Tanja Aitamurto, PhD
I am an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I lead the Media/Democracy Lab. I examine new media technologies for informing, empowering, and connecting people, addressing two fundamental questions:
- How do new media technologies impact human behavior and society?
- How can we harness these technologies for social good to foster a more diverse and inclusive society through journalism, media, and digital democracy?
I operationalize these questions in various empirical contexts, including mixed reality (AR and VR) and large-scale online collaboration systems. My studies are situated in the fields of communication, computer-supported collaborative work, and human-computer interaction.
At the micro level, I study users’ interaction with civic technologies using human-computer interaction frameworks. At the macro level, I analyze the impact of technologically mediated behavior on society, including power structures, representations, and distribution of information. I believe that the better we understand the impact of new technologies on people and society, the better we can design and apply technologies for social good—to support equal access to information and civic participation.
By deploying theories and methods from social sciences and engineering, I examine the cyclical and reciprocal relationships among our behavior, technologies, and society: technologies affect our behavior, our behavior affects society, and society, in turn, affects our behavior. This dynamic also shapes the design of new technologies.
My work is driven by academic goals and a mission to contribute to a more equitable, informed, and inclusive society.