As Miss Jean Brodie so wisely said, 'Seven inches is quite enough' - though ostensibly she was talking about the appropriate amount to have the classroom window open. Sorry, off the point.
On ITN this morning, the news that Facebook has attained its 500 millionth member - 8% of the entire planet are on it. Maybe a Cam23er was the 500 millionth, maybe one of us will emerge unsuspecting from our place of work, we thought to the sandwich bar, but instead into our 15 mins of fame, faced with a baying press pack 'How has Facebook changed your life?' 'Are we headed for a double dip?' 'Who's going to win Big Brother?'
'Is social media a fad?' said 50% of all internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook, and Social Media Revolution 2010 said users are spending an average of almost an hour a day on Facebook. Perhaps the reason I dislike aspects of Twitter and Facebook so much is that [in my opinion] they are just too big. They have strayed dangerously from their original ethos and business interests have weasled in. As Carol says, Facebook is pretty much the perfect resource for those who are removed physically from family, friends and colleagues, and it has most of the bolt-ons you'd want for that function. But now it is so dominant, we are even being asked to believe it can operate as a creditable search engine.
Wouldn't it be interesting to stand up in front of a new group of students, show the Facebook page and say, 'Here you go kiddies, this is all you need'...? Am actually considering doing that, just to see the reaction [if they are awake, of course]. Then I'd have to do the Alvy Singer thing 'Ah, if only life were like that'.
Having a library page on it is fine - or has to be if everyone else has one - though perhaps a lot of effort to create and update a good one, for possibly little return. [The libraries listed in the 'task' have made a fine job of their Facebook pages, but it's awfully difficult to get away from that 'busy' look]. Who exactly would the audience be? As Lottie says, we have to be careful how we pitch it. Moonhare has reminded us that the LSE study mentions that some students resented libraries muscling in on their social circle. Dad-dancing again, but harmless [not like big businesses, anyway].
I attended a JISC workshop 'Maximising Online Resources Effectiveness' a couple of months ago, and could see their argument that for most universities [sic] a presence on many platforms is probably necessary. We were referred to a study that apparently demonstrates that the "words and brands mentioned most frequently on the Web" in 2009 were Twitter, Google, Facebook, iPhone, youTube. Nota bene, children, "words" as well as "brands". Obama was no. 6, Oprah no. 42 [arguably the latter at least also a brand], but the rest of the top 50 were all brands. Hmm, do I detect something ... stinky?
Remember the presentation from the launch of Cam23 - 'Is Social media a fad?' [We got that at the SCAMORE workshop too]. Lots of us probably sat swaying to Fat Boy Slim's specially-chosen hypnotic tones, eyes like Mowgli's when Kaa sang 'Trusssst in me', and at the end said 'Yeah, RIGHT! Let's GO!' Anyway, the presentation predicted "We will no longer search for products and services. They will find us on social media". It's a business proposition - We are being profiled, categorised, used, but we're being told we have control if we stick our little thumbs up on Facebook. I'm not saying it's all bad - just that we have to be careful about going where we're led, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's related to the 'unknown unknown' phenomenon when searching for info : do we take what's thrown at us or do we find things as well?
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From The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, to Annie Hall to Disney's The Jungle Book, I bow down to the eclecticness of your film references.
ReplyDeleteShowing off is naughty, but I do hope others get the references and laugh. Actually someone else in an earlier post already mentioned the 'Annie Hall' incident - wasn't you, was it?
ReplyDeleteI have posted a comment on the study of “words and brands”, asking what is meant by that phrase. What I want to know is whether the researcher restricted the count to brand-type words and brands, or could really show that the brands were the most-used words in the whole corpus of words used.
ReplyDeleteI'll report on the reply!
Thank you Aidan - as usual you are the voice of reason and enquiry, tempering my 'going off on one'. It would be truly terrifying if the survey was not limited to just brand-type words.
ReplyDeleteThanks, that's kind. My comment on that other blog still awaits moderation, after more than 24 hours. I might wait a week & then give the researcher a nudge, because I want to know.
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with www.wordcount.org ? A site listing the English language's 86,800 oftenest-used words by their frequency, the top 10 being
the, of, and, to, a, in, that, it, is, was
-- and presenting them in interactive graphics that are certainly fun to play with.
Wordcount is based on the British National Corpus, which was compiled 1991-1994. Its hope, according to its About page, is that "WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet."
It will then be even more interesting. The present list is based on a corpus drawn up on the eve of the web. I look forward to finding out how far that is still a valid reflection of how we use words, and how far it represents something that has been swept away.