Last Saturday, I went on a Deutschlandradio Wissen talk show to discuss online communities. The other two speakers were Sarah Krohn, moderator at hungrig-online.de, and Mark Ralea, community and marketing expert. What it came down to was an interesting discussion of large social networks versus smaller niche communities. Continue reading
What’s this now? A “News Feed” and a “Live Feed”? Facebook has changed its interface again. I didn’t immediately understand. Apparently, the Live Feed includes everything that’s currently going on in my social online world, and the News Feed just features some highlights. In other words, Facebook believes that a lot of the stuff my friends are up to is simply not relevant. Fair enough, I heard a lot of people say that the previous News Feed had become slightly overwhelming. But how does Facebook know what the interesting stuff is? Continue reading
Posted in Social Networking, Virtual Communities
Tagged algorithm, Facebook, Google, Google News, last.fm, mass self-communication, Virtual Communities
Will they ever get it? I don’t think so. Since social networking sites like Facebook have become so immensely popular, critics from all corners of society have renewed their claims that the Internet is isolating, alienating, and inevitably leading to the end of healthy community life. The latest in line this morning: Archbishop Vincent Nichols (see BBC article)
His criticism is so old it’s almost too boring to repeat. Facebook leads young people to seek transient relationships, as many of them as possible to boast about them. And when these loose relationships collapse, young people go and commit suicide, according to the Archbishop. Moreover, they forget how to interact face-to-face, loosing their ability to interpret a person’s mood and and body language. In other words, once again the end of society.
I do not know if the Archbishop has ever signed on to Facebook or if he was thoroughly briefed about it before making his claims. I find it unlikely, as he contradicts both the experience of most Facebook users and the current status quo in terms of academic research on this topic.
I’ve been doing a bit of work on online communication myself over recent weeks. During the interviews I conducted, all interviewees made it very clear that they use Facebook to talk to a few close friends on a regular basis. The rest of the people on their friend list are those who they just met once or were never really that close to. It’s like collecting business cards. You got the person’s details and if at any point in the future you need to contact her, you can.
Critics like the Archbishop should realize that not every contact that’s labeled a “friend” on Facebook is a true friend. In fact, many people I talked to said they started a number of separate friend lists to distinguish between those who they care about and those they aren’t that close to.
Many academic an journalistic articles, as well as my interviewees, also suggest that online interaction is very closely integrated with offline interaction. If we only looked at Facebook communication, our social life would indeed be pretty sad. But Facebook is there to supplement everything else that went on before, to mix with it, or in some cases to replace it – but only partially.
Facebook and other social networking sites may even enable relationships to be maintained that were previously lost. Those students I spoke to (in addition to my own experience) all came to the UK from abroad. They say that through social media they find it much easier and cheaper to stay in touch with their friends from high school or their families back home.
Finally, critics like the Archbishop make it sound like social networking sites dropped to the face of the earth as the source of all evil. I see that they make for an excellent culprit. But if we want to lament the decline of community life (which we have some reason to do), we should look somewhere else first. Facebook et al. only reflect and perhaps emphasize social trends that have been ongoing for quite some time, such as individualization, globalization, social exclusion, and some others.
While I wrote this, I was wondering about the Archbishops motifs to voice his criticism about social networking sites. Does he think that those who no longer go to church are now surfing the web instead? Does he find it hard to compete for the attention of young people? Does he hope they would come to his church if Facebook was outlawed?
As a side note, I find it worth mentioning that Mr. Nichols has a Facebook fan group with 222 members. Not sure whether he knows about this or how he feels about it.
This morning, I’m happy to post the first contribution by a guest writer on this blog. She previously blogged under the name “Chamique”. Her post is a follow-up to a number of discussions we had about this whole uploading, tagging, de-tagging pictures business on Facebook. This includes not only the obvious issue of self-promotion and reputation management. The real concern is about this obsession of having to document one’s life, every second of it – as if things didn’t happen unless you see them in some Facebook album. Thanks, “Chamique”, for this post!
