Howard Rheingold has uploaded an eight minute video on his Social Media in the Classroom Co-laboratory. The video is a superb piece, a really good overview of social media tools and the benefits to be gained. This posing is about some thoughts I want to share that viewing the video triggered for me.
A master in studying the social implications of electronic communications, Howard’s advice about keeping up with continual change is to “…keep up with the literacies that technology makes possible”. That is true for me. My understanding of social media has been helped along immeasurably through participation – through this blog, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Goofy2, del.icio.us and more.
One consequence is that my attention is being spread over more media. I’m spending more time on social media and less time on broadcast and print media. What’s more, my participation-rate online has lifted considerably over the last few months. There is so much happening.
Back to Howard’s video. Somewhat to Howard’s surprise, his students were not as well informed about social media and the benefits as he thought they would be. I am not so surprised about that. Sure, younger people consume a lot of digital media, but it’s fragmented over many sites and service offerings – diversity rather than convergence. What’s more, although there are some sites popular to everyone (such as YouTube) those aged seven to 15 years are more interested in video games whereas young adults are more interested in social networking sites. In my experience, collaborative tools like Twitter, Friendfeed and LinkIn are more useful to adults in work such as IT entrepreneurs and technicians, journalists and researchers.
I’ve found that people who don’t use social media just don’t get it. It’s a part of the growing digital divide. As a horizon scanner, finding out what the early adopters are doing is important to me. These days, to achieve an understanding of social media requires experience of it – broad and personal experience.
