Social Media / Bookmarking
Student uses of social media will play an important role in learning for this course, and will act as a communication tool between students and the instructor. This task calls for an explicit engagement with social media platforms. You are encouraged to join online social media/bookmarking services, especially Twitter (http://twitter.com) and Delicious (http://delicious.com). Throughout the semester you will draw on these tools to catalog and disseminate course-related materials. It is here that you will explore the praxis of mass communication, that is, of participating in the consumption and dissemination of various texts (broadly conceived).
Click the "Read More" link to view our social media accounts and analysis.
Commentary and Analysis
William's At Noon chose to use and focus on Twitter and Delicious for our social media analysis. We created a Twitter account (@williamsatnoon) and tweeted about events, course related projects and readings, as well as interesting articles we found. We tweeted about events like Nuit Blanche back in October. We tweeted about (and sometimes during) our Mass Communications lectures. We used Twitter as a means of advertising our activist project, the Media Carta. We also used Delicious to begin bookmarking interesting and relevant articles and online postings. Our most popular tags include activism, architecture, environment, music, local, and Toronto. We also connected our Twitter and Delicious accounts, meaning that all of the bookmarks we saved on Delicious would be tweeted to our followers as well. We were also able to embed Twitter and Delicious widgets onto our blog, so that visitors could read our tweets, access our Twitter and Delicious accounts, and even choose to follow us on those social networks.
Throughout the course of writing our collaborative blog, we also used Facebook as a means of communication. We arranged meetings, divided work, shared our thoughts and ideas, as well as our work, all through Facebook. It proved a valuable and useful resource for communicating with the other members of our blog team. Facebook also proved useful in advertising our activist project, the Media Carta. We created a group urging our friends to sign the Media Carta, and invited our classmates to join. Facebook is a fantastic social platform for rallying up support and spreading the word about a great cause or movement.
What we learned from our deployment of social media one is how easy it is for our thoughts to be put into mainstream media. Thorough “Twitter” and “Delicious” we get to share to the world our thoughts, views, and opinions. Through our social media involvement, we also learned a tried and true aspect of social media; what ever you put on the internet never leaves the internet. Therefore, as members of the World Wide Web, we must take ownership of our words and our actions. People see and judge what one outs out there, so shouldn’t our messages be appropriate? There is an opportunity for us to share through social media to share our knowledge with the world, which is what this assignment asked us to do. We at Williams at Noon have now opened our eyes to proper social networking and social bookmarking, to enlighten and inspire others to do so as well.
Having social media accounts can be a bittersweet situation. The positive side to having a Twitter account is that it can be helpful for social networking, and bringing people of similar interests closer together. Twitter can also be a way of broadcasting citizen journalism. For example, people tweeting about a phenomenon, a disaster or public event, would only benefit by keeping the public increasingly aware of current events all over the world. However, the bitter side of Twitter comes from the useless Tweets that people make. On Twitter many times one will find Tweets that are not related or beneficial to the public audience. Furthermore, having a Twitter account can be negative to one’s life if he/she becomes dependent on their virtual online life, and dismisses their real life. On the other hand, social bookmarking sites, such as, Delicious, are beneficial to have in order to manage, and store websites that spark a person’s interest. A site such as Delicious can almost be affiliated with a Calendar, a book collection, or even a movie or music collection. Social Bookmarking enables a user to “favorite” a site that interests him/her. Overall, Twitter and Delicious are sites with unique uses that can help a user build their unique virtual persona, while also enabling said user to socialize with others of similar interests.