What are social media, and why are they important?

The term "social media" gets tossed around a lot in today's discourse. Moreover, the concept is often dismissed as a passing fad and associated with a particular application, such as Myspace, Facebook or Twitter.

However, social media (and the roles of social media in contemporary society) go far deeper than any one trendy internet site or application. And all signs show that social media are here to stay and that they are on their way to becoming the primary mode of media communication in the near future. Social media are fundamentally different from most traditional media (like newspaper, magazines, books, movies and television programs, which are produced or published, and then distributed to consumers in a one-way communication).

Social media are inherently interactive and participatory, allowing for dialogic communication rather than one author or artist issuing a statement, report or artistic vision to an audience. In fact, the concept of audience is truly problematized in social media, because we are all both senders and receivers, producers and consumers. And with the increasing emphasis on collaborative production that is enabled by many social media platforms, we are learning to be co-producers and not just individual artists or authors. The notion of authorship and authority is undergoing a major paradigm shift.

This new form of interactive media is called by many names: social media, Web 2.0, new new media (Paul Levinson), spreadable media (Henry Jenkins), and so on. And these forms of media are multiple and varied, especially as to their purpose. Contrary to the narrow view of them as just being sites for insignificant chatting or making friends, social media are doing some serious work in our own culture, and in global society, today.

What are some of the goals of social media?

• Knowledge sharing (wikis, opensourcing, crowdsourcing) and collaborative knowledge building. My favorite (and the one in which I am most deeply involved) is Geni.com, a collaborative family history site.



• Identity construction and display (Goffman's “Presentation of Self”) for purposes as diverse as friendship and romance on the one hand (Facebook, eHarmony) to professional development and networking on the other (Linked In)

• Community building: in person (e.g., Meetup) and online communities

• Corporate profit, marketing, advertising (social media marketing is the latest business and career trend)

• Consumer need fulfillment (i.e., finding and getting what we want to attain, be it through online commercial sites such as Amazon, personal auction sites such as eBay, nonprofit exchanges such as Freecycle, and all of the consumer-oriented ratings and evaluation sites that allow us to recommend or rate our experiences

• Artistic creativity and expression that allows and encourages interactive sharing and feedback, such as Deviant Art for art and photography, Scribd for writing, and Vimeo for film and video artists.

• Political and public activism and social change, ranging from the use of social media in political campaigns to the use of internet activism to mobilize a following and raise funds (examples include MoveOn and Greenpeace) as well as the use of social media and mobile technology to mobilize and organize real political movements and even revolutions, as recent events in Tunisia and Egypt are demonstrating

• Expressing our opinions and sharing information: Vlogs, blogs, feedback blogs on news stories, customer reviews and feedback -- social media are quickly becoming a mechanism for citizen journalism, self-publishing and distribution, and reputation-building for both individuals and corporate brands

• Knowledge and information management and organizing (tools such as Diigo are among my favorites for personal information management; new technological tagging and ranking tools such as Digg and De.licio.us are behind the movement that is turning the Enlightenment-based paradigm of classification on its head, with the shift from taxonomies to "folksonomies"

What many of these social media tools, however different they may be, have in common is that they allow and encourage a bottom-up and collaborative development of structures and systems that is dynamic and flexible rather than an inflexible, imposed, top-down structure. This too reflects the flux surrounding the relative roles of experts/authorities and ordinary people--who become amateur or lay experts, in many cases.

Many developments in social media are here now, with many more on the horizon.

For my students: my rubric for grading academic blogs

Blog writing is a relatively new technological style of writing, but it has become an increasingly important style that you need to master to be a successful communicator in the digital age.

Many different forms of blogs exist, but those that you should be modeling after are blogs that are smart, well-informed, well-written, and personal as well as analytical. While your blog may feel like a diary at times, it is a diary for the world to read — so always keep your audience in mind (even if they haven’t found you yet).

Blogging allows for a great deal of creativity both in writing style and in visual/graphic design, and therefore it is a wonderful channel for self-expression. Blogging allows you to combine and customize your many skills, talents and interests into a format and style that should reflect your distinctive perspective and voice.

Blogs can be witty and serious, personal and political. Bloggers can be both storytellers and news reporters, both cultural commentators about world events and writers of deeply personal memoirs.

How I will grade your blogs

Blogs will be graded on frequency of entries (at least two per week or as assigned) as well as timeliness.

Have you blogged on each of the assigned topics?

Have your blog entries been posted in a timely manner, as assigned? Are you ready to share them in class, if called upon?

