Social media futures: why iSchools should care - ACM Digital Library

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media communities, ownership, privacy and governance of user- generated content on social networks, and how social media may impact education and ...
Social Media Futures: Why iSchools Should Care Michael J. Scialdone

Anthony J. Rotolo

Jaime Snyder

Syracuse University 221 Hinds Hall Syracuse, NY 13244 (315) 443-5509

Syracuse University 235 Hinds Hall Syracuse, NY 13244 (315) 443-3409

Syracuse University 221 Hinds Hall Syracuse, NY 13244 (315) 443-5509

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

the event was a charrette, an intense three-day design workshop that is the hallmark of many COLAB activities. The intention of Social Media Futures was to bring together students from varying disciplines and backgrounds to conceptualize the future impact of social media on business, and potential opportunities that social media might create. However, business was only one of many concerns for students. Other topics took precedence such as values of social media communities, ownership, privacy and governance of user-generated content on social networks, and how social media may impact education and general learning among individuals of all ages.

Social Media Futures was a 3 day charrette at a major university that brought together students with various backgrounds to consider the future impact of social media on business, and to think about what opportunities that might create. However, topics that arose touched on a variety of themes that included social media communities, ownership, privacy and governance of usergenerated content on social networks, and how social media may impact education and learning at all ages. This paper provides our observations from this multi-disciplinary charrette, and articulates why iSchools need to be concerned with social media.

This paper provides observations from this multi-disciplinary charrette, and articulates why iSchools should care about the future of social media. A background section defines and describes social media, explains charrettes, and provides an overview of Social Media Futures. Next we provide observations from Social Media Futures and subsequent interviews with students. We then discuss some issues surrounding social media that were illuminated during the charrette, and explain why these issues are relevant to Information Science and iSchools in general.

Categories and Subject Descriptors A.m [General Literature]: Miscellaneous

General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords Social Media, Charrette, Information Science, iSchools, Multidisciplinary Collaboration

2. BACKGROUND 2.1 Social Media

1. INTRODUCTION

Defining social media is not a straightforward task as Kaplan and Haenlein [6] acknowledge, “there seems to be confusion among managers and academic researchers alike as to what exactly should be included under this term, and how Social Media differs from the seemingly-interchangeable related concepts of Web 2.0 and User Generated Content” [p. 60]. Therefore, to clearly define social media, we must first explicate these other terms.

Currently, there is a staggering amount of information shared on social networks. For example, the average Facebook user is on the site for 55 minutes each day, resulting in over 5 billion status updates, photos, comments, and other content shared by over 500 million users and 3 million business pages. Twitter has over 100 million users who generate around 55 million “tweets” (short messages limited to 140 characters) daily. Adding to these massive information sources are the rich-content networks like YouTube, which receives 24 hours of video content from its users every minute, and delivers over 2 billion video clips each day [stats from Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

2.1.1 Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly is widely credited with introducing the term Web 2.0. In his 2007 paper [7], he acknowledges that it is loosely defined, but that there is “a gravitational core” which one can visualize “as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core” [p. 18-19]. O’Reilly asserts that this core relies on a central intelligence, that is, connections between users (be it few to few, or many to many). He lists eBay and Napster as successful early examples of the Internet’s ability to support a breadth of interactions among various users. He goes on to compare Web 2.0 to synapses in the brain, observing that a web of connections between users should grow organically “as an output of the collective activity of all web users” [7, p. 22]. Viral marketing, O’Reilly observes, is an exemplary illustration of Web 2.0 philosophy, as information spreads between individuals through various networks. He points out that if something needs to be advertised, it is not Web 2.0.

In April 2010, 35 undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of schools and colleges at Syracuse University gathered together for a weekend-long program called Social Media Futures. The event was co-sponsored by the iSchool and COLAB, the university’s center for collaborative design. The format for Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference 2011, February 8–11, 2011, Seattle, WA, USA Copyright © 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0121-3/11/02…$10.00

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Kaplan and Haenlein [6] present a classification of social media into six categories based on theories from media research and social process. While the universe of social media is still evolving, this framework introduces and explicates different types of social media currently in use.

