The social-media world continues to change the actual world around us — in good and not-so-good ways. While sites such as Facebook and Twitter can help teachers, business owners, and organizations, and help people stay connected with each other, some believe those sites contribute to one’s lost sense of reality. After all, what does being a “friend” really mean to some?
As with most things in life — whether virtual or reality — there are two sides to every story.
Connected to the social-media world can lead to disconnection from reality
By Jeanne Drouilhet
There’s a new way of looking at things these days: stalking is encouraged often by companies when considering potential new hires, a tweet isn’t necessarily the sound a bird makes, four square isn’t necessarily something played on a school ground, and “u” doesn’t always represent just a letter.
They’re all part of social networking and mobile technologies that have invaded everyday life. Always present, contributing and distracting.
While things such as texting and Facebook have allowed people to stay in touch with more frequency than ever, what kind of effect has that had on our society and our community?
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Originally created exclusively for university and college students, Facebook has expanded to allowing everyone and everything to have a means to connect, and it’s a brand that is everywhere and nearly impossible to ignore. It’s become an integral part to everyday life for many people of every age, and has become almost a necessary evil if you want to stay in touch with people or be informed on events, parties, and gatherings.
While this particular social-media outlet can allow people to connect to people they have lost contact with or may not be in contact with otherwise, it can cause obsessions. One of which, according to Penn State professor S. Shyam Sundar, founder of Penn State’s Media Effects Research Laboratory, and psychology and communications professor, is an obsession with “friending.”
“More and more people are losing the essence and meaning of ‘friend,’ ” he says. “I think it used to be a little more sacred than it is now.”
“Friending” people on Facebook can lead to a competition of sorts, whether it be an internal competition or a competition with others, says Sundar, which can cause a person to be spread thin with many weak ties and few strong ones.
“There is some strength in weak ties. You can get some work done, you can have some contacts, but you may not have that kind of deep meaningful intense relationship that you used to have in a small group of people,” he says.
The networking aspect of Facebook and other social-networking sites can give the user a false sense of social capital. The number of connections made can mean little when in a time of need they are unwilling or not inclined to provide help regardless of the “friend” status connecting to the person.
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Another sort of obsession Facebook can cause is an obsession with yourself. Facebook, along with many other social-media outlets such as Twitter and blogs, is centered around self-perception, how the world is a reflection of self and how the self is viewed by the world.
“It makes you look at the world in terms of your next Facebook profile picture, or look at the world in terms of what am I going to say, how are people going to look at me, and does it matter how many contacts I have,” says Sundar.
Through these outlets, people are able to choose to put on their best faces by putting up the most flattering photos of themselves and by carefully crafting the words they post. They can broadcast their thoughts or share them to gauge a response, Sundar says, and can clear out the negative and enhance the positive so their online personas appear to be of high self-standards — with the offline reality becoming somewhat disappointing.
This self-centered tendency through social media can create an outlet to receive feedback, praise, and sympathy. A Penn State senior majoring in kinesiology and State College native, Justin Assadinia finds these types of things sometimes irksome — a shortcoming of Facebook, which he otherwise thinks can be helpful, especially in keeping long-distance contact with others.
“I get irritated with Facebook in that I’ll get on there and see peoples’ status updates and people being melodramatic and over the top with what they’re feeling,” he says. “People use it to get attention or [complain] about their problems.”
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A not-so-long time ago, I was a high school student trying to sneakily send texts of “wat r u doing 2nite?” and “mr. smith’s fly is down lol” under my desk hoping my teacher wouldn’t catch me and take my phone away. That is until my junior year English class with Mrs. Ajemian, who encouraged us to use full sentences and full words when texting and instant messaging — the crazes of the day.
This simple change in habit my junior year saved my writing from continuing its downward spiral, though this isn’t true for all students then or now.
“I do see the use of abbreviations frequently, particularly things like ‘b/c’ and ‘u,’ ” says Michael Maney, a world cultures teacher at Bellefonte High School. “The texting language does affect grammar and spelling skills.”
In his class, Maney tries to have his students write as much as possible, despite the fact that it is a social studies class, in order to prepare them for their PSSA test later in the year as well as their quickly approaching college years.
“I try to make sure to point out ‘texting language’ and make these corrections early on and let them know this may be acceptable texting your friend but not in world cultures or PSSA tests,” he says.
While Maney notices those types of grammatical and spelling mistakes in his class, Sundar has shown in his research that people who text heavily develop poor grammar skills. The study was conducted by giving an offline grammar test to middle school students, and the results showed that the students who had low scores on the grammar test were also heavy texters.
While, on the positive side, things such as texting and instant messaging are making people use words — write words — again, the language is very different.