Individual blog entries will be graded on

• The length and complexity of the blog — reflecting the amount of time and energy you seem to have put into it.
• The degree to which the topic of your blog entry relates to the course issues (relevance).
• The level of critical thinking represented in your blog entry: not just superficial observations, but deeper analytical thought, making new kinds of connections (don’t just state the obvious) and integrating ideas in new ways. Interrogate the sources of ideas (even — especially — readings assigned for class) and don’t just accept them as truth. Asking questions is far more important than finding definitive answers.
• The degree to which your blog incorporates ideas and concepts from the class readings (this is extremely important): linking to them (as applicable), discussing them, mulling them over, finding examples useful to support or argue with them, and so on.
• The degree to which your blog cross-links to and references other relevant websites and shows that your ideas are interconnected with current thinking about your topic. A few extra minutes doing a web search and reading a few related news articles or web sites can make a big difference in your grade. Be sure to document them.
• The degree to which your blogs are audience oriented: Are you speaking just to the teacher to fulfill a grade requirement? (Wrong answer.) Are you speaking to your classmates? Are you speaking to anyone out there on the web who may happen to read your blog? Be sure, then, to always write in a way that fully explains what you are referring to so that anyone can understand your blog.
• The degree to which you demonstrate an increasing command (as the course goes on) of blog layout, design principles, and technical skills to include links, embed photos and videos, and so on. Break your long paragraphs down into readable “chunks”; use bulleting for lists. Insert photos or images to break up long text sections…
• And of course, clear writing that is relatively error-free and that is appropriate for self-expression on an academic blog: good grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. Blogs may be a bit less formal than academic essays, but they should not be written in text-speak or extreme slang. You are encouraged to write in the first person voice (using “I”) and you may use contractions to make your style more conversational and personal.

And don't forget that blogs are living, breathing, interactive conversation sites--so be sure to participate in comments and discussion on the blogs of others and also on your own.

Happy blogging!

How words, images and gestures communicate meaning

Have you ever wondered about how amazing it is that we humans can communicate with each other?

• How is it that when I open my mouth and make sounds that form words and sentences, you are able to understand me and respond to me?

• How is it that I can make a certain expression with my face, or use gestures with my hands, and you know what I mean even when I don’t use words?

• How is it that I can scribble a map on a piece of paper and you can find your way to the place you need to go?

• How is it that your romantic partner can put his or her hand on your shoulder and touch you in such a way to make you feel the communication of sparks of chemistry and desire, but your parent can press his or hand on your shoulder as a way to make you feel the communication of control (“hold still; stop that, now”)?

• How is it that I can say something sarcastically—really meaning just the opposite of the literal words that I’m saying—and you can tell by my tone that I am joking and don’t really mean it?

• How is it that you can be driving on the highway and a car can pull up behind you and turn on its flashing lights and you know you are supposed to pull over?

All of these are examples of types of communication of meaning that we can study that help to contribute to our communication and media literacy.

Do you remember when you were a child and it was fun to make up “codes”? Usually they were supposed to be secret and only known by you and your best friends. Well, our culture is full of codes of communication—language, codes of nonverbal communication, codes of visual communication.

Let’s think of successful communication as a transmission of a message, using some kind of mutually understood code, in which the sender’s intended meaning is basically understood by the receiver(s). In contrast, miscommunication would be the same kind of transmission but when the meaning intended by the sender—that is, the person trying to communicate—either doesn’t reach the ears or eyes or senses of the intended receiver or when the receiver interprets it in a very different way.

How does the sender/communicator know if his or her message was interpreted correctly? In most interpersonal, face-to-face communication, we have what is called “feedback”—that is, there is a response, either verbal or nonverbal, to acknowledge and affirm that the message has been heard. The receivers may agree with it (smiles, nods, affirmations, or responding appropriately in a conversation), or the receiver may hear it but not agree with it—but in this case, the sender still receives the message that it’s been heard (“You’ve gotta be kidding! No way! “ or a scowl or negative headshake or an argument).

As you can see from these examples, most face-to-face interaction involves multiple channels of communication: through spoken (oral/aural) language as well as nonverbal communication such as facial expressions, gestures, sounds and voice tones. Sometimes (like when a teacher gives a power point presentation) there is also written language involved, to add yet another layer to reinforce the message.

Many types of media communications, though, make this kind of communication more challenging. Introducing differences in time and space, as well as many new electronic technologies, has really changed the nature of communication.

How do the media add a level of complexity to the simple communication of meaning?

