Social media and web 2.0
by Jamille Brayshaw
Graduate Student in New Media and Global Education, Appalachian State University
THE IMPACT: REFECTIONS ON CHANGE
HOW A CLASS AND COLLABORATION CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA
In January of this year, I began a journey into Social Media and Web 2.0 that completely changed my opinion about them. I no longer only consider them mindless ways of keeping in touch with everyone from your mom to your best friend in kindergarten's third cousin. Now I actually feel excitement about the power and potential of these platforms.
This all started with the readings we were given in our Graduate Class, Social Media and Web 2.0. I've linked the articles we were given in the blog page and will add more as I see them. The first reading that we were given was The Introduction to NetSmarts, by Howard Rheingold. After reading this 33 page book introduction, my head was spinning a bit from the realization that I had been completely dismissive of an entire section of our contemporary culture. I had viewed Social Media as a type of sinful indulgence rather than a potential place for nourishment. I'd say I thought of Social Media as more of chocolate torte than kale salad. While I find both to be delicious, just one does truly good things to my body, and the other is purely for indulgence and potentially a fatter booty. It is true that for many people, myself included, Social Media is very often a time-zapping (also potentially a booty-enlarging) indulgence that does more harm than good, but it turns out that it has a strong potential for good.
There is no need to choose between being a skeptic and supporter of Social Media. In fact, I have learned that it is so much healthier to position yourself somewhere between the two in a constant conversation about the dangers of its destructive nature and it's positive social implications and potential for good.
WE ARE THE MIND AND SOUL OF THE WEB: CHOOSE WISELY HOW TO WEILD YOUR POWERS
I often get angry with the practices of large corporations, because they are inhumane or for the profit of few. However, there IS power of the consumer in how we choose to spend our money, even if it may be small. We can purchase goods and services from companies with healthy business models and boycott others, and in this way it has been shown time and time again that the consumer does have a say in the morality of the corporate world, although in this case, it may be rather small and sometimes painfully slow.
In a similar way to a corporation, "THE WEB" and individuals websites have no mind of their own, but rather a collective of the people creating it, commenting on it, using it, etc. If we consider Social Media Platforms designed for connection with family and friends, your newsfeed is based on what your friends find interesting. Therefore, the collective intellectual level, the social relevance, and the importance is all shaped by choosing to follow or unfollow, commenting and liking, sharing it again, or hiding from your view. In participating, you are shaping the collective mind within your circles. This is not determined by the site, but by the collection of individuals using it, and you have a power (although small) to share things that are for common good, social morality or morale, uplifting, exposing painful truths or social injustice, and/or about the beauty of the world and humanity rather than things that waste time and energy such as celebrity gossip or bad-mouthing your friends and loved ones to the world. In general, rules of social conduct in the outside world need to begin finding their way to the internet. We need to find respect and concern for each other on Social Media in the same ways we ought to be searching for it outside of Social Media. The decisions you make online about what you will focus your energy on is shaping and changing the psyche of the entire culture on the internet, which isn't a separate culture from "the real world" but a piece of it, and therefore it also impacts the world outside of the internet.
THE WORK: SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEB 2.0 FOR GLOBAL GOOD
INDIVIDUAL PROJECT
For my individual project, FAMILY GENEALOGY early in the semester, I was searching for a way to connect with family on a deeper level through Social Media and explore our biological connections. I set up a genealogy for family members to help contribute to building a family tree.
GROUP WORK: WHO, WHAT, HOW
I had an amazing team for my journey through Social Media and Web 2.0. Dana Mathews, Paige Werhan, and myself, Jamille Brayshaw, collaborated on projects that we hoped would teach us how to learn to use these tools in positive ways.
