Tag Archives: facebook

Using Social Media to Teach Critical Reading and Writing Skills

25 Mar

I read some articles I’d saved to Instapaper while on the treadmill at the gym this week. Frustratingly, I had no Internet access while I was there, so I was forced into a rare state of readerly isolation.

Most of my reading these days is grounded in social connections. With the exception of the (mostly guilty pleasure) fiction I read in the evenings before bed, I read online all day, almost every day. I read things that have been shared by my Twitter and Facebook communities, or I find things on my own and consider whether to share them myself.

During my forced period of lonely reading, I recognized some of the skills that I have to apply during my social reading. It seems to me that these are exactly some of the types of awareness we try to cultivate in students who are developing their skills as readers and writers. Some of these are obvious, others maybe not so much.

The first set of questions to consider is based on a standard media literacy approach, applied in the social media context when we examine content shared by our contacts:

  • Who’s the source? Who shared the link, and who actually created the content? Are they connected? If so, does their connection matter? If not, why did my contact share this content? What’s his or her motivation to share, or his or her personal interest in this content? (See also Howard Rheingold’s advice on “crap detection.”)
  • What comment did my contact attach to the content? Why? Has it altered my interpretation of the content, and if so, how? Do I agree or disagree with my contact’s commentary? If there is no commentary, is there a reason why not?
  • What is the main point of this content? (When so much information flows forth from social media, we have to be able to quickly “get the gist” of what we choose to read more closely.) What is my reaction to it?

When I choose to retweet or re-share information, I have an additional set of considerations:

  • To which audience do I distribute this content? My Twitter and Facebook communities overlap by a few members, but are really quite different. I have to consider my audience’s interests and preferred content consumption styles in making this choice. The constant challenge to “think of your audience” issued to students in writing courses takes on an immediate relevance in social networks.
  • Do I distribute this link with my own contact’s commentary attached? How would my audience respond if so? (How might they respond just to my sharing of content from the contact him- or herself?)
  • If I substitute my own commentary, I must quickly summarize my response in a few characters, or I must responsibly shorten my contact’s commentary to be able to add my own. How do I best capture his or her response and complement it with my own? How do I respectfully disagree, if necessary, to maintain a civil tone in my network?
  • If I summarize the content of what I am sharing, how do I do so accurately? How do I also write my summary in an intriguing way, inviting my network to click on it themselves? (This is akin to good headline writing, and indeed, some instructors have used tweet writing as a way to teach headline writing skills.)

In this post, I’ve tried to make explicit some of the sophisticated interpretive skills required by active participation in social networks and sharing content. For those who diminish social media as mere narcissism or distraction (yes, they’re still out there), I challenge them to see these media as another place where students can develop their critical thinking skills, in many of the same ways we ask them to attempt in traditional reading and writing. This is a new format, to be sure, but an increasingly important one, and also a format in which students can find much that interests them personally.

Personal Growth and Social Networking Identities

1 Nov
Twitter me this 119/365

What are you doing, and who are you? Photo by Sasha Wolff on Flickr.

My large introductory media studies class often takes unexpected turns. With 120 students of widely varying backgrounds and interests, I am frequently surprised (and pleased) by new insights, interdisciplinary connections, and individuals’ anecdotes that challenge and enrich our class content.

During our Thursday class last week, we were discussing Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and I described the basics of Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of social media recently printed in the New Yorker as a way of illustrating possible alternatives to Shirky’s perspective. I was curious to see if my students – who are Facebook fans (so to speak) but Twitter skeptics – tended to identify with Shirky or Gladwell.

Our discussion strayed to interpersonal relationships, rather than focusing on social movements. One of my students described a personal experience that demonstrated his own view of the types of interpersonal ties created by social media. He stated that he had an acquaintance with whom he interacted primarily on Facebook, and thought that he had a great deal of common ground with this person and would enjoy the friend’s company in person. But when they met, he found the Facebook friend to be completely incompatible as an offline friend. Their personalities clashed. He’d had no idea that their interaction would be so uncomfortable.

His experience led the class to explore a question I’d never really considered before. One of the benefits of participating in interpersonal relationships – offline, where difficult personality quirks can’t be avoided – is that we ourselves grow personally from learning to cope with other people. Though that might sound a bit self-centered, it is certainly one of the side effects of participating in relationships, for most of us: we become better able to, well, participate in relationships.

But in social networking, we all present to each other only our best faces. We rarely post things that could lead others to think poorly of us (i.e., we post “self-promotional content”). Like my student’s difficult acquaintance, we all have difficult aspects of our personalities, but we don’t make those public if we want to continue interacting with social networking tools. The witty status updates, the cautiously selected profile pictures, the tidbits of personal data that we provide to our networks are those that we hope will cause others to think well of us. Even text messaging and e-mail – with their lack of spontaneous, unedited interaction – provide fewer opportunities for our more distasteful characteristics to surface.