A technical side needs to be considered when one talks about Web 2.0. While some, such as O’Reilly, might discuss it in terms of ideals and principles, the widespread adoption and use of certain applications and software allow these ideals and principles to manifest and thrive, such as Adobe Flash, AJAX (Asynchronous Java Script), and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) [6]. Collective contributions of these technologies include enhanced interactivity with Web objects, increased accessibility for users to post and modify content, and the ability to aggregate various sources of information into a single stream.

The first category presented by Kaplan and Haenlein [6] is collaborative projects. The main idea of collaborative projects “is that the joint effort of many actors leads to a better outcome than any actor could achieve individually” [p. 62]. They list wikis and social bookmarking as social media in this category, representing probably the most democratic form of UGC.

As these technologies have become widely distributed and integrated across the Web, users who were previously (largely) passive consumers of information are empowered with tools to easily make connections, and to express themselves to a wide array of audiences. Thus, the proliferation and spread of usergenerated content is key to understanding what social media is.

Blogs, the second type of social media described [6], let people share points of view, passions, and personality with an audience [10]. Marlow [11] asserts that “the weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation in personal publishing has also come to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributed but completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest” [p. 1].

2.1.2 User-Generated Content User-generated content (UGC) refers to online information that is created, posted, accessed, reviewed, and recommended by users of the Web. The idea behind distributing UGC via the Internet is not new. Prior to the Internet that we know today, Bulletin Board Systems allowed for users to exchange messages, data, software, and news [6]. O’Reilly [7] observes that even though there were individuals who built homepages in the earliest days of the Web, publication and distribution were far more complicated prior to Web 2.0. Additionally, distributing multimedia (like videos) had to be done via media servers and/or peer-to-peer file downloads. There were also few tools for rating or reviewing content [8].

Microblogging is “a variant of blogging which allows users to quickly post short messages on the web,” [12, p. 2] typically under 200 characters in length [13], which may also include images. Twitter is the best-known microblogging service (although there are others such as Tumblr, Pownce, and Jaiku). Users can participate in topical discussions and micro-networks by using a special hashtag (for example: #iConference), allowing for an aggregation of tweets that share this hashtag. This enables a direct dialog, or a joint experience. The U.S. Library of Congress recently decided to archive every public tweet since March 2006 [14], indicating that Twitter is a social phenomenon of interest.

O’Reilly [7] cites the ease of producing and distributing UGC as one of the major factors defining this new generation of web sites. He maintains that by harnessing collective intelligence through mechanisms such as user reviews, rating systems, RSS, blogs and wikis; the very infrastructure driving the web has shifted. As Web 2.0 facilitates a collective intelligence, O’Reilly argues that this leads to an “architecture of participation” with an ethic of cooperation which allows users to post, rank, edit, review, revise, augment, supplement, and delete data at a dizzying pace.

The next category identified is content communities [6]. Flickr, for example, lets members upload images, and view those submitted by others, as well as to participate in and contribute to special interest groups [15]. Unless one specifically designates his or her content as private, Flickr posts are viewable by the public, and even modifiable in some cases. Content communities such as YouTube let users upload, share, comment on, link to, rate, and tag videos with ease. Originally known as audio blogs, podcasts came upon their name due to the popularity of Apple’s portable iPod audio player [9, p. 10]. Evans [16] writes that podcasts consist of broadcasts which are “published on the Internet and automatically downloaded on to a desktop or laptop computer, and that after transferred onto a portable device, the learner can then choose when, where and how to listen to or watch them” [p. 492]. Content communities have dramatically increased the amount of multimedia community-contributed content on the Web. Such collections are of a depth and breadth that was unimaginable prior to Web 2.0 [17], much of which comes directly from individuals, as opposed to companies.