Our first project THE DEPARTMENT OF SLINKYAN STUDIES was a project designed to explore what makes information on the internet come across as real, and how important it is to look beyond the facts stated on a single site. The idea was to bring the need for critical consumption of knowledge to the foreground in the minds of individuals who view this project. On this project, I took the lead on building the website, while Dana created many of the graphics and content, and Paige led the way with the assisting Social Media
Our second Project WEB 2.O LEARNING is a Blog about Social Media and Web 2.0 in the classroom. For this assignment, Dana Mathews took the lead on the site design and build, while Paige and I assisted with research and content development.
Our third Project STEPS FOR SUDAN was built around the idea of a global Facebook collaboration between schools in Sudan and the United States to raise money for water filtration systems. Our team is very interested in how Social Media could be used for Global Sustainability and Social Justice so that led to our final two projects also being about issues of broader importance.
Our fourth Project CYBERBULLYING was about people using social media to degrade each other and how damaging this can be to other humans. Its not only about cyber bullying, its also about taking the time to consider the impact of our online lives on the confidence and even the ever changing personalities of the people around us. If people can be brought to suicide through what we say or do online, how could we be re-channeling our energies to build each other up, focus on kindness, and even change the world? Dana led this project design, while Paige and I offered support through links, comments and discussion.
Our final Project SUSTAINABLE LIFE is a culmination of the semester's lessons, discussions, readings and tool exploration. We put together a collection of Web 2.0 tools that we enjoyed using throughout the semester and focused them all into a single concept that fit what I had come to define as our group "style:" Social Media for Global Good. This site is about taking real world knowledge and using Web 2.0 tools to create teaching material to share that real world knowledge to the world through Social Media platforms. We took a topic important to a large population of the world: Sustainable Living. Around the topic, we created a population sampling (a class in Sustainability) to represent the individuals seeking to change small things about their lives to live more conscientiously. Then we expanded the concept to a global level by incorporating other lessons from around the state, the country, and the world. For this project, I choose the site and set up the basic outline, but then Dana and Paige both contributed to and helped improve the design elements of the site as well. We all contributed blog posts, links, teaching tools, Web 2.0 projects, writing, and images.
GOALS & FUTURE ACTIVITIES: THE TAKE WAY, HOW I WILL USE SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEB 2.0 IN THE FUTURE
HOW THIS NEW PERSPECTIVE WILL CHANGE MY WORK
When I started the class, I thought that perhaps I'd learn a thing or two about how to set up social media sites for clients that would help them in their businesses. For example, I could set up a website for a restaurant that posts their blog post to their business social media pages with their daily special. To tell you the truth, I had little hope for anything dramatically exciting from this class, and anything of incredible impact to me personally. Now I would tell that same restaurant owner that they can join and begin conversations about their passion for local food, ask customers to read articles about things that line up with their business model to buy organically, connect with other businesses that share similar passions, and join global movements that parallel their ideas.
This is just one example, but I now feel confident that for every entrepreneur, every social advocate, every curious individual there is probably a conversation and practical application already happening on a global level about that that topic that they can and should join for ideas and support...and if it does not yet exist, to begin it. In this way, the news feeds of our social connection sites will begin to look a lot more healthy and substantial.
EXPAND AND CONNECT CAUSES
When I began this degree, I had hopes for my career of using mediums like video and photography to assist nonprofits in promoting their work, telling their stories, raising money, and letting the world know about the problems they seek to solve. The Social Media connection may be even more important for a nonprofit or artistic cause than the films and photographs. These content pieces are important, but the way they are shared is even more important. The content can be presented to the entire world and put into a context of why the particular project is important to society. This is something I wasn't even considering. I can still help them make promotional films & provide photos, but now I can also explain that they can also promote their cause in an interactive group on Social Media and continue to use simple Web 2.0 presentation skills (Animoto, Prezi, Blogs, etc) to update the world on their progress. By doing this they maintain a presence in the minds of their viewers and supporters (current supporters, but also potential future supporters) and it can create a bigger conversation. Plus they can join groups of other nonprofits or artistic causes that have similar goals. In addition to putting causes in the forefront of people's minds , connecting to similar causes, and being able to share a continuing story; using Social Media for a Positive Social Cause encourages people to elevate their minds with what they are finding important in their time on the internet. The more newsfeeds are filled with art, Boys & Girls Club, Sustainable Gardens, and projects to finance the building of wells for clean water supplies, the less space there will be for "crap," meadow muffins, malarkey, foolishness, idiocy, horse-hockey or whatever you'd like to call the useless drivel and poppycock floating around on the internet these days. When people share the videos and images of socially intelligent and important causes, they are asking their friends to take time to focus on something of substance. This will hopefully encourage more people to join up with causes in their physical world as well.