• Some media are real-time and simultaneous, but they limit the channels—that is, they take away one or more of the channels and limit our ability to confirm or interpret the meaning as clearly. Take, for example, a phone conversation when we have the first two channels above but we cannot see the facial expressions or body language, nor do we have written communication.

• Or consider an IM chat in which the written words are flying fast and furious, but you cannot hear the voice, tones, or see the body language and facial expressions of the person you’re communicating with.

• Many types of media communications have delayed responses, so they are in effect not simultaneous. They remove the time factor, and in doing so, leave the sender without any immediate feedback mechanism. Examples are old-fashioned letters sent by mail, as well as recorded media such as photos, video, audio recordings, film, and email. In these cases, the sender may get a response and feedback, but the feedback will be delayed for anywhere from moments to weeks to months or longer.

• Other types of media, which are generally considered mass media instead of interpersonal media, are produced with the intention of being basically one-way communications. This means that although there are receivers “out there,” the sender cannot anticipate getting responses or feedback from any or all of them, and so the intention of these messages is not dependent upon getting feedback.

• In these cases, the sender creates a message and “broadcasts” it out to a lot of people (examples range from making films to be shown in theaters, to broadcasting the news on radio or TV, to sending spam emails to everyone in your address book), not waiting or needing for them to answer or provide feedback, at least directly.

Even though there are so many different models of communication, there are still some very basic and fundamental processes by which we understand each other. It’s far more than just knowing the same language—we rarely think about how complicated all these layers and levels of understanding are, and they go far beyond needing to understand just the literal meanings of words or the grammar of a language. Understanding the mechanisms by which meaning is produced, transmitted and interpreted is at the heart of everything we do. In fact, it’s the very basis of culture, and it is essential for our expanded notion of literacy (if we acknowledge that literacy goes far beyond just understanding how to read or write).

How words and images signify

View more presentations from Dr PamWilson.

Is Internet access a new kind of human rights issue?

An excellent and thought-provoking article about this topic from Technolog on MSNBC. I'll paste the first few paragraphs here:

Is Internet access a human right?
By Wilson Rothman

While most people, including most Egyptians, took Internet access for granted as a constant, the suddenness of Egypt's Internet shutdown raises the question: Is access to the Internet a human right?

The vast majority of urban Egyptians, 78 percent, feel that it is, according to a BBC World Service survey conducted in December 2009 in Egypt's largest cities. In fact, 55 percent responded that they "could not cope without it." Ironically, only 6 percent of the surveyed Egyptians felt that state censorship of Internet content was a chief concern — the same percentile as the U.S.

But when the Internet is taken away, as it has been in Egypt, people feel as though their rights have been stripped.

"It's freedom of expression that is a long-standing core right," Neil Hicks, international policy adviser for Human Rights First, told msnbc.com. "Restriction from the Internet is a violation of the right of free speech."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mustafa's Spiciness: Social Media and the Advertising Industry

One of the most fascinating cases I've seen of an advertiser using social media to not only create a buzz about their product but to also interact with their audience in a new and entertaining way has been the Old Spice campaign with athlete/spokesperson Isiah Mustafa, whose role as a handsome, witty and wildly self-aggrandizing guy-in-a-towel-or-on-a-horse has been played to perfection.

Officially titled the "Smell Like a Man, Man" campaign by ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, Mustafa's engaging and tongue-in-cheek ads first aired on television. The ads "went viral" and became pop culture attractions in their own right.



Then, as if just a really hot ad campaign were not enough, Wieden + Kennedy took an entirely new approach to social media. As explained in a Forbes article, the ad agency decided to utilize Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to create a series of 150 short videos featuring Mustafa in a shower (with a towel covering only a bit of his buff physique) responding wittily to questions that had been tweeted to him. It was like an extra bonus to feed the hunger of the fans of the ad campaign.

“This campaign really is a perfect storm of viralty — not only does it target specific bloggers (who are then more likely to cover the whole thing), it also reaches out to less prominent individuals who can be made more aware of Old Spice. Moreover, they become personally invested in the brand because they have actually become a part of the world it has created. We’re not sure if this marathon of videos will lead to more Old Spice products sold — but it definitely creates a brand identity that people will be interested and excited to engage with,” a Mashable blog says.



In August, Wieden + Kennedy released the video case study (above) of their Old Spice social media campaign, calling it "the fastest-growing and most popular interactive campaign in history"; they noted:

• More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech
• Total video views reached 40 million in a week.
• Campaign impressions: 1.4 billion.
• Since the campaign launched, Old Spice Bodywash sales are up 27%; in the last three months up 55%; and in the last month (July to August) up 107%

The agency also won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial in late August, 2010.

