Part B: Evaluative statement

Discuss the use of social networking/media in the professional environment to demonstrate understanding of the concepts studied this session.

Web 2.0 has revolutionised the way we learn, the way we interact and the way we communicate. Having moved from the two-dimensional “read-only” Web 1.0 era to the 3-dimensional Web 2.0, we inhabit a user-generated information environment characterised as participatory, autonomous, and open, which allows knowledge sharing and peer-evaluation. We are now a ‘platformed society’ where social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and societal structures are linked (Van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 1), ushering in an era of hybrid media systems. Defined as a recombination of older and contemporary media systems in platform societies (Peruško, 2021), the hybrid media system incorporates the media logic of digital media to significantly change political communication and inform social interaction (Chadwick, 2017). “Watching” the internet on a plethora of devices and platforms has replaced watching television and extended and transformed the hybrid public sphere, allowing for and facilitating access to participant-generated content (Skogerbø, 2015, p.1). This intermediality, or interconnectedness of modern information and communication technologies permeates our networked information society and is determined not only by the the technological features of a platform, which determines its level of interactivity and sociability, but the behaviours of users, who are at heart, social creatures (Jensen, 2016).

What are the opportunities?

The influence of technology on society explored in OLJ 2 has resulted in an unprecedented level of access to information, services, government and education. This presents organisations with both opportunities and challenges. Social media plays an important role in our lives on both a personal and a professional level (Bradley, 2015) and with the growth of interactive web technologies (Web 2.0), organisations have become increasingly aware of the benefits of social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram to facilitate collaboration, connection and content creation.

 

Social media networks provide organisations and individuals with a readily accessible and simple-to-use platform for exchanging news and opinions and for maintaining meaningful social relationships. During periods of extreme social and economic disruption such a the current pandemic, social media allows both public and private organisations to act as a third space to alleviate the socio-cultural implications of COVID-19 – physical distancing does not necessarily lead to social disconnectedness, whereas social distancing does (Mansouri, 2020).

The socio-cultural learning effect of social media has had a profound effect on education, and is of particular relevance for educational institutions during the COVID-10 pandemic when distance learning is forcing schools and libraries to find Web 2.0-based alternatives to face-to-face learning to maintain student engagement and learning (Greenhow et al., 2017). Advances in technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) & Augmented Reality (AR) add a new, interactive dimension to remote learning, only hindered by the digital divide and digital fluency (Craig, 2018).

What are the challenges?

Although organisational use of social networking tools has become widespread due to its ease of use and ability to reach hitherto unimaginable numbers of users, it is not without its critics or its problems. Information professionals working in a professional environment face many decisions in determining the right level of social media presence and in assessing the advantages and disadvantages of various platforms for their particular organisational context. Furthermore, organisations often lack the means to develop a social media management strategy to define their use of social media or evaluate its efficacy, nor do they have policies in place to deal with the downside of social media – online criticism. Negative publicity and internal (employees) and external (public) attacks can significantly damage corporate reputation (Horn et al., 2015) and require a range of response strategies.

 

Schools in particular face significant challenges and opportunities in creating a multi-channel marketing and communication program (Cole et al. 2010) due to lack of marketing experience and social media competence and the absence of dedicated staff and resources. When selecting a complimentary social media platform for a heritage society’s audio-visual archive in INF506 Assessment 1, I referred to Hootsuite’s How to Create a Social Media Strategy in 8 Easy Steps which encompasses goal setting, metrics and evaluation, identifying audience personas, analysing available social media platforms, conducting a competitive analysis and an audit of existing social media activity.  A comprehensive evaluation needs to be carried out before choosing the right social network(s) to suit organisational objectives. Establishing a social media content calendar ensures regular, consistent online activity that aligns with the organisation‘s mission statement and an attribution model is needed to evaluate the performance of a multi-channel approach (Newberry & LePage, 2020).

What are the issues?