“Linguists would argue that that’s the way language shapes and changes itself,” says Sundar. “We now talk in terms of LOL and ROFL and stuff like that so it’s kind of an abbreviated language we’ve developed as a result of texting.”
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School bullies have a new tool in their arsenal. It’s no longer about the wedgies and swirlies and stealing of lunch money that you so stereotypically see in movies. Social media and other online and offline technologies have contributed to brutal bullying — so much so that it has made national news in relation to several suicides over cyber bullying, which is often about a person’s sexual preference.
“Especially for young people who are just developing their personalities, some people can be very cruel and write things on there that can destroy their self-confidence,” says Patty Assadinia of State College, who has three children ages 15 to 21.
While she thinks modern social-media sites and technologies have made her children more tech savvy and thinks they’re great tools to connect with others, she stresses the boundaries and responsibilities that come with their usage, including being selective of whom to accept as “friends” to avoid bullying.
“That’s the thing that scares me the most, the bullying online,” she says. “It’s important for parents to talk to their kids and explain to them the consequences, and they should understand it before they allow them to use them.”
Maney has had to attend meetings and in-service days on the subject of cyber bullying in the school. While the school has taken some measures to limit students’ access to these outlets by blocking social-media sites such as Facebook on school computers and not allowing cell-phone usage in the classroom, students are still able to access these things on their phones between classes and outside of school.
“When Facebook started it was only open up to universities and colleges and students. I don’t think that the younger students — and they keep getting younger — have access to fully understand that the stuff you say on the Internet becomes permanent,” says Maney.
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Need to check scores on ESPN, listen to the radio, take a picture with a mustache, track your diet and exercise, simulate punching someone in the face, pop bubble wrap, or get out of a bad date? Don’t worry there’s an app for that.
Smartphones, such as iPhones and Droids, allow for people to not only be constantly connected socially but also stay informed, keep a calendar, check the weather, and pretty much any useful thing that used to be done only on a computer. They also will send alerts from Facebook and Twitter and do things as trivial as digitally slap someone in the face or pop bubble wrap.
“Ubiquitous computing is really the idea that you have computing access anywhere and everywhere,” says Sundar. “People are using it in many profound and interesting ways, but they are also getting sucked into it.”
Having access to nearly everything that a computer would have — the helpful things and also the things that aid procrastination and provide distractions — can cause quite the time suck.
“It almost prompts you to get on social media when I otherwise probably wouldn’t have bothered to do that,” Sundar says about the Facebook notifications on his iPhone. “It has connected up all our different devices to be in social-media land all the time.”
Here’s the scenario: you walk into a very public place, say the HUB on Penn State’s campus or even a busy street corner, and you see a person handing out fliers. You don’t want to be cornered into taking the flier because you know you’ll most likely just throw it in the next trash can you can find, so you pull out your cell phone and pretend to be calling someone or sending a text message. Situation averted.
“There’s a general kind of lowering of civil exchange in public life,” says Sundar. “And you can also see people being less responsive to the needs of people around them.”
Cell phones and mp3 players create a convenient excuse for people to not interact personally with others and to tune out their immediate environment. These technologies allow people to strategize their isolation, as in the situation with the person handing out fliers.
Also, the increased usage of technology as a means of communication has created, as Penn State sophomore Matt McGee put it, a gain in ambiguity.
You can’t tell sarcasm in a text message.
“It teaches ambiguity and ambiguity is the same as monotony, it’s not as fun or as creative an expression. While you can use it to perpetuate this creativity, a lot of times it’s lost because of the tendency to be ambiguous,” says McGee, who is a member of the Clown Nose Club, whose philosophy is pretty simple: people matter. The club encourages members to take positive social risks and redefine the norm in areas of social interaction through using symbols of happiness, such as the clown nose, to spread positivity.
President and founder of the club Chad Littlefield agrees with the vague tendency of digital communication and says one of the reasons for it is a loss of nonverbal cues such as body language and tone of voice.
“I don’t know, you just can’t communicate the same thing if you’re breaking up with somebody in a text as you can in person,” he says.
In a world where people are becoming more connected to, and at the same time more distant from, each other, Littlefield created the Clown Nose Club in part to encourage people to personally interact with one another.
The idea sprang from a desire to be like Patch Adams, and from a walk from the HUB to his dorm where Littlefield wore a clown nose. He received nods, smiles, and comments from many of the people he passed. The clown nose brings people to the same level and can provide a good icebreaker to initiate positive social interactions
Though the doctor path, like Patch Adams, wasn’t quite the fit for Littlefield, he still liked the idea of promoting personal and authentic interactions between people, especially on a campus of more than 40,000 students that can often feel very impersonal.