In today's news, Mustafa and his towel are back!

Can a country shut down the internet entirely?

Isn't the internet the one form of media that can cross national borders and elude the control of various governments throughout the world? Isn't the internet the true space of civil society that allows anyone, regardless of their levels of power, to be able to voice their opinions, share their messages, and receive information freely?

Apparently not, as the government of besieged President Hosni Mubarak has this week achieved what seems to be unprecedented, even for regimes like China. With his administration under internal political attack by young dissidents (a generation that relies heavily on social and internet-based media), Mubarak has shut down the internet and mobile phone service in Egypt.

The internet monitoring firm Renesys calls these actions "unprecedented in Internet history," indicating what others label "a level of governmental Internet control unseen to this point, not even in China, Iran and Tunisia, which have been accused of manipulating Internet access to quell government opposition." Mubarak has digitally sealed Egypt off from the rest of the world, according to articles in Scientific American and The Huffington Post that explain the technical methods used to do so.

It appears the the Egyptian government and its security forces have been able to shut down internet and mobile communication services by shutting down routers of individuals internet service providers (ISP's) and withdrawing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes by Egyptian ISPs, effectively blocking the majority of both incoming and outgoing internet traffic. According to a PCWorld article, satellite communications may be the only chink in Mubarak's digital armor.

Twitter was the first social media platform to be blocked on Tuesday, just three days ago, as the civil unrest, fueled by social media communication, became more intense. This was not unprecedented; China, for example, had blocked Twitter in July 2009 during the ethnic unrest in Urumqi in Xinjiang Province. Authorities in these totalitarian states fear both the ability of social media like Twitter to mobilize an even larger protest group as well as their ability to spread reports and images of protests and police actions throughout the world.

Al Jazeera was able to post some photos of the demonstrations on Flickr, taken 25th and 26th of January, which appear to be mobile phone camera images.

Moments ago, Mubarak gave a speech announcing that he was removing his cabinet ministers. According to an excellent live news coverage feed on BBC News Online, covering the speech:

The recent protests wouldn't have been possible without the introduction in Egypt of civil and media liberties, says Mr Mubarak. While he takes the side of citizens' freedom to express their views, he also wants to defend Egypt's stability. "There is a fine line between freedom and chaos," he says.

The best news report I've seen on this is from Democracy Now:

Featuring some great student bloggers

I'm very fortunate to have a terrific group of freshmen (and a couple of sophomores) in my brand new COM 103 Media Literacies class this spring. This is a class that has just been developed as a core general education class as one option students can take to address the need for critical reading and writing; other options include ENG 102, ENG 103 and SSC 103 (a new class on writing for the sciences).

Students have been assigned three blog entries so far: the first to introduce themselves, the second to address the question of "What is Media Literacy?," and the third to reflect upon the degree to which each of them feels that he or she is a "digital native" (after reading some excerpts from Mark Prensky, Henry Jenkins, and John Palfrey/Urs Gasser's writings).

So far, the bloggers leading the pack are Taylor Cone and Claire Moore. Taylor actually has two blogs--one she's had for a while, a pretty cool Tumblr blog, and a new one for this class. I was amused (and very happy) at how she found herself blogging about blogging when she wrote:

Schoolin January 19, 2011

So I’m at the library. Just made my second blog post for my COM 103 class, aka the coolest class known to man. Basically I get to “interpret” media and write about it on my personal blog all for a grade. Can you say awesome? Cause I can. And dang, that’s freaking awesome.

Claire's blog I'm Just Sayin'... is off to a wonderful start, with a natural storytelling style, good attention to the readings, and most importantly a thoughtful application of the readings to the real-world of her dad and his 8th grade class. She made some good revisions since class yesterday, too, and shows that she's a quick study when it comes to learning to insert photos and hyperlinks.

Sam Morton's blog post on Media Literacy featuring Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris is pretty cool too. Keep it up, COM 103 bloggers!

Tumblr, Disqus and Micro-blogging

Here's a helpful blog article that explains why Tumblr is a different kind of blogging system from Blogger and Word Press. It's called micro-blogging, and it's not a full-service blogging system. I'd never heard of Tumblr before starting this class a couple of weeks ago and so was not aware of it until my class members started building blogs on it.

There's an add-on app that Tumblr bloggers can use to enable comments--it's called Disqus (like "discuss"--got it!). I recommend that all the Tumblr users in the class, if you are really committed to keeping your blog on Tumblr, try out Disqus. If not, you might consider creating a new blog on Blogger or Wordpress, because commenting and discussing are going to be a critical part of our class assignment.

