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Building mental resilience against disinformation: an experiential futures case study

Law, James (2023) Building mental resilience against disinformation: an experiential futures case study. [MRP]

Item Type: MRP
Creators: Law, James
Abstract:

Disinformation, its impacts and mitigation measures have been a focus of governments, communities and industry as globalized societies struggle to govern, co-operate and build policy under rapid digitalization. As regulating the spread of disinformation is difficult, this research project explores the emerging futures and interventions supporting resilience against disinformation and how the public receives and reacts to these futures. This project also explores the use of experiential futures as a tool in foresight and prototyping to sample public feedback. Literature and media reviews and expert interviews were used to generate experiential futures depicting extreme polarities of interventions to build resilience against disinformation: high government regulation of the use of tech, commercial protection for individuals against disinformation and more community and education-focused efforts. The futures were physical installations created using a combination of physical items and audio- visual elements using the POEMS framework. Members of the public were invited to navigate these futures and provide their responses, reactions and perspectives using a feedback questionnaire. Results indicate that individuals are most fearful of government and commercial/industry interventions and prefer community-based approaches. This is aligned with preferences and legal limitations on how disinformation generation and spread is regulated. Through the use of experiential futures, participants were able to identify the differences in the futures and shared their different reactions and responses to each future. It is proposed that with technological advances helping make new immersive and creative experiences more affordable and scalable (e.g. VR, AR, 3D printing), there is opportunity to understand whether investing time and resources in making experiential futures more immersive will generate different or more insightful responses and feedback from participants.

Date: 1 May 2023
Uncontrolled Keywords: disinformation, misinformation, resilience, inoculation theory, foresight, experiential futures, design fiction
Divisions: Graduate Studies > Strategic Foresight and Innovation
Date Deposited: 05 May 2023 19:11
Last Modified: 05 May 2023 19:16
URI: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/4005

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