Of late, we’ve been discussing this sudden and constant need to document everything we experience and see. To make others believe we were there. Or maybe to make ourselves believe it sometimes. Was I really lounging around on a beach somewhere just a few weeks ago? My tan and memories might be fading, but all the photographs say yes, this did indeed happen.
I’ve always considered myself to be someone who writes to remember. I’ll make to-do lists just so the list stays in my head. I remember my handwriting on Post Its and journals and lecture notes. I guess my memory is visual. Does that mean my photograph taking is meaningless, given that I’ve already seen what I’m capturing on the lens?
On a recent trip to Oxford, I whipped out my camera and took several pictures of the owner of this ‘blog just because I knew it would piss him off. (I’m controversial like that.) The results were so ridiculous – even by my flimsy standards – that those pictures will remain relegated to a lowly subfolder somewhere on my computer. But I know I can still get a giggle out of looking at them in the near or distant future. If ever I choose to do so. The point is – I am comforted that I have large portions of my life in pictures. Like somehow this knowledge lets me clear up more brain space for all the new things I must learn over the course of my life.
The better part of my Sunday morning last weekend was spent in the frantic un-tagging of some *ahem* unflattering photographs of myself on Facebook. While I’m unapologetic about the clothes I wear and faces I make at a camera when it’s pointed at me, I do take into consideration that the 600 people that are called ‘friends’ of mine include those whom I do not particularly want to share my momentary lapses of reason with. It must also be pointed out that I seem to have far too much faith in my friends and their taste(lessness). It appears that not many of them are as discerning as my gentle self whilst uploading photographs to the internets. My grandchildren would be horrified. (It ruins the glamourous image I’m trying to build up for myself over the years, you see.)
Then again, all I have of my own grandparents is a selection of elegant black and whites. I haven’t ever seen them sticking out a cheeky tongue during a group photo. Did previous generations live their lives less fully than us now?
At home, we have a charcoal sketch of my grandmother, which guests are quick to comment on. Where’s that from, they’ll ask. And there’s the romantic story of how Ruiz Pipo, a young Parisian artist, approached my stunning grandmother and asked if he might sketch her, right there, on a paper napkin at the café, circa 1954.
Cut to Paris, 2009. I, instead, have an album of a hundred or so digital photographs of me making a fool of myself in front of the several places of interest. Have we become so accustomed to the abundance of cameras and recording devices that we allow ourselves to be at ease or even careless when accosted by a lens? Are photographs not sacred anymore?
Things become even more complicated if we entertain stuffy respectable ambitions for ourselves as professionals. The aspiring political candidate can’t be seen sleeping on the sidewalk with her head next to a trash can. (The quirky artist, however, causes no scandal when carelessly displaying a profile pic of himself rolling a spliff.) So many people are quick to restrict viewing of their personal photographs and weblogs, pre-empting controversies at the workplace or amongst family. Are we no longer expected to let our guard down – ever? Or does it mean that we must all acknowledge how public our social, professional and personal lives have now become? Foucault would have had a field day with the panoptic discipline we’re exercising. We’re self-censoring like never before whilst simultaneously being led to believe that we have every freedom of expression.
There have been so many times that I wish I had my camera, afraid that I might forget what was in front of me. But strangely, those moments are the ones that stay with me longest.
If a picture tells a thousand words, personal memories make photographs seem like Shakespeare on acid.
The pictures might show me sitting under a watermelon pink sunset, but it doesn’t tell you how tart and minty my cold mojito was that evening. They might show a group of us at our high school graduation, but it won’t show the purple hickey I was hiding under my sari. My parents don’t know that the boyfriend they hated so much was the one making me smile when he took the picture of me that’s framed in their bedroom. You can’t smell the grass from my pictures in the park.
