Retirementmatters
booktalk
- Alexandra Salerno, Department of English
- Mary-Katherine Ramsey, College of Arts and Sciences
Mary-Katherine Ramsey, College of Arts and Sciences
- Alexandra Salerno, Department of English
asktheexpert
- Sharvari Karandikar-Chheda, College of Social Work
Sharvari Karandikar-Chheda, College of Social Work - Claire Kamp Dush, Department of Human Development and Family Science
Claire Kamp Dush, Department of Human Development and Family Science
- Sharvari Karandikar-Chheda, College of Social Work
Right now on the Board:
Rick Voithofer, associate professor, School of Educational Policy and Leadership
Posted on | March 3, 2010 | 2,194 views | Comments Off
Who is using social media sites like Facebook?
The demographics of individuals using social media have changed substantially in recent years. While the majority of early users of social networking sites were people between 16-35, the fastest growing group on Facebook are people 35-55, particularly women. While Facebook was overrepresented by whites and Asians only two or three years ago, it has become more diverse in recent years. It has only been in the last year, though, that the proportion of blacks and Latinos using Facebook has approached parity with the proportion of individuals from these racial groups who use the Internet. Also, it’s important to understand that the use of social media is not just a US phenomenon. With translations for over 70 different languages, more than 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the US.
How are social media changing the way people are interacting with the world?
Social media are impacting the relationships, daily practices and routines of numerous segments of society across many categories including age, race and gender. For example, the teen years have always been a time for people to begin to experiment with forming and maintaining social connections and social affiliations outside the family. Before the spread of social media sites, these connections and affiliations were more bounded by time and space. Through the proliferation of social media, texting and cell phones, teenagers can make and maintain those “anyplace-anytime” connections with individuals who are dispersed geographically. Because of this geographic dispersion, individuals from across the social spectrum can find other people with similar backgrounds and interests.
What are some of the broad implications of social media for how people are educated?
I think it’s important to make a distinction between the implications of how people want to be educated and how they actually are educated. Social media and information and communication technologies, in general, have created a growing expectation that people want to be able to have access to rich learning experiences at any place and any time. Young people are participating in many different kinds of literacy practices through social networking, including posting and manipulating images, creating and viewing video on sites like YouTube and creating hyperlinks to dispersed resources across the Web. The capacity to understand and create different media is called multimodality. Typically we aren’t educating students multimodally. Education is still predominantly a textual enterprise in a multi-textual world. This is not say that teachers don’t want and try to teach multimodality, but educational institutions often aren’t geared toward anyplace-anytime learning. People live increasingly complex lives where, thanks to wireless Internet, a few spare minutes can be utilized to engage in some kind of formal or informal learning. In this context, going to a school or a university at the same location and time becomes less desirable and practical. However, models and institutions of education are slow to evolve. As more people interact with social media and experience the social, content and communication possibilities available, the market pressure for these institutions to change will, I believe, force them to adapt to the new educational landscapes that are being created by social media.
