Exciting News
The team is growing + new projects
We're thrilled to bring you news of dynamic team expansions and innovative projects that are set to advance our work at the Psychology of Technology Institute and USC Marshall’s Neely Center.
Our initial expression of gratitude goes out to John Sands, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making at USC Marshall. Their generous funding support has facilitated the recruitment of new talent, including Ravi Iyer. Ravi’s role is twofold: he serves as the Director of Research for Neely and the Managing Director of the Psychology of Technology Institute. You're no stranger to Ravi's exceptional work as it's been a significant feature of this newsletter.
In addition, we're welcoming Parama Sigurdsen on board as our new full-time Research Program Manager, and Matt Motyl and David Evan Harris as Senior Advisors. They will all be helping us to build our organizational capacity as well as working with the team to develop and share new empirical insights.
We're also eager to unveil a groundbreaking project – a collaborative effort between the Neely Center and the Psychology of Technology Institute. Later next week we will be announcing new results from our brand new Neely Social Media Index, which represents the first ever public, longitudinal survey of Americans’ social media experiences. We launched the index to provide answers to questions we can’t currently answer. For example, how would we know if Twitter is getting better or worse under Elon Musk? How do we get beyond mere anecdotes about which social media platforms provide better/worse individual experiences? Along with addressing questions like these, the Index will incentivize social media companies to be more accountable for the experiences on their platforms, provide researchers and technologists with high-quality data, and provide important insights to policy-makers (to help them to regulate social media more effectively) and consumers (to help them determine their own media use). We just finished collecting our first wave of data, and the results are already fascinating. Can you guess the platform where people reported the most negative experiences? Or where they viewed the most content they consider bad for the world? What about where people are creating the most meaningful connections or learning the most valuable information? We can’t wait to answer these questions and share all the results with you next week.
Lastly, in a bid to align our communication with our focus on creating research-based design solutions in psychology, ethics, and technology, we're rebranding this newsletter. Henceforth, you'll receive updates from us under the banner of "Designing Tomorrow: Psychology, Ethics, and Technology".
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the forthcoming launch of the Neely Social Media Index!