I think my relationship with photographs is becoming increasingly distant. They’ve come to represent a moment, but not the experience of it. Pictures trigger memories and anecdotes. Like my grandmother’s portrait. Maybe not quite as graceful, but nonetheless real. Like the music that was playing at the time you looked into the camera, that nobody heard but you.
Together with a bunch of LSE Media & Communication students, I attended the “one-day international conference” on “Maximizing Opportunities for Young Learners in the Digital Age” in Oxford today.
As young learners that we consider ourselves to be, we had hoped to get an overview of the latest research regarding technology and learning. Our hopes were not entirely disappointed, but it turned out that the debate was about some bigger questions that go way beyond the role of technology. In fact, what was really at stake was the (power) relationship between teacher and student, as mediated by technology.
After writing the post, I decided to go straight into my thoughts on what was said at that conference, moving a summary of the presentations to the end.
To be critical, all of the presentations raised more questions than they answered. One of the reasons for this is that the research is not specific enough about what is meant by “young learners”, by “technologies”, and (most crucially) by “learning”. Just these three variables can be configured in so many different ways that generalizations seem very problematic.
The conference also left some people in the audience wondering what the debate was actually about. If you didn’t know that it was about technology and learning, you could have assumed at times that it was the entire schooling system that was up for discussion.
All arguments quickly led to questions about the nature and purpose of learning, the role of schools in learning, and even about the nature of knowledge itself. What is it that we want our children to learn and know?
What was really at stake at this debate was something that no speaker at the conference explicitly talked about: the relationship between the teacher and the student. The teacher is supposed to have the ultimate authority over knowledge. That defines his identity and professional self-understanding as a teacher.
If technology enables students to go out and discover (possible more recent or conflicting) information by themselves, the position of the teacher is undermined. Her role would have to change from preaching knowledge to guiding students in finding it themselves. Teachers would have to be accountable for what they teach and their teaching would be more transparent. Do they like that? Most of them probably wouldn’t.
I couldn’t help the feeling that some of the researchers in this field also don’t fully embrace such a change in the way the teacher-student relationship works. If we think about the many interviews they conduct with young people as a discourse (as Foucault would like it), then the patronizing undertone in their questions and the way they frame their studies possibly reinforces the powerful position of teachers and lecturers (that they are) as the ultimate source of knowledge. Those who this research is about – the young learners – are not given a loud enough voice in this discourse.
Justine Cassell, Northwestern University in Chicago, opened the conference with an intriguing presentation of the Junior Summit project, which she was involved in. In short, the Junior Summit was a global online community that was set up to be run by teenagers themselves. Given this opportunity, the young participants actually managed to establish a strong sense of community and activism. One of her findings was that adults should stay away as much as possible. “We need to build communities, not classrooms.”
Ole Erstad, University of Oslo, continued from there by questioning the notion of a “digital generation”. Teens and their media habits are in many ways quite “normal”, he suggests. He also questions any distinction between “formal” or “informal” ways of learning. To understand how young people use technology for learning, we should adopt a “learning lives” approach that focuses on learning in everyday life, across many different contexts and places.
Sonia Livingstone, LSE, gave a concise summary of current empirical research on technology and learning. Does technology improve students performance in the usual school subjects? Yes, no, maybe. There is no conclusive empirical evidence for this relationship. Maybe technology allows for new ways of learning, like experimentation, tinkering, social learning, and so on? Yes, no, maybe. The problem with empirical research in this area, she suggests, is that we don’t seem to know what to look for. “The pedagogy of the Internet has not been worked out yet.”
Finally, John Furlong and Chris Davis, University of Oxford, asked “Do young people need help in using technologies to maximize their learning out-of-school?” They made the distinction between formal, quasi-formal, and informal learning settings (that Ole Erstad had rejected), providing quotes for each of them, taken from their interview research. They suggest that adults need to better understand young people and technology in order to guide the youth.
Posted in Culture, Mediation, Technology, Virtual Communities
Tagged conferences, e-learning, education, exams, higher education, Identity, LSE, online study groups, Oxford, Virtual Communities
