Annenberg’s Dean Willow Bay talks new tech project
Primarily a television reporter and anchor, USC Annenberg Dean Willow Bay came to Annenberg and started a new project across the country in partnership with COMMON SENSE, on the use and importance of mobile devices among teens and adults.
When visiting the school, Bay spoke about how her work as a journalist informed the work she’s doing now with her study of technology use.
She was the first woman to co-anchor on CNN’s Moneyline, which was a financial news show that she had to learn about on her own. She did her own homework on technology to understand the show itself at the peak of a technology boom. This show got Bay into the world of technology because it sparked a light of interest within her.
Throughout her career, Bay learned a “very broad perspective about the world of technology. The way it disrupts, the opportunity that it presents and also the way it is shaping our lives in profound ways,” she said.
With Bay’s newly found project, she’ll be going to Mexico this fall to research how a different setting with a different culture uses technology, how often and the importance of technology in other areas outside of the United States.
Sofia Nagy at the USC Annenberg Youth Academy confessed during Bay’s presentation that “when my phone is not in my pocket I feel weird.”
Bay said she doesn’t think it deteriorates our society. “Over consumption of media may have harmful effects on adults and young people alike. But it is not the media itself that is the problem,” she added.
In discussion with the Annenberg Youth Academy 2019 cohort, some students discussed the cultural differences of technology use in their families.
Some Latino students said that family discussions most important in their culture, so they get punished for using their phone at family gatherings or at the dinner table.
Technology is not so accessible back in their home land, so when their families migrated to the U.S. a phone was seen as a privilege.
Bay suspects that these are worldwide trends of technology use: feeling addicted or attached to a phone and consuming more content on mobile devices.
She said that the trends with technology and mobile device usage may be more or less pronounced in certain countries or cultures. She is interested to learn and understand about how cultural specificities shape behavior.
Within her research, Bay thinks there is a possibility that the results of the surveys in Mexico will bring awareness to the American people about their use of technology. In certain countries, such as Mexico, they have less penetration of technology so their family norms tend to show that.
One possibility Bay is predicting is “in American families the traditional rules applied to a brand new technology, may in fact, turn out to be a valuable lesson. Maybe we don’t need new rules, maybe we just need the old rules applied to the new tech.”
Bay analyzes teens and their way of thinking a lot in some of her studying. She’s very interested in young people because she feels that teens are bringing a new and completely different future. Teens now end up teaching older people new things. She wants to understand the newly founded brains to understand new visions and how to work with them for the greater future.