Conflicting research presents online communication technology in two roles: on one hand as a social connector facilitating open information exchange, community development and participation, and on the other, a separator fostering political partisanship, loss of empathy and loss of trust (Waytz et al., 2018). Having looked into bi-partisanship issues in OLJ 1 and followed up on many subsequent reports over the period leading up to the US Presidential election, it became clear that social media has become an important tool for the dissemination of misinformation and lobbying by political parties and splinter groups on both sides of the political spectrum.  We live in a post-truth era and research suggests that negative emotions expressed on social media, and the resulting emotional contagion, could lead to a long-term societal value change with implications for rights, freedom, privacy and moral progress (Steinert, 2020; Kramer et al., 2014). Discussions following the banning of Twitter and Facebook accounts deemed to be inflammatory or a threat to national security posed serious questions regarding security and privacy measures and the responsibility of Big Tech in safeguarding freedom of speech while simultaneously preventing the misuse of social media. “Such serious interference with freedom of expression should be based on laws and not on company rules”(Von der Leyen, 2021), according to Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, who spoke about new EU legislation which, if adopted, would not only increase data protection and enforce competition rules, but also to censor content circulated on internet platforms. Social media platforms such as Facebook would be responsible for posted content, a move which would seriously impact big tech companies (Waterfield, 2021).

Educational institutions and library and information services are often reluctant to adopt social media as a way of promoting their organisation due to data protection issues.  In Germany for example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the new Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG new) stipulates the appointment of a data protection officer to monitor compliance with federal guidelines but schools may struggle to find sufficient headcount for a dedicated staff member or budget for training.

Another issue relates to data produced by user interaction on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook which is analysed to identify trends and patterns, so-called social media mining (Zafarani et al. 2014). The resulting Big Data makes social media platforms “surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation “(Lohr, 2021), endangering their functionality as the egalitarian tool of connection and information sharing envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee , founder of the World Wide Web, who now sees the need to for users to reclaim their personal data sovereignty (Berners-Lee, 2018)

 

Part B: Reflective Statement

Document your development as a social networker as a result of studying INF506 and it’s relevance to your professional and personal life.

 

Throughout this course of study, I have been steadily acquiring knowledge and exposure to social media and its affordances for teachers and learners. I am now in a position to write effective posts, select and evaluate appropriate platforms and collaborate with other professionals in an educational context.

INF506 Facebook tasks and OLJ entries provided a structured, thematic framework which upped my active social media participation, previously limited to passive Facebook use and messaging apps for their ease of use (and because they were free), to include active content contribution and professional collaboration with educational interest groups on Twitter and Facebook, and the ability to select and evaluate the efficacy of platforms such as Instagram for establishing and maintaining channels of communication with the public and building the organisation’s brand.

As a means of communicating with the INF506 cohort, the Facebook platform is a convenient and more engaging forum for the exchange of ideas or comments than the rather dry Blackboard discussion forum. There was no need to log in and the quick response time (other than the fact that I live in a time zone ten hours behind) indicates that fellow students were more active and more inclined to add visuals and links designed to excite our interest, which spurred us on to reciprocate.  Comments from fellow INF506 students on my blogs were a source of inspiration for blog-matter outside my professional experience (OLJ14) and a springboard for further research. As a test case for the communicative affordances of social media, it was very effective.

The thread running through many of my OLJ entries is the need for more professional training to equip information professionals with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to adapt to their ever-changing and expanding roles and to provide them with the specific pedagogies they need to benefit from technology such as AR/VR in the classroom (OLJ6), their role as third space providers (OLJ18) and their proficiency as social media managers, the lack of which results in a reluctance to embrace digital technology (OLJ7), or social media.

Ongoing engagement – tying theory to practice.

Effective social media engagement can only be achieved if staff are suitably trained so that they fully understand the affordances, current trends and practices of social media platforms at their disposal (Bexheti et al., 2014). It is only when this level of understanding has been reached that tools can be used to impact learning.

