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    Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide
    Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide
    Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide
    Ebook402 pages4 hours

    Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide

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    About this ebook

    This book provides an overview of social media technologies in the context of practical implementation for academics, guided by applied research findings, current best practices, and the author’s successful experiences with using social media in academic settings. It also provides academics with sensible and easy strategies for implementing a wide spectrum of social media and related technologies - such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, and various Google tools for professional, teaching, and research endeavours.
    • No other book exists that assists academics in learning how to use social media to benefit their teaching and research
    • The editor has an extensive background in social media teaching, consulting, research, and everyday use
    • All the contributors come to the book with a common goal, from various expertise areas and perspectives
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsevier Science
    Release dateAug 6, 2012
    ISBN9781780633190
    Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide

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      Book preview

      Social Media for Academics - Diane Rasmussen Neal

      networks.

      Introduction

      Diane Rasmussen Neal

      What is social media?

      These days, it seems we cannot escape mentions of the popular online services that comprise social media. Television news anchors tell us to learn more about their stories by following them on Twitter. Our favourite local coffee shop displays a sign at the register, inviting customers to ‘Like us on Facebook.’ Charlie Sheen tweets that he’s #winning, and the world talks about it. We learn that citizens of countries whose governments are in upheaval use social media to organize grassroots political efforts. The song ‘Friday’, performed by an unknown 13-year-old girl, garnered 167 million views on YouTube, and Ms Black’s name was the ‘#1 fastest rising search on Google in 2011’ (Google, 2011, para. 2).

      Social media – and its sister term, ‘Web 2.0’ – are difficult to define, because there is little agreement about what they mean. My view, in the simplest terms possible, is that these phrases refer to the many easy-to-use services that anyone can use to interact with other people online. For example, when you watch and/or comment on a YouTube video, ‘Like’ a friend’s Facebook update and read your colleague’s blog, you are using social media. In the pioneer days of the World Wide Web, we had to put content online by writing HyperText Markup Language (HTML) files, which is what is used to display a web page in an Internet browser. (HTML is still necessary for website development, but we don’t have to know the code to put our content online.) That old-school approach to creating web pages is known as ‘Web 1.0’, in which HTML was created and posted for one-way communication: from the website developer to the people reading the site, not the other way around. For example, if the BBC posts a news article online for people to read – and that’s it – that is considered Web 1.0 technology. If the BBC allows readers to comment on the story, then that might be considered a Web 2.0 approach to information dissemination. Social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter exist based on people’s ability to post, share and view one another’s thoughts, links to interesting web pages and other online content such as blog posts, videos, photographs, tweets and – yes – even old-fashioned Web 1.0-style pages.

      With today’s easy-to-use social media tools, creating an online presence is as easy as signing up for a Facebook account, which is a two-minute process. Or, on Twitter, type in a tweet such as ‘I am looking forward to grading the 150 papers piled on my desk’ – and you’ve created web content! Your Twitter followers can respond to you just as easily by tweeting back to you, ‘No! Don’t grade until you’ve had a glass of wine!’ There are, of course, web programmers who create the technologies behind these sites, but the advent of Web 2.0/social media means that the rest of us don’t have to know what they know in order to create online content.

      Of course, the idea of easily communicating with each other online did not come about just when early social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster ramped up in the early 2000s. When I was an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I used technologies such as bulletin board systems, ICQ and Usenet to talk to people daily. (I even dated a few men I met online; the Internet was a young female geek’s oyster in those days.) Thanks to the rapid improvements in hardware and web-based information provisions, ‘social media’ is now in the mainstream. According to the web metrics company alexa.com, the top three sites on the web are Google, Facebook and YouTube, respectively.

      When I lecture on social media, I always emphasize that it is ultimately not about the technology itself; it’s about connections between people. I do not believe that social media isolates us because it glues us to a computer screen or a smartphone; I believe it brings us together in remarkable ways. I’ve happily found old friends through Facebook, learned that other people do in fact like the same obscure 1980s bands I like via YouTube, and told people I was going to bed ridiculously early on Twitter. These small exchanges are not always necessarily life-changing (which is why sceptics argue that they are a ‘waste of time’), but they keep us in touch and they can in fact be extremely meaningful. When my wonderful father died in 2010, the tremendous support I received as a result of sharing the moments leading up to his death with my Facebook friends was invaluable. Even with the physical presence of my family and closest university colleagues around me at that time, I would have felt so much more alone through that horrible time without my virtual social network surrounding me. Facebook changes its news feed, its privacy policies and its profile pages constantly, and people get angry about it, but they keep coming back and new accounts are added every day. Why? That’s where their friends are. Figure I.1 shows my Facebook status on my final day of editing this

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