Although it may be of great interest to corporate players, by definition UGC is neither created by, nor for, marketers, advertisers, product developers, or trend spotters. The user empowerment of Web 2.0 stands out in contrast to older notions of the Web in which most users were consumers who perceived that only a small number of individuals could actually publish on it [9]. While Web 2.0 might be considered the philosophical and technical foundation of the social media; generating, sharing, and collaborating with content is how individuals make use of it [6].

2.1.3 Defining and Describing Social Media Distinguishing between Web 2.0 and UGC, Kaplan and Haenlein [6] define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” [p. 61]. Although many recognize social media as a new phenomenon, it embodies a dogma that existed in the earliest days of the Web. Anderson [9] notes that Tim BernersLee, widely heralded as the Web’s creator, intended users to both view and edit web pages. Technologies that are consistent with Web 2.0 principles allow the web to “return to its roots as a read/write tool,” [p. 2] and to be more social and participatory.

Social networking sites are “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site” [18, p. 221]. The degree to which a page is public depends on the site, and user discretion. Social network sites “enable users to connect by creating personal information profiles, inviting friends and colleagues to have access to those profiles, and sending e-mails and instant messages between each other” [6, p. 63]. User profiles might include photos, audio, video, and blogs.

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[20]. In its ideal form, the charrette provides an environment where ideas can be expressed, augmented, and refined with immediacy, and where consensus can be reached [21].

Facebook and MySpace are two of the most famous examples. Boyd and Ellison [18] explain that most social networking sites can support networks that already exist offline, while others enable strangers to connect based on shared activities, interests, or political views. Such sites may attract large audiences, while others focus on specific topics or demographics.

2.2.2 Artistic Modes of Knowing As charrettes have evolved from design-based disciplines, with an epistemological flavor that may be less familiar to an iSchool audience, it is useful to provide some background on artistic modes of knowing, and studio-based learning. Heckman and Snyder [22] advocate the integration of artistic ways of knowing into technical disciplines (such as Information Science), noting that professionals in technically-driven occupations must have “the ability to interpret complex and ambiguous situations, interact with those expert in other forms of specialized knowledge, and constructively evaluate their own work and the work of others. These abilities call for an approach to knowing the world that complements the knowledge provided by a rational, scientific approach” [p. 1]. Scientific and artistic modes are not mutually exclusive, they argue, but rather can and should be complementary to each other.

There are two other categories of social media described by Kaplan and Haenlein [6]. The first is virtual game worlds, typically consisting of strict rules within the context of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing. Gaming consoles, as well as PCs and handheld devices, allow simultaneous play in virtual worlds among mass numbers of individuals. The final category, virtual social worlds, allows “inhabitants to choose their behavior more freely and essentially live a virtual life similar to their real life” [6, p. 64]. Individuals are represented as avatars in immersive worlds, but there are generally no restrictive rules except for the infrastructure of the world itself. Second Life is one prominent example. While the categories provided above [6] are a good starting point for talking about specific types of social media, one must be mindful that social media is becoming increasingly rich in features that make it difficult to cleanly describe. These categories are not mutually exclusive, and interconnections exist between content that lies across these different categories.

Pink [23] explains that science tends to be literal, sequential, textual, and functional, while the arts favor knowledge that is simultaneous, contextual, metaphorical, and aesthetic. Artistic knowing weaves details into a holistic pattern, whereas science analyzes and discriminates between details. Artistic knowing concentrates on relationships, while scientific knowledge stresses categorization. The arts rely on synthesis while the sciences rely on analysis. Heckman and Snyder [22] note that education in the arts can help in the development of empathy and can increase awareness about the diversity of human experience. They explain:

2.2 Charrette 2.2.1 What is a Charrette Our colleagues at COLAB, a multidisciplinary design center hosted within the College of Visual And Performing Arts, introduced us to the charrette format for collaborative work. Although relatively common in design fields, charrettes generally require a bit of an explanation for other audiences.

