danah boyd & Gail De Kosnik on the New Normal
BCNM alum danah boyd and faculty member Professor Gail de Kosnik recently gave their predictions on the future of the post-Covid-19 world in an article by the Pew Research Center and Elon University on Imagining the Internet.
Prof. de Kosnik in the Pew Center article:
Climate change, invasive corporatized technologies and increasing economic precarity will all combine to give rise to a far more paranoid society in 2025 than we had at the start of 2020. In some ways, widespread fear and anxiety will have positive results, as people will be more environmentally conscious than ever before and will engage en masse in efforts to regulate corporate resource extraction and pollution, and will show a collective willingness to adopt less environmentally harmful lifestyles (for example, I expect a huge upsurge in mass transit use and a corresponding movement to improve the quality of mass transit in cities across the U.S.).
danah boyd in the Elon University article:
Inequality will create a huge division between those who are thriving and those who are in dire straits. There will be plenty of high-status people who will come out of the pandemic with wealth, health and their life goals intact. But a large amount of society will be dealing with all sorts of ripple effects.
Read the rest of the Pew Research Center article here and the Elon University article here!