Trust, media and technology: A conversation with Janet Coats at the University of Florida – Gainesville Sun

Janet Coats has a daunting task as the first managing director of theConsortium on Trust in Media and Technology at the University of Florida: helping to mend the deep woundsin our civic life and head off the next pandemic of disinformation.

An interdisciplinarygroup of scholars have been studying these issues:how media and technology can become more trustworthy,and develop programs for the application of new knowledge and toolsand the creation of new policy and law, as its website frames the mission.

Coats has been on the job for less than three months. A former editor at the Sarasota Herald Tribune, more recently director forthe Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and dean of faculty at Poynter, Coats brings more real-world experience and less of an academic background to therole.

Despite the dire circumstances for trust in media and technology, or perhaps because of this,the consortium has beenbuoyedbysome recent news beyond the arrival of its new director: a $2million gift from Gainesville developers Linda and Ken McGurnthat aligns with the fight against disinformation, and HiPerGator -- a supercomputer that has come online to providethe fastest artificial intelligence tool in higher education.

With all of that, Coats sat down for a Zoom conversation recently from her office at the UF College of Journalism and Communications where a new dean, Hub Brown, is set to over next month.

What is themission of the consortium?

To some degree,we are enteringa new phase to the consortium. There hasnt been apermanent.managing director.Sopart of my job is to figure out where we go from hereand how to build on the work of the people associated with the consortium to date.

There is so much conversation going on around trust. A lot of it is focused on things like media literacy and the platforms like Facebook and Twitter. That will be part of what werelookingat, but Im really trying to push us forward into things like artificial intelligence.

UFs new supercomputer gives an opportunity to look at AI and large data sets that other universities and journalism programs dont really have.Sotrying to think about how technology is moving, where its moving and what some of the new issues of trust might be.

It really feels like an inflection point, where some of theconversations about trust may be shifting.Theres certainly going to be more conversation about what regulation and access mean.And I also think theres going to be a different conversation about AI, machine learning and things like that. Both as ameansof surfacingmore factual information, and alsoas away of understanding where things are coming from.

My goalsright noware to look at those places where theuniquecapabilitieswe have with our research and our access to computing can help fill in the gaps.

Some of the things I was working on with my colleagues at Arizona State, we have aprogramthere on media literacy. I believe that is a really important element of this, but we are now where people can be reading from the same book, but theirinterpretation of it is completely different depending onwhereyouarecoming from

Jan. 6 is a great example of this. We call be sitting and watchingwhat isunfolding in front of us on the television screen, and the literacy people are bringing to this is very much informed by beliefsand peer groups, associations, where you are in the social media sphere. It is such a challenge to think we are all watching the same thing but seeing so differently.

How can the consortium address some of these challenges to civic trust?

In termsifwhat the consortium is focusedon,Iwant to be sure were not fighting the last battle. We did not see the kind of power and influence the platforms were going to have when they were first emerging. When I first went onto Facebook, it was cool to see my high school friends and what was going on with them. But it has morphed into this political and social firehose, commentary, and means to spread a lot of information and disinformation.

Some of our scholars are looking at things like interaction with political news and the psychology of how you come to information. We have to grapple with how traditional news coverage re-enforcessome of thedisenfranchisementof voices.The news is not reflective of a lot of peoples reality. Not only does it notreflectit, it suppresses it.

Its more than a common set of facts, its also about experiences. For instance, trust about health information. Some of that is based on very legitimate experiences with the medical system. We think about distrust of media, but there is a lot of institutional distrust that underpins thatthat is separate from news coverage.

Its not just in the media that things are moving so fast. Its in science and medicine.You think about the evolution of the vaccine.When the pandemic first began, the conversationwas that this can take years as you go through all the testing and safety procedures. And then for it to come so quickly.Just reading how scientists talk about that: in the last few years, in ways that werent obvious to people others than scientists working on this,the process hadaccelerated.Expectations about what waspossiblechanged even within the science community in ways the rest of us had not caught up to.

Trust is broken in our elections in ways that may be hard to fix within an election cycle.

"Were Floridians, so weve been living with can you trust an election, now for 20 years. Im still traumatized by hanging chads. Even the machinery of elections, the process, has all kinds of ways people mistrust things beyond the political information.

"Theres the how we convey information, and then trust in the institutions themselves. Theres interplay between those things of course."

Are you optimistic about where things are headed and the impacts the consortium can have?

"I have to be optimistic or I wouldnt do this. For me, this is theculminationof years and years of work as a journalist. Issues of trust are not new. We could see diminished trust in our work andpolarization. Thats picked up speed in thedigital age.

"I do think that intervention can make a difference. In one sense, I think an era ended (on Jan. 6), the first 20 years of being in a truly connected world. For a lot of people, the flaws in social media, the echo cambers, really became stark.

"Soin one way, Im optimistic that this is a chance to engage the conversation in a different way. And in a way thatreally gets into the rights andresponsibilitiespieces of this. For social media platforms, what should that look like in a regulatory environment?

"When the president getsdeplatformedon Twitter, different people look at that, some with cheers and some with arguments about taking the voice of the president out of the public square, or at least a corner of the public square.No matterwhere youcome down on that, the implications are broad and the conversation is one that is ripe."

Will that conversation happen in academic papers, in classroom lectures or in ways that are somehow more direct outreach to the community?

"One of the advantages of a college of journalism is that we can do all those things. Because it is interdisciplinary, were able to have collaborativerelationshipswith scholars all over the university.Sowe have that rigorous scholarship. We can take the current moment that were studying into the classroom. The students are teaching us. They are living in this world in a very different way than I do.

"Those of us who grew up with three channels on the television are never going to be native to this digital world. These young people will shape the dynamic. And the public scholarship is something that journalism educators do particularly well because were used to writing in the mainstream media.

"One of the things that Im eager to do is to get the consortium in that broader trust dialogue that is going among researchers and the broaderconversation among people who are navigating this world and wanting help with that.

What are the goal posts that will help you know youre heading in the right direction?

"Im still trying to find out where light switches are over here. There is a body of work to draw from, from what the scholarshave been pursing in their research, and I'm having conversations with them on what theyre learning and where we think we should go.

"Part of my job as managing director is to be just that, to manage consortium. I would never hold myself up to be an expert in this, certainly not in a scholarly way in understandingtrust. A lot of my job is bringing together the thinking of others and facilitating collaborations within UFand the business world too.The KPIs are going to come.

"As someone who watched the internet change the world inwayswe were slow to understand in the 90s, AI is that force now. The resources and commitment of UF has in place make that a real opportunity. The consortium stands right at the intersection of that: AI and technology, and how information is moving, and what that means for trust, and what that means for ways people communicate, share information and collect information. That is exciting to me."

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Trust, media and technology: A conversation with Janet Coats at the University of Florida - Gainesville Sun