Studio learning environments focus on idea generation, production and critique. It is common for problems assigned to students to be ambiguous and equivocal. A student is expected to create, present and defend their work in front of the class. The class is then expected to provide thoughtful and constructive criticism to help improve the idea. During discussion and evaluations, there are often no “right” answers. Students take turns presenting what they have created and offering critique of the work of others. Much of the learning is done “out in the open,” within a setting that provides a shared environment for mistakes, inventions and questions. This setting provides students with opportunities to see multiple solutions, within a concentrated timeframe. Potential solutions can be evaluated in real time [p. 5].

A charrette is an intense, collaborative design experience where participants from a range of backgrounds brainstorm on a specific problem. The goal is to generate new solutions to specific problems that reflect diverse thinking and community values. Sessions are frequently moderated by experts who are well-versed in design thinking and in the facilitation of collaboration. Subject matter experts are often brought in to further define the requirements and constraints of the problem. Brief presentations give participants food for thought as they enter into smaller groups for more concentrated exploration of the topic and possible solutions.

Snyder et al. [24] elaborate that studio-based learning provides a “safe” environment for creativity to flourish, which is especially beneficial for “technically focused students who have little or no experience with creative problem-solving techniques” [p. 1926]. A charrette supports collaborative learning approaches and interactions that have much in common with studio-based learning. A report from Mr. Youth and Intrepid called Millennial Inc. [25] focusing on students of this generation indicates that the charrette experience is very similar to their expected future work environments (i.e., interdisciplinary, open to all ideas, collaborative). Very much like the charrette, and potentially the organization of the future, social media seems to embody these characteristics well. They allow for multiple modes of expression, collaboration, and voices that echo a plethora of individual and collective vantage points. For these reasons, a multi-disciplinary charrette executed in the spirit of studio-based learning provided the ideal format for an exploration of social media.

The group work sessions that characterize a charrette are generally defined by a tight time frame that encourages participants to think quickly, work together, and generate ideas at a rapid pace. For example, charrettes at Syracuse University often take place over the course of three consecutive days, where the problem is proposed on Day One, intense ideation and brainstorming happens on Day Two, and presentations of possible solutions occurs on Day Three. More often than not, the problem being addressed is of great importance to a specific community, and the cross section of perspectives brought to the table by a multidisciplinary team is seen as a great advantage for discovering broad spectrumsolutions [19]. In addition to being used by designers and architects, the charrette format has frequently been utilized by urban planners to bring together professionals and members of a community for whom a service or environment is being designed

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2.3 Social Media Futures

Dotted with mismatched furniture, abstract artworks, and various trinkets and toys of all sorts on shelves and in other random spaces, the COLAB space might seem haphazard, but it was intentionally designed to provide a haven for students, faculty, and visitors who need a break from the monotony of offices, lecture halls, or classrooms. The space is large, open, and reconfigurable. Most of the furniture is up-cycled and much of it was designed and fabricated by VPA faculty and students.

From April 16-18, 2010, students from across Syracuse University took part in Social Media Futures, a charrette that was coorganized by the iSchool and COLAB, a collaborative design lab affiliated with the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA). This event was part of the Common Ground initiative, a year-long partnership between the two schools to explore the potential multidisciplinary synergy between information technology and the creative arts.

During the charrette, each group was assigned a nook or niche where they could camp out for the duration of the weekend. Endless supplies of post-it notes, markers and snacks were provided. The intention here was to make the students as comfortable as possible so that they could devote all of their energy and attention to the program at hand: What is the future of social media for business?

Social Media Futures was comprised of 36 students who were handpicked from a number of colleges on campus. Participants were selected in order to represent a wide array of perspectives and ideas. Individual schools and colleges were asked to nominate students who were particularly social media savvy. This resulted in a cohort that shared great pride in social media, and who viewed social media as a positive change agent in the world. Student participants were divided into six groups, with five to six members in each group. Facilitators from COLAB used their expertise in collaboration to purposefully curate the groups to maximize interaction between students with varied backgrounds.

