland firefighter on U.S. Forest Service crews in rural Idaho. Now, instead of rappelling out of helicopters to fight fires, she's an associate professor in CMCI’s Department of Communication who studies the culture of wildland firefighting crews.

Her current research project is designed to capture what's already working well in wildland fire culture, and then work with crews to train other crews on their best practices.

“It's really about problem solving and improving culture in a collaborative manner. And I think that's where the value lies,” Jahn said. “Our goal is to help the wildland fire community figure out what they want the wildland fire workforce future to look like and help pull all those details together into some action plans that they can try out.”

During her time as a firefighter, she worked on five crews over the eight years, and each crew was different from the others.

“I found that a crew's culture impacted everything about my professional development and safety as a firefighter,” Jahn said. “I worked on poorly managed crews in my first few seasons, then moved onto crews with excellent leadership and culture.”

Our goal is to help the wildland fire community figure out what they want the wildland fire workforce future to look like and help pull all those details together into some action plans that they can try out."

- Jody Jahn
Associate Professor
Communication

With time she discovered “that a crew's culture evolved entirely from the vision and dedication of its leadership.” She wants to understand how firefighters gain credibility in leadership roles, what dynamics are at play in firefighting teams and how those team dynamics are designed.

The research is particularly pertinent right now because wildland firefighting, especially at the federal level, is at a turning point.

Traditionally, wildland firefighting has been a seasonal summer job. Leadership and key support positions operate year round, while the bulk of the wildland firefighting workforce—nearly 18,000 firefighters—are employed on a seasonal basis. But as the severity and frequency of wildfires increase—on average 7 million acres burn across the country every year, more than double the annual average in the 1990s—the need for a professional workforce has also increased.

Jahn and her team have developed pilot programs that they plan to run through this fire season with the goal of fine-tuning firefighting practices to be more inclusive, diverse and open to problem-solving approaches as the profession shifts from seasonal work to career tracks.

For the program, Jahn’s research team works with crews in Western states, typically between five and 25 firefighters, to identify their purpose and values and then translates those into routines they would conduct often and that could help other crews.

For example, a crew with lots of inexperienced firefighters might determine its purpose is to focus on training foundational skills and that its values are learning, inclusivity and mentorship. In contrast, a crew of highly experienced firefighters might determine their purpose is to develop leaders able to manage both highly complex fires and challenging interpersonal dynamics.

The researchers would then help the crew create concrete practices to serve that purpose and exemplify those values, like daily debriefings that emphasize open dialogue or training to develop diversity mindsets.

“A crew with a diversity mindset would recognize the skills they traditionally have valued—like physical fitness, chainsaw proficiency, navigating terrain and decisive leadership—while also recognizing the importance of activities that are sometimes taken for granted like community and morale-building within the crew,” Jahn said.

To explore wildland fire culture and start to build pilot programs, Jahn and her team surveyed U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters. The survey resulted in 1,500 anonymously submitted answers to five open-ended questions. Jahn’s team then distilled the responses into central themes that firefighters later rated.

Over the next year, Jahn and her team will work with three to five U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighting crews to test the pilot programs. The researchers are targeting a range of fire specialities, such as hotshot crews, who work on foot next to active flames, or “helitack” crews, who work with helicopters.

Researchers will track the test crews through the year with brief interviews and then conduct a debrief session at the end of the year to identify what worked and areas to adjust for next season.

“We can use a kind of diffusion of innovations approach,” Jahn said. “Where they're just kind of learning from one another about what might work well in a culture as opposed to forcing culture change from the top down.”

Associate Professor Jody Jahn’s time as a seasonal firefighter did more than fund her college education, it inspired her professional research. Jahn and a team helped design a pilot program that aims to help wildland firefighting crews improve their culture.

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Anonymous — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 21:53:34 +0000

#AdventuresInInvesting Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/27/2023 - 15:53

By Hannah Stewart (Comm’19)

One’s name, banking information and a good wifi signal—that’s all most people need to set up an online brokerage account. A helmet, the right shoes and good outerwear—that’s where most people start when exploring extreme sports. While most sports enthusiasts realize the importance of preparation and safety, many new investors lack that knowledge, sometimes to disastrous consequences.

First-time investors often hear that in order to get high returns, they ought to have a high-risk portfolio. According to Forbes, nearly two thirds of the global population use financial technology every day. Whether it’s using a smartphone to send money to a friend or to trade stocks, moving money between people and accounts is more accessible than ever.

Last year, Securities Commissioner Tung Chan from the Colorado Division of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) became concerned about the reported rise of new investors making bad investments as access to financial technology increased. She connected with Assistant Professor Jolene Fisher’s strategic communication capstone class for their help to create an educational campaign.