FOCUS, BREATHE, FIND TIME FOR TRUE PRESENCE IN LIFE
Oddly enough, a class on Social Media inspired me to turn off the computer. Yep, it's true. We had many discussions about focus and mindfulness since I began this class, so I have decided to have a day every week that the computer is off, the cell phone used only for talking to loved ones (no checks of notifications or emails). On top of that, I read from something with pages that actually turn, that has that delicious smell of "book" and I look my husband and son in the eye and I pet the dog and focus, focus, focus and breath deeply and think, "Focus on where you are at this very moment."
This practice of focusing then carries back into my time on the computer. When I turn on the computer I think, "What is my goal, here? What do I want to accomplish during my time on the computer?" Sometimes the answer to that is "Nothing" and I just want to look at baby pictures for 20 minutes, and that's ok. Balance is key, but by asking the question, I can waste less time, which around here is a pretty precious commodity.
In his article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Nicolas Carr instilled a healthy fear in me of coming to rely on the internet to "mediate our understanding of the world" and the potential for "our own intelligence to flatten into an artificial intelligence." In strong defiance of this fear, I beg of myself and anyone reading this to not only consider how to change our online behavior, but to reflect on the strength it has in your life. I don't want to only understand the world simply through what's going viral at the moment. The whisper of the wind in the trees will never make your news feed, but it may define something about what it means to truly live...don't miss it because you want to know what Julie ate for lunch or see how much weight David lost on that new diet.
Graduate Student in New Media and Global Education, Appalachian State University
THE IMPACT: REFECTIONS ON CHANGE
HOW A CLASS AND COLLABORATION CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA
In January of this year, I began a journey into Social Media and Web 2.0 that completely changed my opinion about them. I no longer only consider them mindless ways of keeping in touch with everyone from your mom to your best friend in kindergarten's third cousin. Now I actually feel excitement about the power and potential of these platforms.
This all started with the readings we were given in our Graduate Class, Social Media and Web 2.0. I've linked the articles we were given in the blog page and will add more as I see them. The first reading that we were given was The Introduction to NetSmarts, by Howard Rheingold. After reading this 33 page book introduction, my head was spinning a bit from the realization that I had been completely dismissive of an entire section of our contemporary culture. I had viewed Social Media as a type of sinful indulgence rather than a potential place for nourishment. I'd say I thought of Social Media as more of chocolate torte than kale salad. While I find both to be delicious, just one does truly good things to my body, and the other is purely for indulgence and potentially a fatter booty. It is true that for many people, myself included, Social Media is very often a time-zapping (also potentially a booty-enlarging) indulgence that does more harm than good, but it turns out that it has a strong potential for good.
There is no need to choose between being a skeptic and supporter of Social Media. In fact, I have learned that it is so much healthier to position yourself somewhere between the two in a constant conversation about the dangers of its destructive nature and it's positive social implications and potential for good.
WE ARE THE MIND AND SOUL OF THE WEB: CHOOSE WISELY HOW TO WEILD YOUR POWERS
I often get angry with the practices of large corporations, because they are inhumane or for the profit of few. However, there IS power of the consumer in how we choose to spend our money, even if it may be small. We can purchase goods and services from companies with healthy business models and boycott others, and in this way it has been shown time and time again that the consumer does have a say in the morality of the corporate world, although in this case, it may be rather small and sometimes painfully slow.