During the many free-form ideation sessions, students were encouraged to not only work in their own groups, but to periodically weave in and out of other groups and observe. Thus, cross-pollination of ideas was supported not only by the nature of the interdisciplinary teams, but also by the openness between groups. And because the topic on everyone’s mind was social media, a projector was setup to display the steady stream of tweets that began even before dinner on Friday night. Once a universal hashtag was established (#SUcharrette), groups rapidly began tying together snippets of overheard conversations, with tweets, with phrases spotted on post-it notes littering every vertical surface. In fact, students continued to tweet to each other about the event far beyond the end of the charrette on Sunday evening.

In addition to the iSchool and VPA, students came from law, management, communications, public affairs, architecture, education, engineering and computer science, and human ecology. They ranged from freshmen to doctoral students. The Social Media Futures charrette kicked off on a Friday night, with participants meeting each other (many for the first time) during dinner. A short informal presentation introduced them to the themes and activities they would be encountering over the course of the weekend. Specifically, they were informed that they would be spending two to three intense days around the topic of business potentials in the context of social media. This served as an initial deep-dive exploration, intended to generate a longer conversation about social media. Ice-breakers led by the COLAB facilitators resulted in each group coming up with a unique moniker and battle cry for their team by the end of the evening.

After the event concluded, we interviewed two students from group 5, which called themselves Juncture. Alyssa Henry, who was a senior in Mass Communications at the time (and currently a graduate student at the iSchool), explained that their name came from the idea that social media allowed for a joining of paths between traditional media, government, individuals, and education. Alyssa explained to us that the space where the charrette took place helped to stimulate her group’s thinking. She noted that it starkly contrasted the typical stuffy, uninspired conference room or lecture hall where she is used to group work taking place. Specifically pointing out the casual furniture (such as beanbag chairs), the artwork along the walls, and the sense of transparency between groups, she felt that Juncture had the freedom to do what they wanted. She expected her group’s product to be just as colorful and inspired as the space it was conceived in.

Saturday was a rigorous day, starting with breakfast at 9am. Designated periods throughout the day allowed students to work. However, in between these periods were presentations and panel discussions with interactive marketing experts, entrepreneurs, and social media artists. These were designed to provide students with insights, observations, and challenges they could then build upon. Many presenters lingered for several hours after they left the stage, providing ad hoc feedback to student groups as they developed their ideas. By 7:30pm, these scheduled sessions were over, and students were free to work with their teams on their presentations as late into the night as they wanted.

David Rosen, an undergrad dual major in information management and finance, spoke to this being a novel form of collaboration that he had not previously been exposed to. He said that going into it, Juncture had no idea what they were doing. Group members, he felt, were expecting someone to tell them what to think, or how to think. Eventually, they began to bounce different ideas around. They put scores of sticky notes with relevant words up on the wall and began to identify themes that they all thought were important. This helped them to move forward, despite different vantage points of group members.

Sunday began at 10am with brunch. Students had until 4pm to work. Finally, the event concluded on Sunday evening with presentations that there open to the public. Attending the event were colleagues from across the university, members of the community familiar with COLAB’s unique approach to collaboration, family and friends of the student participants, and representatives from the media.

Both David and Alyssa emphasized that the interdisciplinary nature of Juncture helped them see perspectives that they would never have considered otherwise. Alyssa noted that while she is used to being a group leader, this experience helped her to learn to step back, and that groups do not always need leaders to thrive. David noted that this experience reminded him that everyone is an

3. OBSERVATIONS 3.1 Student Collaboration The loft-like space where the groups worked is home to COLAB and reflects their unorthodox approach to learning environments.

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Despite rooting the charrette in the business context of social media, one of the most surprising outcomes was the diversity of concepts present in discussions and final presentations. Stretching beyond traditional business-oriented topics, other themes that emerged were ideas about the values of social media communities, ownership, privacy, and governance of usergenerated content on social networks, and how social media may impact education and learning among individuals of all ages.

expert on something, and that they carry meaningful perspectives that he would never have been exposed to in teams comprised of individuals solely from his home disciplines. While we anticipated that the interdisciplinary nature of the groups would bring a number of important perspectives to the table, we had not expected that the students would so acutely recognize the value of these perspectives, as expressed by David and Alyssa. The interdisciplinary nature of the teams simulated the elimination of those boundaries that are typically in place in real-world business contexts, allowing student groups to consider additional possibilities that may not have arisen if they focused on a sole aspect of the enterprise (e.g. marketing, advertising, IT).