“We knew something had to be done and we knew we needed help to do it right,” Chan said. “Many of the students were in our target audience. They could relate. They did the research and they came up with professional campaigns with unexpected, creative messaging and channels of distribution.”

Real clients in the classroom

Each semester Fisher teaches the senior capstone course, she aims to have at least one real-life client that is a company or in the realm of public affairs advertising, where an organization or brand seeks to influence or inform the public.

“I like inviting real clients into my capstone class because it gives the students an opportunity to move beyond the hypothetical and apply their thinking to a specific issue the client is experiencing,” Fisher explained. “Through this process, students learn firsthand the many and complex factors a client takes into account when determining if they want to put their dollars behind a strategic communication campaign. “

With DORA as a client, students conducted research, including interviews and focus groups with their peers to better understand their perspectives on investing.

“Through our focus groups and interviews, I learned that young investors tend to take more risks, as they are often in the market for [the] thrill,” said Harrison Meng (StratComm’22), who now works at The Trade Desk. “At the same time, this also makes them more susceptible to losing it all.”

After nearly a semester of research and creating a pitchbook, the teams presented their findings to Chan and her team. One team, including Meng, impressed the commissioner so much that its campaign was chosen to be used by DORA.

“We could see the campaign coming to life visually by comparing activities like skydiving or backcountry skiing to taking risks with your money. [Athletes] take certain precautions to ensure their safety. The same thing should apply to your investing habits and the ‘safety’ of your money,” said team member Annabella Ruschenberg (StratComm’22), who now works as an account coordinator at 9thWonder.

For Makayla Karas (StratComm’22), it was exciting to have her team’s pitch chosen by the state and to stay on the project. After graduation, she was hired by Chan’s office to help execute the campaign.

“The whole point is to help young people be successful with investing, and I believe that safety can start with a simple conversation between friends,” Karas said.

“The students acted as a successful advertising agency: They did a pitch, they sold that pitch, the pitch was approved, and ultimately, that pitch is public facing.

—Teaching Assistant Professor Morgan Young

Launching the campaign

Bringing an idea from the classroom to live social media ads and a billboard on a major state highway is no easy feat. To make it possible, Fisher secured $120,000 in grant funding from the Investor Protection Trust (IPT) and recruited Teaching Assistant Professor Morgan Young, founder of advertising company Young Ideas, onto the team.

“We stepped in and helped get it from a student idea to producible files. The ideas were there, we didn’t want to mess with the creative at all,” Young explained. “The students acted as a successful advertising agency: They did a pitch, they sold that pitch, the pitch was approved, and ultimately, that pitch is public facing.”

Young—who has previously worked on government campaigns—and his team worked largely behind the scenes, helping Karas and her new team create a media plan. He explained that it was important to make sure the images of mountain bikers and skiers came from Colorado. Just as importantly, it was key to find the perfect locations to showcase the creative.

Logistically, adventurous college students will often take either I70 or Highway 6 to get to popular ski spots like Winter Park and Copper Mountain. Those two routes converge near Empire, making it prime placement for a billboard of a skier that went up in November.

“Seeing the billboard for the first time was really emotional. It was a physical representation of all the hard work over the last year,” Karas said.

When the first billboard was erected, DORA launched their microsite with information like how to spot investment scams and began to run targeted social ad campaigns on Instagram and TikTok. Karas also managed in-person educational booths at events such as ETHDenver (a major Web3 event) and the Colorado Older Adult Financial Justice Symposium to promote the campaign.

“I’ve had students do great work, clients who have been really excited, really complimentary, but never anything like this, to this scale, it might go even bigger,” Fisher said. “There’s potential for other states to model something after what we’ve done.”

Almost five months into the campaign, in March 2023, the IPT voted to continue funding through the end of the calendar year. They granted an additional $195,000 to continue the social media ads and erect two more billboards—featuring a rock climber and mountain biker—over the summer. The campaign’s full impact hasn’t been determined yet, but Karas said a number of friends have reached out saying the billboard has sparked conversations about financial safety.

“Americans in particular are very influenced by marketing communications. The heart of what we’re trying to teach in CMCI is to not just be effective in advertising but to be ethical in our advertising as well,” Young said. “This is a case where you have both the effectiveness and the ethics coming together at one moment."

Learn more about this campaign on DORA's website →

Extreme sports enthusiasts are no strangers to adrenaline rushes, but they know the importance of preparation and safety before jumping out of a plane or climbing a steep mountain. New investors, on the other hand, often jump into the trading game with far less experience and knowledge. Advertising students from CU ��«��Ƶ recently worked on an education campaign designed to counteract risky behavior.

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