In a similar way to a corporation, "THE WEB" and individuals websites have no mind of their own, but rather a collective of the people creating it, commenting on it, using it, etc. If we consider Social Media Platforms designed for connection with family and friends, your newsfeed is based on what your friends find interesting. Therefore, the collective intellectual level, the social relevance, and the importance is all shaped by choosing to follow or unfollow, commenting and liking, sharing it again, or hiding from your view. In participating, you are shaping the collective mind within your circles. This is not determined by the site, but by the collection of individuals using it, and you have a power (although small) to share things that are for common good, social morality or morale, uplifting, exposing painful truths or social injustice, and/or about the beauty of the world and humanity rather than things that waste time and energy such as celebrity gossip or bad-mouthing your friends and loved ones to the world. In general, rules of social conduct in the outside world need to begin finding their way to the internet. We need to find respect and concern for each other on Social Media in the same ways we ought to be searching for it outside of Social Media. The decisions you make online about what you will focus your energy on is shaping and changing the psyche of the entire culture on the internet, which isn't a separate culture from "the real world" but a piece of it, and therefore it also impacts the world outside of the internet.
THE WORK: SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEB 2.0 FOR GLOBAL GOOD
INDIVIDUAL PROJECT
For my individual project, FAMILY GENEALOGY early in the semester, I was searching for a way to connect with family on a deeper level through Social Media and explore our biological connections. I set up a genealogy for family members to help contribute to building a family tree.
GROUP WORK: WHO, WHAT, HOW
I had an amazing team for my journey through Social Media and Web 2.0. Dana Mathews, Paige Werhan, and myself, Jamille Brayshaw, collaborated on projects that we hoped would teach us how to learn to use these tools in positive ways.
Our first project THE DEPARTMENT OF SLINKYAN STUDIES was a project designed to explore what makes information on the internet come across as real, and how important it is to look beyond the facts stated on a single site. The idea was to bring the need for critical consumption of knowledge to the foreground in the minds of individuals who view this project. On this project, I took the lead on building the website, while Dana created many of the graphics and content, and Paige led the way with the assisting Social Media
Our second Project WEB 2.O LEARNING is a Blog about Social Media and Web 2.0 in the classroom. For this assignment, Dana Mathews took the lead on the site design and build, while Paige and I assisted with research and content development.
Our third Project STEPS FOR SUDAN was built around the idea of a global Facebook collaboration between schools in Sudan and the United States to raise money for water filtration systems. Our team is very interested in how Social Media could be used for Global Sustainability and Social Justice so that led to our final two projects also being about issues of broader importance.
Our fourth Project CYBERBULLYING was about people using social media to degrade each other and how damaging this can be to other humans. Its not only about cyber bullying, its also about taking the time to consider the impact of our online lives on the confidence and even the ever changing personalities of the people around us. If people can be brought to suicide through what we say or do online, how could we be re-channeling our energies to build each other up, focus on kindness, and even change the world? Dana led this project design, while Paige and I offered support through links, comments and discussion.
Our final Project SUSTAINABLE LIFE is a culmination of the semester's lessons, discussions, readings and tool exploration. We put together a collection of Web 2.0 tools that we enjoyed using throughout the semester and focused them all into a single concept that fit what I had come to define as our group "style:" Social Media for Global Good. This site is about taking real world knowledge and using Web 2.0 tools to create teaching material to share that real world knowledge to the world through Social Media platforms. We took a topic important to a large population of the world: Sustainable Living. Around the topic, we created a population sampling (a class in Sustainability) to represent the individuals seeking to change small things about their lives to live more conscientiously. Then we expanded the concept to a global level by incorporating other lessons from around the state, the country, and the world. For this project, I choose the site and set up the basic outline, but then Dana and Paige both contributed to and helped improve the design elements of the site as well. We all contributed blog posts, links, teaching tools, Web 2.0 projects, writing, and images.