Some believe that social media is more about culture than content, and this seemed to be a sentiment shared by many of the charrette participants. As the presenters at the charrette were students, it is probably not surprising that several groups drew connections between social media and education. These discussions seemed to blur the lines between what we now define as traditional face-toface instruction and distance education. The students envisioned social media elements being integrated into all aspects of the education process, allowing students to fluidly collaborate beyond the boundaries of a classroom, a class, a single teacher, or a geographic location.

One reason we chose to describe the charrette experience through the eyes of this particular group is that they coined a phrase that, much like a viral social media phenomenon, was repeated time and again by participants, facilitators, and observers alike. At one point during their collaborative efforts, Alyssa Henry exclaimed, “social media is faces, not logos.” This phrase has since become a staple in conversations that the Syracuse University community has since had about social media.

4. IMPLICATIONS FOR ISCHOOLS During the Social Media Futures event, the richness of discussion around social media highlighted many questions about these technologies, networks, and systems yet to be fully explored. In this final section, we share our observations related to those topics, which we believe offer opportunities for research and exploration of social media by information science researchers. It is our hope that these observations may spark interest in further exploration of social media within the information field.

3.2 Presenting the Future of Social Media At the conclusion of the charrette, the six groups presented their vision of the future of social media to a public audience. The groups were instructed to use Pecha Kucha style for their presentations, that is, students were limited to a total of 20 slides shown on screen for only 20 seconds each. This encouraged the students to be very organized, focusing their ideas precisely and coherently. A question and answer session was held at the end of all of the presentations, and included all of the student participants. A real-time twitter feed was projected on a wall behind presenters during this session. This allowed anyone who tweeted with our designated hashtag to participate in the discussion.

In information science and iSchools, we both explicitly encourage, and are famously proud of our interdisciplinary nature. This charrette served to reinforce the importance and benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration. With students having different career objectives, backgrounds, levels of education, and even value systems, their effort in working together on the topic of social media served to emulate one of the most challenging characteristics of social media adoption within the enterprise: that social media does not conform.

Student presentations covered the following topics: • Group 1 presented almost entirely on “ground rules,” underscoring the importance of considering values in social media.

iSchools, with our interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex informational problems, are uniquely poised to make sense of this phenomenon. We can help the enterprise to understand that usual business practices do not thrive in social media as individuals largely dictate the flow of information.

• Group 2 considered how classrooms might be constructed as to better support digital media. • Group 3 focused on personal and professional development. They envisioned a new social media platform made up of numerous spaces that allowed for developmental mentoring through various activities.

Education was a theme that arose in nearly all of the group presentation to some degree and we see this as another area of relevance for iSchools. Social media tools emphasize microcontent, remixability, and transformation, and [26] promote flexibility in access, choice, and mobility [27]. McLoughlin and Lee [28] state “learning is an intensely social activity, where ideas are generated in contact with others in the community through mutual exchange, contribution and sharing of ideas. In the Web 2.0 era, new and dynamic forms of community are emerging that are self-directed and open to a global audience” [p. 646]. Experience with issues such as digital literacy is important for understanding how students learn with social media.

• Group 4 considered the integration of social media into elementary and middle schools, advocating the broadening young learners’ perspectives through local and global interaction with others. • Group 5 (Juncture) discussed ownership of social media, with business, government, and individuals being three distinct, but important players. The issue of control was central to this, highlighting the need to consider how it will evolve, and the potential resulting consequences. • Group 6 had an arguably more novel and extreme vision than the others. Their presentation envisioned a world in which all senses could be invoked through digital media. They looked beyond a fourth wall, giving us a world where the social and real overlapped through holographic and multi-sensory interaction.