In the professional context of school education, a high level of critical literacy development is required to equip learners of all ages, and their educators, to critically assess the flood of digital and print information, for which they, despite their designation as digital natives (Prensky, 2001), are often woefully ill-prepared (Kunnath & Jackson, 2019). Having had many years experience in adult education, I have witnessed the positive impact  professional learning can have.   Pre-service teacher training programmes often fail to address the issue of media literacy and for the in-practice educator, there is a lack of critical literacy training and workshops available to guide policy making and classroom practice (Considine & & Considine, 2013). Professional learning communities empower educators by allowing the exchange of new pedagogies and should be encouraged as an adjunct to sometimes costly formal training measures. To put theory into practice, I intend to develop resources for teachers to use in their classrooms and will be exploring Hilde Johannessen’s work @hildetd and Frank Baker’s (Baker, 2018), Close reading the media: Literacy lessons and activities for every month of the school year, and his Media Literacy Clearinghouse for inspiration.

Have my ideas changed and if so, why?

My concerns about the use of social media for information professionals stemmed from an awareness that I was not competent in the use of even the most common social media platforms (I was a Twitter/Instagram novice) and to the amount of time social media participation requires if it is to be done well. Alone the construction of an effective blog post is very time consuming and the return on investment in terms of comments is limited, a consideration valid for many organisations. I still have reservations about Twitter as a platform that potentially contributes to social division but this has more to do with the behaviours of users rather than the platform itself. I see the value of participating in professional networking via social media but feel that the onus is on us to carefully choose who to follow and how we interact.

Concerns about pervasive social media use have fallen by the wayside in times of COVID-19 related social distancing when parents are simply grateful that their children will still have access to their peers and to education, albeit in a reduced form.

 

The inherent risks attached to posting sensitive information or politically/socially inappropriate content and cyber bullying are addressed by our school policy, aimed at protecting individual privacy and personal data, as required by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). I still have some reservations about privacy but have no doubt that the benefits of collaborative learning far outweigh these concerns.

With regard to social media participation for the purposes of promotion and marketing, surveys reveal that only 12% of international schools have a clearly defined social media strategy and that there is a lack of management buy-in (Eisenach, 2019). Supporting data, a risk/benefit analysis and proposals for ongoing social media evaluation are vital before starting to use social media platforms or expanding an existing social media presence in order to safeguard the school community and its reputation.

 

Resources to support media literacy for teachers and librarians:

Altheide, D. L. (2016). Media logic. In G. Mazzoleni (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of political communication. John Wiley & Sons. DOI: 10.1002/9781118541555.wbiepc088

Baker, F. W. (2012). Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom. International Society for Technology in Education. Washington, DC.

Baker, F. W. (2018). Close reading the Media: Literacy lessons and activities for every month of the school year. Routledge.

Johannessen, H. (2017). Teaching source criticism to students in higher education: A practical approach. In S. Ingvalsen & D. Oberg (Eds.). Media and information literacy in higher education : educating the educators. (p.p. 89-105). Chandos.

Media Literacy Now. https://medialiteracynow.org/resources-for-teachers/

 

References:

Berners-Lee, T. (2018). One small step for the Web. Medium. https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085

Bexheti, L. A., Ismaili, B. E., & Cico, B. H. (2014). An analysis of social media usage in teaching and learning: The case of SEEU. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Signal Processing, Communications and Computers (pp. 90-94), Venice. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316911404_An_Analysis_of_Social_Media_Usage_in_Teaching_and_Learning_The_Case_of_SEEU

Bradley, P. (2015). Social media for creative libraries. Facet.

Burnett, C. & Merchant, G., (2011). Is there a space for critical literacy in the context of social media? English Teaching: Practice and Critique 10(1):41-57. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ935562

Chadwick, A. (2017). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Cole, K., Graves, T. & Cipkowski, P. (2010) Marketing the library in a digital world. The Serials Librarian, 58(1-4), 182-187. DOI: 10.1080/03615261003625729

Considine, D. M. & Considine, M. M. (2013). Media literacy preparation in undergraduate teacher training: An American and Australian perspective. In P. Mihailidis & B. S. De Abreu (Eds.), Media literacy education in action: Theoretical and pedagogical perspectives (pp. 203 – 212). Taylor & Francis Group.

