The Reality of Virtual Spaces Virtual Spaces Ohio State Professor Jesse Fox discusses how online interactions affect our lives BY O L I V I A M I LT N E R P H OTO S BY R E B E CC A T I E N
Dr.
Jesse Fox says she was privileged as a child. Because both her parents were teachers, she had a computer at home before most other kids her age. She started to dabble in coding, but she says growing up in that changing time, seeing both the old way and the new, kept her questioning whether these new technologies were actually beneficial to ourselves and our society. She turned her curiosity into a career as an associate professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University, where she studies technology, virtual spaces, social media and their impacts on our lives. Fox said that the accessibility that comes with technology has changed expectations for the ways we interact. “Having access to someone all the time creates a lot of different pressures for people,” she said. “It just becomes this expectation, this sort of hyper expectation of connectivity.” In addition, she said there’s a culture in some online communities that can lead to bullying and harassment; not being able to see reactions to this behavior in real time can compound the problems. At the same time, technology allows us access to information on an unprecedented scale, which can aid in understanding issues that are otherwise abstract. •
614NOW.COM MARCH 2020 (614) MAGAZINE
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