Social Media: Uses and Abuses

Jennifer JonesDepartment of Media and Communications

University of Leicesterhttp://jennifr.net

follow me on twitter:caffeinebomb

What is Social Media?

• Wikipedia DefinitionSocial media is information content created by people using highly

accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Source: http://www.wikipedia.org/social_media

What is Social Media?

• Remembering the cult of Web 2.0

Participation, user-generated content, collaboration, social networking platforms, many-to-many, moving towards a semantic web, horizontal structure, grassroots media and so on.

Source: O'Reilly (2004)

• The buzzword of 2009?

Erm..so what is it?

• Social Media refers to the tools used by Practitioners. (Tools focussed)

• Social Media refers to the culture that has emerged from using the tools. (Terminology focussed)

Source: Mishra (2009)

4Cs of Social Media

4Cs of Social Media

• Content

• Conversation

• Community

• Collective Intelligence

Source: Mishra (2009)

Stop discussing it, USE IT!

• Don't analysis it, just try it. And keep trying it.• Socially focussed websites are not a new

thing, they should be used in addition to other tools.

• The Internet is not an object, it is a social space

• http://www.twitter.com/home

Social Media: Uses and Abuses• Friday, June 26th 2009 • Prof. Andy Miah (University of the West of

Scotland/FACT Liverpool)

• Prof. Rachel Gibson (University of Manchester)

• Dr Gillian Youngs (University of Leicester)

• Toby Moores (CEO of Sleepydog/Visiting Prof. At IOCT, De Montfort University)

• You!