COMMColloquium

Silent Fall: Digital Communication Technologies and the Decline of our Social Support Systems

Devan Rosen, Professor, Ithaca College

1pm in 160 Mann

Reception to follow in the Hub

In this conversational, discussion-style talk, I will share my perspective of the path that digital communication technologies have taken, from the early days of decentralized, user-controlled content and interaction to the current situation where we are experiencing a possible decline of our social support systems. Having been part of the cohort of graduate students in the Communication Department at Cornell at the start of the 21^st century that studied digital communication technologies and the emerging social media platforms, I was fortunate to have an early view of the possibilities and bright future that seemed to lie ahead. Several decades later, the bright future we were anticipating seems to have been co-opted by extractive business models and subverted by geo-political interests. Drawing from my past work, my edited volume The Social Media Debate: Unpacking the Social, Psychological, and Cultural Effects of Social Media, and my time in the field of communication technology, I will make the case that the decline of our social support systems represents a social version of the decline of natural support systems described by Rachel Carson in her seminal book Silent Spring.

Devan Rosen (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Professor of Emerging Media in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. His research and teaching focuses on the social uses of new media, social network analysis, social media, and distributed socio-technical systems. He has developed social and semantic network-analytic theories and methods for the analysis of dynamic social networks in online environments. His research on decentralized self-organizing systems, Flock Theory, has been featured as the basis for several episodes of the hit CBS show Numb3rs.