The Power of Social Networking

In October 2007 I started teaching on the ‘Communities On-Line’ module at Leeds Metropolitan University. It was a module originally designed and developed by Professor Janet Finlay and Lynette Willoughby, and taken forward by Steve Walker afterwards. In that month (as I write this, only 18 months ago), facebook had reached the 50 million user mark (1:facebook.com). Not all of our module students had their own facebook profile at the start of the module. Most of them had become regular users by the end of the module, in January 2008.

From the  reflections and analysis we received from the students in that academic year, it was clear that on the whole, their imagination for the power of social networking was limited to arranging pub nights and commenting on photos, with of course the exception of one or two more wide-reaching minds. So we set up a group to discuss any module related ideas and I shared information on my wall. It was a reasonably active meeting place for the duration of the module.

This year, the more techie-literate and enlightened students are using Twitter to harness the power of information sharing, and I don’t just mean pub socials, I mean software plug ins, interesting projects, reported events and so on.

Like many others’ anecdotal accounts of Twitter, until very recently I wasn’t sure of the purpose. But now I am an avid fan.  And in the last 4 hours, an amazing thing happened.

I had been recommended a couple of high-profile twitter pages to follow, and through following links to blogs in the Bios I came across a Digital Story posted yesterday by Courage Campaign in the States. http://vimeo.com/3089746 The issue struck a chord with me, as with any social injustice, and I tweeted the link asking readers “Please share widely”.  I’m fairly new to Twitter and don’t have many followers, but within 2 hours both AmnestyUK and Janet Finlay had both retweeted my link, and AmnestyUK has 1,247 followers alone. Of Janet’s followers, some of those have retweeted too.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, that’s how Twitter works. But it’s the first time I have been directly involved with viewing the chain, and it’s been very exciting. And it’s been a very good illustration for me of the power of social networking.

And it’s interesting that in the space of 18 months, the majority of my students haven’t used facebook as a tool for sharing module-related issues. And I haven’t particularly suggested it either. I still post news stories and related materials on my wall, but there is no group and much lower interest. But the phenomenon of facebook has dramatically increased membership worldwide with over 150 million users at the start of 2009 (2: thefuturebuzz.com).

So for those students who are active in this area, and also non-academic peers who didn’t previously make use of the sharing facility, the visibility of networks to rapidly disseminate stories is creating an amazing information channel.

References:

1: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics#/press/info.php?timeline (accessed 6th February 2009)

2: http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats/ (accessed 6th Febrary 2009)