In a 2007 talk, boyd [29] called on parents and educators to rethink the emphasis on “vetting” information, or on what she called a “push” model of information access. Boyd said, “we are failing to teach our youth how to evaluate, interpret, and assess

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the information that they pull or that which falls out of the sky. In other words, they are completely media illiterate.”

enabling communication management through features such as “tagging” on Facebook and “hashtags” on Twitter.

If indeed boyd [29] is correct in her assertion of a “complete disconnect between youth's everyday practices and what they are expected to do in formal learning environments,” and if this also includes the professional environments (where access to usergenerated content is more likely to be restricted), then further investigation may be required to better define information literacy for a new generation of learners and workers.

The sheer quantity of digital content being produced through social media reminds us that it is challenging to measure the results of social media initiatives. As the widespread adoption of these tools continues, organizations (including academia) will require new methods of analyzing the impact or influence of the information shared via social networks. The need to address this concern has sparked the creative engines of entrepreneurs. One such example is the work of the company Klout [39], which has developed metrics and algorithms for calculating the influence of an individual or a brand’s online presence. Additionally, Twitter is reportedly working on analytic tools to provide users with similar details [40, 41]. Some websites are even keeping tabs on the topics being discussed, such as pulseofthetweeters.com [42, 43]. Further research in this area, and partnerships with industry, may produce significant findings and new approaches for measuring impact, influence and returns on investment of social media.

Students do tend, however, to be comfortable interacting in digital environments. Both Brown [30] and Coffman and Klinger [31] consider today’s learners to be “digital natives,” those who “seamlessly work with technology to gather, analyze, and synthesize information, and then present it in new and innovative ways” [31, p. 29]. Yet, it is recognized that more empirical research needs to be conducted in regard to social media use in education [9]. Some scholarly articles have looked at social media in educational contexts. Wikis are considered by Parker and Chao [32] and Godwin-Jones [33], exploring the affordances of collaboration that they provide. Cebeci and Tekdal [34] look at podcasts from the angle of an audio learning object, while Evans [16] asserts that they have “significant potential” as a form of mobile learning (or m-learning). Twitter (or microblogging) is tackled by a number of researchers [12, 35, 36] as is using Blogs for learning and teaching purposes [33, 37]

As social media arguably gives individuals a sense of empowerment, be it through participation in political conversations, or through new channels to crowd source, concerns arise as to the governance of social media. It is at this point that discussions about social media and user-generated content reveal questions about privacy and/or policy. Therefore, it was not surprising that these aspects of the social web appeared in many of the conversations and presentations at Social Media Futures. Ranging from what one group called “common social media values” to those concerns over ownership and control of usergenerated information, a broad spectrum of issues were raised.

Yet, while educators adopt and adapt social media for the classroom, and while students may already have a strong degree of digital literacy, there is a danger that social media may not be used in its full capacity, or to its fullest potential. In the realm of distance-education, courses are all too often shabbily designed as educators might simply employ modified versions of traditional pedagogic approaches [38] rather than taking into account that the media platform matters. While the disciplines of education or mass communication may be appropriate homes to study such matters, iSchools also need to play a role in looking at how educators are using social media. We need to concern ourselves with the cognitive and social processes through which students create, share, and filter information, and the role that social media is increasingly playing in these processes.

Several studies of social network privacy have focused on how much information individuals are willing to reveal about themselves (or information revelation) [44, 45]. These studies have pointed out what has since become a common theme in the media; personal or sensitive information can flow from actual friends to strangers much more easily via online social networks than is possible with offline networks. Some attempts have also been made to understand how and why users share information via social networks. In one such study, Gross and Acquisti [44] concluded that students at Carnegie-Mellon University were generally unconcerned with privacy risks, with very few altering the default privacy settings on Facebook.

The Library of Congress’s decision to collect all public Twitter messages underscores the need to develop information systems and practices through which the ever-growing mountain of usergenerated content can be managed and curated. This should be of central importance to the information field as existing methods of cataloging, archiving, and retrieving information may not be sufficient to deal with content of this nature and scale.

