Social Media in Education: the good, the bad, and the unintentional

Posted by jeremyknox on Sep 22, 2011 in Social Media | 1 comment

I thoroughly enjoyed the Social Media and Academia panel on 21^st September, as part of Social Media Week in Glasgow. The event was arranged masterfully by Edinburgh Beltane, Nicola Osborne at Edina, and hosted at the University of Glasgow Library. The panel members put forward some fascinating projects, and a useful discussion was well and truly stimulated.  The live blog is here.  Below is some of my continued reflection on social media in education.

I am quite interested in how educationalists might respond to the criticism that commercial social networks are driven by underlying corporate interests. I refer to the work of Douglas Rushkoff and Norm Friesen, which has sought to expose the underlying processes which govern social networks like Facebook. This perspective views the social network as designed, and maintained, for the purposes of generating revenue through advertising, and the notion of promoting connection and friendship is only implemented to advance this cause.

The criticisms of social networks, and indeed services like Google, often centre on their propensity to collect data, analyse and track the minutia of user activity. The hidden black arts of the Google search immediately create a sense of suspicion, and this is mirrored in the reaction to Facebook’s incessant preservation and utilisation of user account information. However, despite some legitimate concerns, I remain fascinated by the power and proficiency of these tools. Should data collection and analysis really be labelled as ‘the bad bit’ of social networking, where educational endeavours are concerned? A common reaction appears to be, ‘yes we acknowledge the evils of tracking and advertising, but there are still many advantages and creative ways of utilising social networking services for education’. Fair enough. As was suggested by the panel, these issues would make valuable discussion points for the study of media and advertising itself. However, should we automatically dismiss the data collection as the ‘dark side’, or is there some way that these processes can be considered differently, or even utilised for educational purposes?

Certainly, such data collection, tracking and analysis would be very valuable in educational research, where quantitative data is sought. Having access to detailed user actions would be invaluable for that kind of educational analysis of social network use, if such data could ever be obtained. Nevertheless, is there another way to think about this underlying surveillance in commercial social networks?

The educational line seems to encompass social networking in the broader ‘centring’ of learners, primarily through the perception that these systems facilitate a personal, ‘tailor-made’ experience. It is with such an orientation that the mere hint of the objectifying, de-personalising processes of analysis and tracking is perhaps understandably viewed with suspicion and labelled ‘the bad bit’. The corporate view point is associated with mass movements and collective trends, seemingly in direct opposition to the current trend for personalisation and control in educational theory. So, what if we consider the fault to be, not with the collective thinking of the advertisers, but with the focus on the individual? Is there educational value to, not only focusing on trends and mass movements, but thinking about the lack of autonomy and control on the part of the learner? The issue raised by Rushkoff and Friesen, that social network users think they are engaging in social communication, but in ‘reality’ are subject to corporate interests, seems to be an interesting point to discuss (and critique) the merits of ‘social’ and ‘personal’ learning environments, and the perceptions of autonomy that underlie them.

As Friesen highlights in a comparison of broadcast media criticism and social media, the advertising that intersperses television might be considered to reveal profound insights about both the viewers and the act of viewing. In a similar fashion, the advertising in services like Facebook may have value, rather than being relegated to mere corporate, but not academic, interest. So, what seems to be very interesting to me about advertising in social media, is the very thing that makes it detestable to some: the fact that it ignores intentionality, and it is not really interested in what people ‘think’ they are doing. In this sense, the subversive tactics of data collection for advertising seem to point to possible educational research strategies that focus on the unplanned, the unwitting, and the unintentional.