So what about those difficult personality quirks? What about the opportunities for growth we have in our relationships when we deal with each other and all aspects of our natures, even those uncomfortable characteristics?

For older people and those less active in social networking and other types of online communication, these questions may seem irrelevant. Many people’s online friends are still also those with whom they also interact in person during daily life. But for most of my students – who laughingly admit that they chat online and text message with people in the same room at times – these online modes of relating are the norm. I wonder if the types of interaction among all of their ideal personalities online will reduce their opportunities to learn to have effective relationships, or will alter their methods of growing from their personal relationships.

Social Media Policies and Journalists’ Personal Brands

11 Mar

Photo by Dean Meyers on Flickr.

I recently read Reuters’ new guidelines for their journalists’ use of social media.

Here’s a paragraph that stood out for me:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you — do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters. Our company’s brands are important; so, too, is your personal brand. Think carefully about how what you do reflects upon you as a professional and upon us as an employer of professionals.

I find it highly interesting that Reuters acknowledges their journalists’ desire to have a personal brand here. I don’t think I’ve seen an explicit reference to that emerging reality in any other media company’s social media policies/guidelines so far. (Correct me if I’m wrong about that, please.)

I recently wrote in an academic paper about the increasingly real dilemma that both journalists and their employers will face in balancing individual brands with corporate brands, particularly with regard to the use of social media to establish both. I think that as today’s young journalists come into the profession – especially those who graduate from journalism programs where personal branding and entrepreneurship are emphasized – it may be challenging to find a happy medium between using social media for self-promotion and for corporate promotion.

Can corporate policies like this one help journalists strike that balance by reminding everyone of the significance of both brands? Or does having a social media policy restrict individuals’ ability to establish their own personal brands, to the degree that they begin to resent their employers?

Overall, Reuters’ policy emphasizes the individual journalist’s role in using social media responsibly, and doesn’t set out many strict rules, suggesting instead a string of things to “think about” when using social media. It’s good to see their trust in their employees’ critical faculties, rather than some of the more draconian approaches to social media that other media organizations have employed, though Reuters does still warn that “your manager and/or senior editors will retrospectively review your professional output” and that “We reserve the right to change your beat or responsibilities if there are problems in this area. In the case of serious breaches, we may use our established disciplinary procedures.”

This question isn’t really a problem just for journalism, of course; other professions will also face the challenge of managing employees’ commitment to “take care of No. 1″ – their own personal brands – as well as their employers’, especially when long-term stable employment seems more and more a thing of the past.

Though social media policies, other than Reuters’ version, don’t yet seem to address this dilemma in quite these terms, it appears likely that this will be a more relevant issue as our workforce becomes increasingly reliant on short-term, freelance and contract projects. After all, if one’s employer isn’t going to take care of you in the long run, then you might be prepared to do it yourself, no matter what you have to tweet.

Do You Believe in Facebook?

7 Sep

I had some fun asking a new discussion question to my introductory mass communication class last week: “Do you believe in Facebook?”

Not in Facebook’s business model, nor its overall success as a concept. Not in whether it was addictive or not (though the consensus was that yes, it’s addictive). Rather, did the students believe in the fundamental assumptions underlying the creation and use of Facebook?

by Flickr user Luis Perez

by Flickr user Luis Perez

One of those assumptions, we decided as a class, was that Facebook assumes that we are willing to give up a good measure of the privacy of our daily lives and affiliations in exchange for the benefits of participation, particularly enhancing and making new friendships and associations.

To me, we ask this question too rarely of our media use, both as individuals and a society.

Personally, I’ve decided that using Facebook (and, yes, two Twitter accounts and a blog) are worth sacrificing some of my privacy. I am willing to consent to their fundamental assumptions. However, the assumptions of other media may not be as easily agreeable to me.

For example, the application of this question to entertainment media becomes challenging – especially media with violent content. When I analyze that type of content with this question, I have to acknowledge than the creators of such content assumed that I’d find enjoyment in it.

As a result, I’m forced to ask myself if I agree that I am gaining pleasure by watching murder, assault and more. The “pleasure” might take the form of mere escapism, rather than glee – I’m no psychopath – but watching something like The Bourne Identity has been enjoyable to me. This means, on that fundamental level, that I am obtaining pleasure from the violent images I’m seeing.

Am I comfortable with that? On a personal level, that’s not an easy question to face. It makes me feel bad. On a larger scale, am I comfortable with a media industry that uses the audience’s pleasure in such imagery to make money?

I certainly believe in free speech and the right to express one’s creative vision. But when our media system creates massive profits through the manufacture of crass and vulgar products that cater to the worst human urges, we can look first to ourselves to see how right this situation feels. Do we really believe it’s right, healthy, positive to consume these products for our own psychological well-being? Then, on that greater scale, do we believe in the mass production of such products? With these questions, we find some assumptions worth examining.

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