Young and Quan-Haase [46] examined the factors that influence college students to share personal information on sites such as Facebook. Their findings indicated that although concerns exist among users for the privacy of personal information, factors like the size of a user’s social network or the visibility of a user’s profile were still positively associated with information revelation. Furthermore, users are not naive regarding privacy. Students have developed strategies for protecting their personal information on social network sites, including the use of private messaging, adjusting default privacy settings, and excluding personal information such as phone number and physical addresses [46].

Still, the massive amount of content created, shared, and captured through social media presents information scientists with opportunities to work with large data sets that were previously unimaginable. For example, this might benefit researchers interested in natural language processing, as they may be able to easily gather communication data. Those interested in the political ramifications of social technologies can look right to Twitter to see how politicians manage their messages, and how citizens respond; or they might check to see what is being posted in Facebook groups. With these datasets, we can also now ask (and answer) questions about how individuals use technology to mobilize and solve problems. For example, social media platforms have introduced “crowd sourcing” methods of adding context and

Further examining privacy policies of major social network sites, Wu et al. [47] find that the privacy policies of Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube all allow for the repurposing of network information and content shared by users. Also, the shift toward the use of information “feeds” has compounded the issue of privacy through the introduction of third-party aggregators such as the popular TwitPic and URL

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6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

shorteners found on Twitter. Presumably, each of these services would have different policies for how user information is handled.

College of Visual and Performing Arts, COLAB, Chris McCray and Shoham Arad for introducing us to the charrette and facilitating a highly generative weekend. Alyssa Henry and David Rosen for sharing their experiences of Social Media Futures with us.

From these studies, we understand that an awareness of privacy risks and available controls may not decrease information revelation by users, and that additional research needs to be conducted to understand how to best to handle personal information shared by social media participants. As discussed by Juncture and several other groups at Social Media Futures, the process by which this content is revealed, remixed, and even sold by organizations is of great concern to participants and stakeholders. As social network sites evolve, the restructuring of privacy policies may continue to run up against user expectations. We may study these expectations further to develop better ways to collect, aggregate, and store the large amounts of information flowing into organization via social mediums.

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Additionally, little information is available regarding the policies of employers regarding social media use among employees, and the impact such policies may have on the productivity and overall information environment of an organization. These issues appeared to raise great concern among students of the millennial generation, specifically that restrictions on social media would effectively cut off access to information sources they have grown accustomed to using for professional as well as social purposes.

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A 2010 report [25] indicates that millennials would use many approaches that leverage or are derived from social media use (e.g. crowd sourcing, personalized experience and peer-to-peer recommendations) if they ran a business. It is possible then, that this generation may soon enter a workforce equipped with information skills that are incompatible with their employers’ policies. Thus, iSchools need to be aware of this discrepancy when students come through our doors. The research we produce on social media in business contexts should also make a point of discussing this gap.

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5. CONCLUSION Social media affords its participants the ability to create and exchange user-generated content using internet-based applications [6]. The 3-day charrette discussed in this paper pulled together students with vastly different backgrounds to predict the future of social media. The topics and themes they considered spanned a broad, but important spectrum of issues; many, if not all, central to the information field. Social Media Futures underscored the notion that social media issues are iSchool issues.

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Considering the enormous amount of information that is produced daily by its participants, and the novel forms of interaction this engenders, iSchools must necessarily concern themselves with the social media phenomenon. As users are empowered with tools to generate and share content, businesses that want to play in the same space need to learn new rules. As educators adopt social media for their classes, they will need to adapt their curriculum to mesh with digital natives. Students who graduate from a technologically-savvy sphere into a workforce which may be behind, need to be prepared to experience discrepancies in the tools, forms, and methods of communication. Yet, we must also ensure that appropriate, thorough, and modern digital literacy skills are taught. We must also reconsider existing notions and expectations of privacy in online environments. As the charrette demonstrated, tackling these issues benefits greatly from an interdisciplinary approach. For this reason, we believe iSchools are well-equipped to address, explore, and explain social media.

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