Respect, Kindess, and Empathy in Social Media

Can social-networking technology actually be social? I've worried, not just about anti-social behavior like bullying and ranting, but about people substituting face-to-face, or ear-to-ear, and hand-in-hand communication. Much is lost in the media.

Will the next generation be burrowed in their own niches, texting in syllables, with only like-minded fbfs--completely incable of geniune social skills?* No tubs of ice cream in this picture.

Yet I saw a glimmer of hope in the words of Himanshu Nigam, chief security officer at News Corp. and MySpace. In an article posted by Cnet, Nigam made the following points about the potential of social networking sites to promote certain social behaviors:

Post with respect: photos are a great way to share wonderful experiences. If you're posting a photo of you and your friends, put yourself in your friends' shoes and ask would your friends want that photo to be public to everyone. If yes, then you're uploading photos with respect.

Comment with kindness: compliments are like smiles, they're contagious. When you comment on a profile, share a kind word, others will too.

Update with empathy: sharing updates lets us tell people what we think. When you give an opinion on your status updates, show empathy towards your friends and help them see the world with understanding eyes.

So with lessons in media literacy can come lessons of social literacy. What an engaging and unsexpected arena to teach caring for ourselves and others! Conversations about fair, just, generous, and kind dealings naturally can be reasoned out as we teach our students how to best interact on the web. Alas, maybe with media can be geniunely social, even if the ice cream must be served separately.

_____________________

*fbfs - Facebook friends

Image credit: "Goat Milk Ice Cream." By Stu Spivak. 29 May 2007. Flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons: BY, SA.

Into the Woods

This past summer I read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. So I have been thinking about his ideas of "intimate immensity" as they pertain to how students (and well, anyone for that matter) sometimes perceive the World Wide Web. The screen about eighteen inches of my face has the lure of such intimate immensity.

Bachelard provides a metaphor of a forest to explain intimate immensity. It is the experience of being surrounded by the trees closest to you, and therefore, unaware of the vastness of the woods beyond this immediate, intimate circle. Perhaps the woods is as Robert Frost tells us "lovely, dark and deep." Or maybe not. Either way we can't see the forest for the trees. We are lured into a coziness, a security of a verdant canopy and steady bark pillars in our intimate vicinity.

Is that not how comfortable I feel as I type this in my own study, with my own familiar computer screen? Is that not how my students feel when they post pictures of their latest OMG moments with their friends? Sure. It's the intimacy of thinking we are talking only among one's "friends" or writing only to oneself that blogging can be.

Still, it's important before clicking "publish" or "upload" to remember ourselves and remind our students that as intimate as the Web may be when it's eighteen inches away or in one's lap, it and our audience may also be vast and unknown. Indeed, there may be a few "lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!"

Fairy tales warn us about dropping breadcrumbs, straying from the path, and talking to wolves. As we tread into the woods of the World Wide Web and invite our students, these cautionary stories and a mindfulness to Bachelard's sense "intimate immensity" can help us find our way safely.



Image: Nicholas T. “Mossy.” Detail. Flickr. 19 March 2007. CC Licensed: BY-SA-NC

"Beyond Here Be Dragons!"

"Why would anyone want to blog!" First, this is a question screamed at me today by a colleague. Second, notice I do not punctuate it with a question mark. The scream made it rhetorical.

I had been talking about a student who had recently removed a blog that included posts, though heartfelt and honest in tone and style, were perhaps so personal so as to compromise the author and his subjects in a less than perfect, not so understanding world. Although the young blogger had removed his blog, other bloggers were pulling up its contents in Google Reader and reposting them. Our world may not be understanding, but unlike the virtual world it could be more ephemeral. What we post can virsist on without us.

It is to this nonrecantable, uncontrollable existence of our posts to the blogosphere my colleague objects. She gave me pause. As she objected, I reflected.

Several thoughts came to mind. Of how she was right--it does seem unfair that once we publish, to others we cannot see, cannot know, who can abuse, misuse, and reuse our contributions in ways we cannot immediately imagine. I also thought of how I find the process of blogging--and publishing--to be almost as enriching and rewarding as reading the blogs of countless other educators who are doing the same. I have the sense that publishing my "reveries" is dues for reading the "buzz" of other bees. That together we create the prairie.

Indeed, I know that my metaphor is romantic. After all , the blogosphere is more a woods than a prairie. It offers what the 20th Century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls the "immediate immensity." To sit in front of a computer screen, less than a meter between you and the rest of the world, in the comfort of your own home, and not realize that it translates to billions of other screens (now and into the future) is to forget the forest for the tree. The forest may be lovely, but it is dark and deep. And there may even be wolves.

"Beyond here be dragons!" This makes me think of yet another topographical metaphor for cyber-space. The sea. But like the explorers before us we students and teachers set sail to explore while others cozy up to a cup of tea and a good book back at home. Nothing wrong with the latter, and someday I hope to make it home safely, so save a cup for me. In the meantime, I'm off.

Most People Exist, Some Virsist

Oscar Wilde once said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” We'll now you can have a Second Life. But I'm not sure that's living.

Recently I've seen a promo on television for a program that examines "the effects on people who persist in virtual reality." I've seen the promo twice and can't recall whether it's a news report or special documentary. I get hung up on the phrase "persist in virtual reality." Does VR take persistance?

Well, maybe. Although I can spend clock-spinning time warps flying about in Second Life, I've yet to lose track of major slices of my first life (and I've heard some people have.) Maybe my RAM isn't hyper enough, but my avatar eventually starts freezing up and the program crashes. So persistence is part of it.

Besides being in Second Life is a sort of Oz. "People come and go so quickly here." I wouldn't call it a place to persist.

I just think "persista" is not "exist," and neither is what you do in VR. How about virsist! Persist, exist, virsist--Wilde had it right. Save some time for living.

Image: Avatar in Second Life.