“The idea of the club is to personalize and I think there is also an element of encouraging, as much as possible, an environment where people are comfortable being authentic and comfortable being themselves,” he says.
The Media Effects lab conducted a study on ubiquitous computing where they had people look something up using their phones and had a person come in their vicinity carrying a heavy bag of books, looking around. The study found that people who were looking something up were less inclined to help out the person with the heavy bag than those who weren’t.
“People who are on cell phones and these kinds of mobile media tend not to be aware of their real physical surroundings, so that’s a real danger sometimes,” says Sundar. “Going online can cut you off from your immediate offline world.”
Positive classroom, community connections made thanks to social sites
By Jenna Spinelle
From Facebook to Twitter to Skype and blogs, social-networking tools have connected people in ways never thought possible as recently as the last decade. It has profoundly impacted the way people learn, teach, and communicate, as well as speed at which all of these things can be done.
While there are privacy concerns and other negative aspects of social media, it has positively impacted the community in a number of ways. Everyone from students to working adults has benefited from these technologies.
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It seems just about every business and nonprofit organization one can think of has some social-media presence. Large corporations have millions of friends and followers, while local businesses might have only a few dozen or a few hundred. In either case, tools such as Facebook and Twitter have helped organizations to spread the word about who they are and what they do to a whole new audience.
Locally, the Centre County United Way uses Facebook and Twitter to help promote its message to “Live United” and raise awareness about its events and fundraising activities. The organization also connects with its member agencies across the county and with United Way International, its parent organization.
Centre County United Way communications director Megan Evans says the organization started using social media around the same time she came on board last fall. Its goals are broad, she says.
“We’re trying to reach anyone who can support United Way,” she says. “Whether it’s with a donation or volunteering, anyone who can give to United Way. We serve the whole county, we want the whole county to be involved.”
One recent social success was this year’s United Way Day of Caring event in October. The event takes volunteers to nonprofits across the county to complete landscaping, repair projects, and other work.
Without any encouragement from Evans or other United Way staff, participants posted pictures from their day on the group’s Facebook page and created a Twitter hashtag for the event to share their thoughts as the day of volunteering unfolded. Evans says she hopes those activities will encourage more people to get involved with Day of Caring next year.
She encouraged United Way member agencies to share their feedback about how volunteers helped them on the Day of Caring. She also posts photos from the organization’s events and reminders about donating to its fundraising campaign.
Like many other nonprofits, the United Way has a small staff and many responsibilities. It looks to Penn State student interns to stay on top of new social-media trends and expand its current presence by adding more interactive features. United Way International also offers support but does not dictate what content or images its chapters must post because each organization is self-governed.
“Using social media has allowed us to educate people about our partner agencies and send public Thank Yous to pacesetter companies and link to partner agencies,” Evans says. “It’s gotten the word out about us and helped inform people about how our partner agencies serve the community.”
While the United Way has national support and recognition behind it, smaller organizations such as the Centre County Community Foundation are using social media to help raise awareness about the work they do on a local level.
Erin Rowley, program assistant, manages the foundation’s blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account. A recent Penn State graduate, she was very familiar with social media and was eager to incorporate into the foundation’s communications strategy.
“It’s a really great way for us to reach out to people who might normally not know much about us,” she says. “It’s a lot easier to find information via social media that it is to do it in more traditional ways.”
The foundation’s blog tells stories of the organizations that benefit from its funds. One such post introduces readers to Bob Perks, for whome the Bob Perks Cancer Assistance Fund is named.
Rowley’s posts on the blog also promote other fundraising events in the community such as the State High 5K and PAWS Bingo Night, and even allow her personality to shine through in photos from her semester spent studying abroad. All of these things, she says, help to make the organization more authentic and put faces and personalities with the appeals for funds, creating a more well-rounded image for the foundation.
Since Rowley joined the organization in April, its blog has received more than 5,000 views, and its number of Facebook fans has doubled. She’s careful not to use social media directly for fundraising.
“Our main goal is just to continue to feel more personally connected to the foundation,” she says. “Social media is a great way for organizations to reach out to people and have a conversation rather than talking at them.”
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In addition to its impacts in the professional world, social media has enhanced teachers’ toolboxes and made it easier for students to express themselves and share their work with peers.
Angela Homan, a sixth-grade teacher at Penns Valley Intermediate School, has used Skype to connect her classroom with one of a friend now teaching in Alaska. Rather than writing letters or exchanging e-mails in a pen-pal format, Homan’s students were able to come face-to-face with their peers in Alaska and interact with them in real time.
