Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Designing Tomorrow explores a new playbook for modern social impact leaders and brands to reach their true impact potential.
Why do some social impact brands thrive, while so many others fail to get traction, build support for their cause, and make meaningful progress? Imagine your impact with truly sustainable revenue and resources. With deeper community engagement and relationships. With more influence in your social impact category.
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, each episode dives into the strategies, mindsets, and behaviors top social impact brands use to play and win in the attention economy. Go beyond high-level concepts to specific tools and tactics you can use today.
Watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes each Tuesday.
Let’s design a better tomorrow, together.
Designing Tomorrow is a Cosmic Production. Learn more at https://designbycosmic.com/
Designing Tomorrow is a registered trademark of Design By Cosmic, Inc.
Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Trust No One Is Exactly What Authoritarians Want
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Every major technological paradigm shift has broken society before it fixed it. The printing press, radio, television. Each one reshaped how we communicate and what we believe. Now the internet, social media, and AI are repeating the pattern at unprecedented speed. Joel Breakstone, co-founder and executive director of the Digital Inquiry Group, has spent over a decade studying how people evaluate online information, and what he's found is alarming: students, academics, and everyday adults are failing at even the most basic tasks of digital discernment. But his research also reveals a path forward, built on the surprisingly simple strategies of professional fact checkers.
Episode Highlights:
[00:01:55] Was the internet a huge mistake?
[00:08:30] From Stanford History Education Group to the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum
[00:12:35] Fact checkers vs. PhDs vs. Stanford freshmen: who evaluates sources best?
[00:15:20] Lateral reading: the counterintuitive skill that changes everything
[00:26:20] The collapse of institutional trust and rise of influencer trust
[00:31:05] AI as both threat and tool for digital literacy
Notable Quotes:
Joel Breakstone [00:11:25]: "The myth of the digital native is very much a myth. Young people, like the rest of us, need help making sense of the unbelievably crowded and confusing landscape that we encounter when we go online."
Joel Breakstone [00:27:30]: "It can become really easy to just throw your hands up in the air and say, 'Nothing's real. I don't know what to trust.' And that is a really dangerous place for us to end up because it plays into the hands of authoritarians."
Resources & Links:
- Digital Inquiry Group — https://www.inquirygroup.org/
- Civic Online Reasoning (COR) Curriculum — https://cor.inquirygroup.org/
- Verified by Mike Caulfield & Sam Wineburg — https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo207015182.html
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. New episodes every Tuesday.
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