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 manuscript:

Wow! – 34 comments on one silly status! (Not all of the comments were from me.) Commenters included people who are contributors to this book, colleagues at various universities who knew about this book and librarians who just enjoy talking about things like citation styles and punctuation quandaries on Sunday mornings.

As another exemplar of social media use, my contributors and I created this book largely using a Google Docs site; instead of emailing endless versions around, it was all on one shared site. Google Docs files live in ‘the cloud’. Cloud computing, a term you will see throughout this book, is used to describe all the online services that store your content and make it available on demand. Using the cloud means you don’t have to worry about hard drive crashes, USB drives gone missing, or other predicaments that cause traumatic data loss. Your data is perhaps safest in the cloud – in the sense that it’s saved on a professionally managed and backed-up server. But, those companies that run the servers – whether it’s Google, Facebook, Amazon, or any other cloud-based site – sometimes do things with your data that compromise your privacy; see Chapter 10 of this book for more details. (Hint: a site’s privacy policy is, in my words, an anti-privacy policy.)

Social media is emergent; it’s exciting; it evolves faster than any of us can imagine. This book will be outdated as soon as I finish this sentence. Even my students and I cannot keep up with the changes, and we don’t try to do so. But, the precepts and the abstractions that support the backbone of social media as a phenomenon – and as a societal game-changer – will not go away anytime soon. For this reason, I believe that the concepts presented in this book will remain relevant even if Facebook goes bankrupt while the book is in press!

Why should academics care about social media?

We have so many reasons to care! In the process of educating our students, we need to incorporate social technologies into our classes and our student communications. Students already exist in the social media world – just pay attention to how many of them are attached to Facebook on their laptops as you walk around the student centre – but they do not necessarily know how to use social technologies effectively. I spend a lot of time pondering what my 22-year-old second cousin (an amicable, intelligent undergraduate at the University of Michigan) told me recently, during a fleeting moment when he was not texting: ‘Email is for old people.’ Additionally, in our research endeavours, we can utilize social media to share our work with our colleagues and work collaboratively in more efficient ways.

The tricks lie in knowing what tools are available, deciding what tools suit your personal needs and personal style, and then using them as your preferences dictate. I edited this book to help you determine these variables in your practice as an academic, regardless of your field. (Our universities have different needs as organizational entities. Those needs are beyond the scope of this volume.) Whether you are a chemistry professor, a linguistics professor, or an engineering professor, this book is for you. Social media can unite us all.

Part 1 of this book, ‘The nuts and bolts of social media for academics’, explores specific uses and practical tips for getting started with a variety of social technologies. We start with blogs, perhaps a more traditional bread-and-butter form of social media (if there is such a thing), and one which we should not neglect to consider. Next, we provide an overview of social networking websites that can be used to grow and nurture your own scholarly community; networking isn’t just for conferences anymore! We also discuss social tools that we can use for collaborative work; once we can learn to move beyond the scores of email that plague our lives, research collaborations become more productive and more pleasant. The next chapter describes how to find scholarly papers online with a variety of advanced search tools and strategies; if this gets too technical for you, see your local librarian for assistance. This is followed by a chapter outlining methods to keep track of your references online using social media tools specifically designed for this purpose – yes, there are many apps for that! We give special consideration to Twitter with its own chapter, because there are many particulars and peculiarities on Twitter that call for special attention. The last chapter in Part 1 explores a variety of uses for mobile devices in higher education, such as Android-based smartphones and iPads.

Part 2, ‘Putting social media into practice’, blends these nuts and bolts together into creative packaging. Part 2 opens with a chapter on choosing and implementing Web 2.0 tools for student engagement, whether your students are solely online or traditional students attempting to find their way at university. I then provide a chapter on making your research go ‘viral’, or wildly popular, on the web. A scary but necessary chapter on online privacy and identity concerns follows. The penultimate chapter is provided just for academic librarians. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter that one of my former students and I co-authored on teaching and learning social media via only social media.

All the contributors to this book have significant, relevant knowledge in their respective areas of social media. Some chapters are more academically grounded than others, but all provide useful tips that you can start using today in your own daily work. The contributors represent a necessary mix of students, academics who are prolific researchers, and other academics who focus more on teaching. We present a diverse scope of knowledge within information science and information technology, and we all believe in the enormous potential of social media in academic settings.

I hope this book ignites sparks of inspiration and ideas for you. You don’t have to be a ‘techie’ to use Web 2.0 tools; in fact, the opposite is true. It would not be possible to include every social media website, every type of social media tool, or social media’s every potential academic use within this volume. By the time this book is in print, the social media world will have changed drastically. But it is that energy behind the technology – and, especially, the meaningful connections I foster with the friends and colleagues who use it with me every day – that fuels my enthusiasm for the potential of Web 2.0 (and whatever comes next) each morning without fail. Thank you for reading this book; use it in whatever way is meaningful to you. I’ll look for you online, but I might not read your old-fashioned email.

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