At the risk of making this look like a gang-tackling exercise, I feel
compelled to agree with both Pat and Janice. But I'd like to raise a
different point.
Social media are wildly diverse. It's easy to get lost in the ruck of
MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Second Life, you name it. No
mortal can interweave all of these and others coherently - it would
require cloning several times over, along with total telepathy among the
clones (hmm... story here somewhere). BUT - interworking among them is
quite useful and productive, and plenty of people in online life do it
all the time. Second Life events get posted in Facebook for better
dissemination, Web conferences get posted in Second Life, and so on.
And most importantly, the people who see these postings are outside the
self-selecting groups that originate the posts.
Why is this important? Once a group forms, it organizes and settles into
a pattern of beliefs, activity and behavior determined mostly by its
dominant members. While this can be good for certain familiar and
more-routine undertakings, it isn't so good for the exploration of
novelty and innovative developments. Settled patterns of belief tend to
handle novelty poorly (Kuhn's observations about science come
immediately to mind). One great attraction of interconnected
participation in open public social media is the freedom to engage
novelty with those who can and do offer unfettered insights about it. It
amazes me how an innocent-seeming question from an outsider teaches me
so much more than the frequently-professed bafflement of an insider who
simply does not want to listen.
Still, I can't fault groups for their ability to raise the quality and
focus and scope of the endeavors of their members. That, it seems to
me, is what groups do best. But in a world where finding and selected
the endeavors is perhaps the major challenge, the reach and variety of
combined social media is, I think, unquestionable.
Dana
On 3/19/2010 9:58 AM, Janice Carello wrote:
I also chuckle when people poke fun of things they say they don't
understand. If I don't understand something then there must be
something wrong with the thing I don't understand? Or with people who
use the thing I don't understand? Or worse, with me?
FWIW: The novelty of friending instructors is wearing off for most
students.
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Pat Rapp <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What's wrong with friend requests from your students? Lots of
people view
social networking as a way to connect with their students in a
space that is
open, familiar, and easy to use.
I realize that social media is not for everybody, but it always
makes me
chuckle when people who don't use it poke fun at those who do.
Personally, I
have generated work leads and cultivated relationships on facebook
far more
than I would have without it.
If I were in academia, I would think of facebook as a resource and
a tool,
and would be using it to engage my students.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>]
On Behalf Of
delancey
Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 9:12 AM
To: R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association
Subject: Re: Shatner's new spec-fic-themed social networking site (!)
Well, I'm the worst guide on these things, but maybe I represent some
tiny demographic, and I must disagree. I never understood Facebook.
It looks to me like a crappy web site software -- kind of like AOL-
make-your-own-website! I stay away from it from fear that students
will bomb me with friend requests. But this thing is actually for
something besides telling people when I eat lunch or displaying
pictures of my cat; the purpose is to network with creators of spec
arts; that's attractive to me. (There's an equivalent thing in
academe, called Academia.com; I don't use it much at all, but
apparently some academics do.) So I signed up....
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