“We talked about the similarities and differences in our lives,” Homan says. “For example, students in Alaska need to be taught safety because they may encounter a moose on their way to or from school.
Each classroom asked the other 10 questions, and both groups used the answers to write essays comparing and contrasting life in Pennsylvania with life in Alaska.
Homan’s students also use Glogster, an online presentation tool, to create and share electronic posters with their classmates. Gone are the days of markers and poster board — Glogster allows students to share their work with others, comment on each other’s work, and incorporate multimedia elements into their projects.
Students have created “glogs” about current events that included links to news stories, and about their favorite music with clips of songs they like incorporated into the online poster.
“Students make an interactive online poster where they can add photos, videos, and animations, and comment on each other’s projects similar to YouTube,” Homan says. “It’s better than getting out the poster board to do a project … it’s so much more interactive.”
She says stakes are higher for the students when their work is being viewed by others instead of just by her. Online tools such as Glogster and Google Docs allow her students to work from anywhere and keep up with assignments when they’re not in the classroom.
The Penns Valley district has supported Homan in these endeavors, and in October paid for her to visit Apple’s offices in Virginia to explore how she can use iPads and the company’s other products in the classroom.
She also shows her students the dangers that can come with using social media. In a unit called “Missing,” she shows them how easy it can be for others to find information about them online. She’s careful to walk the line between showing students how to protect themselves online without turning into a parental figure.
“Social media is wonderful, but social media can also be scary,” she says. “Safety is at the top of my list of concerns, and role-playing scenarios like the one we use in the ‘Missing’ unit are a great way to show how quickly it is to get yourself into trouble.”
In addition to her classroom work with social media, Homan uses Twitter to connect with other teachers, share ideas, and keep up with the latest trends and news in the profession.
At the collegiate level, one can barely walk around campus without seeing students on phones or logged into Facebook from computer labs or laptops. Professors are leveraging social media to help enhance their classroom communities and keep discussions going long after the class period ends.
Penn State English lecturer Jessica O’Hara uses blogs in her classes to help students learn how to write for a public audience and refine their skills of persuasion and building arguments. Her students in English 15, the introductory composition class required for freshmen, maintain “passion blogs” devoted to interests of their choice. The blogs also serve as platforms for them to create and edit drafts of traditional compositions and essays.
“They find it a lot more pleasurable to write when a major component is blogging,” she says. “I’m trying to instill in my students a sense of public writing and writing for an audience as a way to help them find their voices. That can be difficult to do when they’re only writing for a teacher.”
Her students use Blogs at Penn State, a platform maintained by the university and linked to a student’s Penn State user ID. Blogs at Penn State is part of the Teaching and Learning with Technology group, which helps faculty integrate the latest technology into their classrooms.
The classes meet three times per week, with Fridays designated as blogging days for students to work on their posts and add comments to their classmates’ blogs. Passion-blog topics range from ways to be frugal in Happy Valley to celebrity gossip to awkward moments in college life.
Theresa Fieo, a student in O’Hara’s class, says she was taken aback at first when she found out she would be blogging for class but has grown to love the assignments over the course of the semester. Her blog chronicles her first semester of college and provides tips for other new students at Penn State.
“In high school, the teachers were really focused on formal writing and grammar, so this was definitely different” she says. “I was excited not to be so buckled down and I feel like it’s easier to convey your viewpoints in this format.”
The students enjoy commenting on each other’s blogs and getting to know each other in the process. O’Hara says the blog platform and the interests shared on the blogs allow students to connect with each other in a way that would not happen in a more traditional classroom environment where the only interaction was partnering up to proofread each other’s papers.
Student Madison Butler blogs about her favorite music, bands off the beaten path that are not always known by her classmates. She’s received several comments during the semester thanking her for turning people on to new songs or artists, and hoped to continue blogging once the class ended.
“This actually isn’t the first class I’ve blogged for,” she says. “I like it because we can do what we want it and it helps convey your personality.”
In the last few weeks of the semester, O’Hara’s students added another social-media platform into the mix by creating Facebook pages to advocate for a local, national, or global issue they wrote about in a paper. Like the blogs, O’Hara says the Facebook assignment helps refine the students’ public-writing skills and teaches them how to craft an argument in a public setting, creating a conversation and responding to others who might disagree with their viewpoints.
“They already have a Facebook account and are spending time there,” she says. “This is a way to get other people to join in and raise awareness about an issue that they’d like to tell their audience on Facebook. They can invite other people to join their site and try to get information out there.”
Jenna Spinelle is a freelance writer in State College. She works in Penn State’s Undergraduate Admissions Office and is an adjunct lecturer in the College of Communications.