Craig, E. (2018, April 12). How we can prevent a digital divide 2.0 as virtual reality expands? EdTech. https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2018/04/how-we-can-prevent-digital-divide-20-virtual-reality-expands

Eisenach, D. (2019, March 19). State of social media at international schools [Blog post]. Finalsite. https://www.finalsite.com/blog/p/~board/b/post/state-of-social-media-at-international-schools-webinar-recap

Greenhow, C., Chapman, A., Marich, H. & Askari, E. (2017). Social media and social networks. In K. Peppler (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Out-of-School Learning. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315113656_Social_Media_and_Social_Networks_Facebook_Twitter_LinkedIn_Instagram_Pinterest_etc

Horn, I., Taros, T., Dirkes, S., Hüer, L., Rose, M., Tietmeyer, R., & Constantinides, E. (2015). Business reputation and social media: A primer on threats and responses. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice 16,193–208. https://doi.org/10.1057/dddmp.2015.1

Houghton, D., Keenan, E. S., Edmonds, M., & Blix, L. H. (2020). Are you managing your risks from social media? MIT Sloan Management Review, 61(3), 1-5. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/are-you-managing-your-risks-from-social-media/

Jackson, D. (2018). The use of metadata within Instagram for visibility. Medium. https://medium.com/@georgejmedia/the-use-of-meta-media-within-instagram-for-visibility-63566f5909ce#:~:text=Metadata%20is%20everywhere%20online%2C%20especially,Hashtags

Jensen, K. B. (2016). Intermediality. In K. Bruhn Jensen & R. T. Craig (Eds.), Encyclopedia of communication theory and philosophy (pp. 1-12). John Wiley & Sons. DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect170

Kramer, A, Guillory, J.E., & Hancock, J.T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 111(24) 8788-8790. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

Kunnath, J. P., & Jackson, A. (2019). Developing student critical consciousness: Twitter as a tool to apply critical literacy in the English classroom. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 11(1), 52-74. https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2019-11-1-3

Lohr, S. (2021, January 10). He created the Web. Now he’s out to remake the digital world. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/technology/tim-berners-lee-privacy-internet.html

Mansouri, F. (2020). The socio-cultural implications of COVID-19. UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/news/socio-cultural-implications-covid-19

McCourt, A. (2018, April 3). Social media mining: The effects of big data in the age of social media. [Blog post]. Yale Law School. Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/social-media-mining-effects-big-data-age-social-media

Newberry, C. & LePage, E. (2020, May 27). How to create a social media strategy in 8 easy steps. [blog post]. Hootsuite. https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan/

Peruško, Z. (2021). Public sphere in hybrid media systems in central and Eastern Europe. Javnost – The Public. Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture. 27(4).DOI: 10.1080/13183222.2021.1861405

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

Skogerbø, E. & Krumsvik, A. K. (2015) Newspapers, Facebook and Twitter. Journalism Practice, 9:3, 350-366. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2014.950471

Steinert, S., (2020). Corona and value change. The role of social media and emotional contagion. Ethics and Information Technology.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09545-z

Stower, H. & Donaghue, M. (2016). Using social media to support school library service. Schools Catalogue Information Service. 98(3). https://www.scisdata.com/connections/issue-98/using-social-media-to-support-school-library-services/

Waterfield, B. (January 20, 2021). Rein in social media to defend democracy from hate, EU is told. The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rein-in-social-media-to-defend-democracy-from-hate-eu-is-told-ss6p60js2?shareToken=a2e289722990eaa8ed6aaba6170f3a0f

Waytz, A. & Gray, K. (2018). Does online technology make us more or less sociable? A preliminary review and call for research. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 13(4), 473-491. doi:10.1177/1745691617746509

Van Dijck, J., Poell, T. & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society.  Oxford Scholarship Online. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001

Von der Leyen, U. (2021, January 21). Speech by President von der Leyen at the European Parliament Plenary on the inauguration of the new President of the United States and the current political situation. [Paper presentation]. European Commission. Brussels. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/speech_21_167

Zafarani,R,  Abbasi, M. A. & Liu, H. (2014). Social Media Mining: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. http://1.droppdf.com/files/ogOCJ/cambridge-university-press-social-media-mining-an-introduction-2014.pdf