GOALS & FUTURE ACTIVITIES: THE TAKE WAY, HOW I WILL USE SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEB 2.0 IN THE FUTURE
HOW THIS NEW PERSPECTIVE WILL CHANGE MY WORK
When I started the class, I thought that perhaps I'd learn a thing or two about how to set up social media sites for clients that would help them in their businesses. For example, I could set up a website for a restaurant that posts their blog post to their business social media pages with their daily special. To tell you the truth, I had little hope for anything dramatically exciting from this class, and anything of incredible impact to me personally. Now I would tell that same restaurant owner that they can join and begin conversations about their passion for local food, ask customers to read articles about things that line up with their business model to buy organically, connect with other businesses that share similar passions, and join global movements that parallel their ideas.
This is just one example, but I now feel confident that for every entrepreneur, every social advocate, every curious individual there is probably a conversation and practical application already happening on a global level about that that topic that they can and should join for ideas and support...and if it does not yet exist, to begin it. In this way, the news feeds of our social connection sites will begin to look a lot more healthy and substantial.
EXPAND AND CONNECT CAUSES
When I began this degree, I had hopes for my career of using mediums like video and photography to assist nonprofits in promoting their work, telling their stories, raising money, and letting the world know about the problems they seek to solve. The Social Media connection may be even more important for a nonprofit or artistic cause than the films and photographs. These content pieces are important, but the way they are shared is even more important. The content can be presented to the entire world and put into a context of why the particular project is important to society. This is something I wasn't even considering. I can still help them make promotional films & provide photos, but now I can also explain that they can also promote their cause in an interactive group on Social Media and continue to use simple Web 2.0 presentation skills (Animoto, Prezi, Blogs, etc) to update the world on their progress. By doing this they maintain a presence in the minds of their viewers and supporters (current supporters, but also potential future supporters) and it can create a bigger conversation. Plus they can join groups of other nonprofits or artistic causes that have similar goals. In addition to putting causes in the forefront of people's minds , connecting to similar causes, and being able to share a continuing story; using Social Media for a Positive Social Cause encourages people to elevate their minds with what they are finding important in their time on the internet. The more newsfeeds are filled with art, Boys & Girls Club, Sustainable Gardens, and projects to finance the building of wells for clean water supplies, the less space there will be for "crap," meadow muffins, malarkey, foolishness, idiocy, horse-hockey or whatever you'd like to call the useless drivel and poppycock floating around on the internet these days. When people share the videos and images of socially intelligent and important causes, they are asking their friends to take time to focus on something of substance. This will hopefully encourage more people to join up with causes in their physical world as well.
FOCUS, BREATHE, FIND TIME FOR TRUE PRESENCE IN LIFE
Oddly enough, a class on Social Media inspired me to turn off the computer. Yep, it's true. We had many discussions about focus and mindfulness since I began this class, so I have decided to have a day every week that the computer is off, the cell phone used only for talking to loved ones (no checks of notifications or emails). On top of that, I read from something with pages that actually turn, that has that delicious smell of "book" and I look my husband and son in the eye and I pet the dog and focus, focus, focus and breath deeply and think, "Focus on where you are at this very moment."
This practice of focusing then carries back into my time on the computer. When I turn on the computer I think, "What is my goal, here? What do I want to accomplish during my time on the computer?" Sometimes the answer to that is "Nothing" and I just want to look at baby pictures for 20 minutes, and that's ok. Balance is key, but by asking the question, I can waste less time, which around here is a pretty precious commodity.
In his article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Nicolas Carr instilled a healthy fear in me of coming to rely on the internet to "mediate our understanding of the world" and the potential for "our own intelligence to flatten into an artificial intelligence." In strong defiance of this fear, I beg of myself and anyone reading this to not only consider how to change our online behavior, but to reflect on the strength it has in your life. I don't want to only understand the world simply through what's going viral at the moment. The whisper of the wind in the trees will never make your news feed, but it may define something about what it means to truly live...don't miss it because you want to know what Julie ate for lunch or see how much weight David lost on that new diet.