Trying to set up blogs for my classes: the challenge of coordinating!

So, this is a technological experiment. I'm teaching two classes for which I've asked each student to keep a blog rather than writing regular journals or traditional essays. The learning curve is about how to coordinate all these blogs, especially across several different blogging platforms. I was more familiar with blogger/blogspot and wordpress, but a lot of students are using tumblr, too. Tumblr has beautiful graphic style, but we're still trying to figure out how (and if) one can enable comments, and how someone can "follow" if you're not a blogger on the same system. So just a few technical hills to climb on that.

But the blogs are looking great, and as long as everyone keeps up and doesn't forget to blog a couple of times a week (hint hint!), I think this is going to be a very cool complement to our classroom discussions.

Also, in my senior seminar, we have a Facebook page called Spread That New New Media that we're using to cross-promote and coordinate the blogs. It's a good place to start exploring this class, which is focusing on Social and Spreadable Media.



Instead of my having a blog for each class, I'll use this blog as a connector for both.

Defining the What and Why of Media Literacy 2.0

We had a great class today, though it was strange to have the second class two weeks after the first one! We were delayed by the rare snowstorm that hit north Georgia last week and basically shut down everything (including our university) for the week. And then Monday the campus was closed (and class was cancelled) for MLK Day. So now...trying to get back in the groove with our Media Literacies class, and all of us are still getting to know each other. I think it's a great group--so far, everyone has really participated well and contributed to discussion, and the new blogs look very promising! I will feature different student blogs here, and I encourage all of you to check them out and comment on them and get some good blog discussions going.

So, today's introductory lecture laid out the foundation for a new concept of literacy--not just media literacy, as it's traditionally been conceptualized (what I call Media Literacy 1.0), but a new kind of media literacy that is needed for today's high-tech, internet-mediated, multi-channel participatory culture. I'm calling it Media Literacy 2.0 since it really does go hand-in-hand with what is frequently dubbed Web 2.0 and social media (or spreadable media, to use a term from Henry Jenkins' forthcoming book).

Okay, I'm going to try to learn a new trick so that I can embed my Powerpoint slides into this blog. I found some instructions at Amit Agarwol's blog Digital Inspiration that involved saving my PPT as a PNG and then uploading to Flickr. I've followed the directions, so we'll see if they got re-sequenced correctly through this method.

Technical experiment #1 (to help improve my own media literacy skills!):



Experiment failed. Something must have been wrong with the code, since I see that someone else in Agarwol's comments had the same problem. Also, I just noticed that this blog post was about five years old, so perhaps coding has changed since then.

However, another of Agarwol's commenters recommended slideshare.net, a free presentation-to-flash converter, and I tried it as "technical experiment #2"--and here's the result. It was MUCH easier and faster than the first method. But gosh, the embed code is incredibly long!

Information literacy in a media-saturated world

When I tried to preview it, I got a message "Internet Explorer cannot open Internet site....operation aborted."

Okay, enough experimenting for now. I'm going to save and publish this and then see if it will open in a different browser. Will try again later.

PS a few hours later--it finally opened for me. For some reason, there seems to have been about a 15-minute delay before it was accepted.

Also, about the content of the PPT--I need to mention that the material at the end on participatory culture is from “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” A MacArthur Foundation publication authored by Henry Jenkins et al. (2009).

Media Literacy 2.0

Hello--I'm Pam Wilson, commonly known around the halls of the Reinhardt University Communication Department as Dr. W, and this is the blog for the brand new Media Literacies course, COM 103, that we are offering here at Reinhardt starting this semester. I'm a professor who specializes in Media and Cultural Studies, and this course will be different from any other. It's a freshman-level, university-wide core course that goes well beyond the traditional media literacy curricula.

Maybe we should have called it Media Literacy 2.0--it's all about building skills and critical understanding to enable students to become not only competent consumers of mass media (which is what the traditional media literacy has focused upon) but also, and most importantly, about developing skills and know-how for becoming producers of and interactive participants in mass media, especially the web-based media that is at the center of our social media world today.

Each of my students will be building and maintaining a blog, and I'll link to their blogs as well as to articles and sites and resources that I find especially relevant.

One of the downsides of creating a brand new course is that there is not a textbook that's perfect for my course--I guess I'll need to write my own. :^) In the meantime, Greg Smith's new book What Media Classes Really Want To Discuss has some great material that we will read, and we are also using Art Silverblatt's Media Literacy (3rd Edition).

So, let the journey begin!