Have you ever stepped in a puddle because you were busy texting? Or worse, ran into a door or pole because you were more concerned about your digital world than your physical one?
After spending years people watching and noticing more and more individuals glued to their mobile devices instead of connecting with the world around them, Susan Drucker, a professor of Journalism,
Media Studies and Public Relations at Hofstra University took real world action.
Drucker dove into a fifteen year research study aiming to find out how to tailor the world around us in such a media saturated age.
“I’ve noticed that the generation now is measured much more in terms of media literacy, not merely in age difference,” explained Drucker at the Faculty Research Presentation Day last Wednesday.
“It’s a strange occurrence when a two year old is teaching his mom how to ‘play’ on the family’s new iPad”.
Pulling from previous media studies by theorists like Marshall McLuhan and E. Sousa de Silva, Drucker’s research is entitled Media Technology and Our Relation to Place: Media Studies and Urban Communication.
Drucker employed both structural-functional and symbolic-interactionism approaches on a macro level to predict social media’s role in our society’s future. To break down all the sociology jargon, Drucker saw that social media would be an on-going process in society from now on and therefor pinpointed the essential and latent functions of it.
“My goal is to see how people will comply to the world’s social needs now” she said. “For example, how people will market and build new buildings, even cities, using digital media”.
Staying one step ahead of the game, Professor Drucker is putting her research into real world application as one of the founding members of the Urban Communication Foundation which “meshes technology and social interaction” in city settings.
UCF holds seminars and conferences throughout the year and is based in the New York metro area. Drucker is the acting treasurer.
For more information on Drucker’s research or UCF, email sphjd@hofstra.edu or visit www.urbancomm.org