Category: HCId

Sharing a post seems simple enough. Copy and paste a link, click the like button or recommend a story. Seems simple enough–not too complicated. There is a lot more happening behind these 1 and 2 step flows. When we share we are defining our identify, building our social capital and simply speaking, expressing ourselves.

Takin the action to share, or not share, by whatever process is an editorial process. Creative tools like Facebook give people who were once only consumers a more liberal opportunity to also be producers.They are using their personal judgement to select or ignore what they choose to broadcast to their networks. Each post is a reflection of  their values by showing what they consume and promote and thereby constructing their identity.

Schniederman and Hochheiser discuss the transformation from readers to leaders in social media. Social media users are constantly shifting from roles as passive readers to very active leaders: those who move conversations in the community forward. In between they act as contributors and collaborators and are constantly negotiating their role and identity as it shifts even from post to post within their greater social communities online.

Sharing to a community also builds on social capital. Journalism history researcher discusses the orientation of text in his book Communities of Journalism.

“When a reader writes a letter to the editor, they are speaking to the public, speaking to the editor and to the self,” he says.

Nord’s statement here supports identity building while interacting with news. What also happens here is engagement with the community. Posting and sharing certainly speaks to a public, especially as the web is becoming more open. Friends in the network work as editors, they critique, comment and build on what has been stated. As a person shares to their network, the public and editor are one in the same as they are building their social capital.

In a recent study done at Michigan State University, Ellison, Stenfield and Lampe found significant social capital benefits from college students on Facebook. They found students used facebook “primarily to maintain existing offline relationships or to solidify what would otherwise be ephemeral, temporary acquaintanceships.” In doing this, they found “indices of psychological well-being, such as self esteem and satisfaction with life.” Sharing and engaging in these communities not only pass time and serve as passive news to read about friends, but also builds socially beneficial experiences.

Malcom Barnard quotes Roger Fry in his book Approaches to Visual Culture. Barnard writes:

Fry believed that message of the work is described as’a whole mass experience hidden in the artist’s subconscious’ Conscious or unconscious, the matter is still that of expression.

When someone share to their network, whether or not they are conscious and aware of their expressions does not take away from them expressing themselves at are. When they post, and especially with commentary,  they are engaging in editorial, creative work and the process of communication.

In doing this, their expressive nature directly relates to their identity that is always in progress of being crafted and the social capital in which they are building. The individual does this across their networks, their community while every other friend in their network is simultaneously making the same conscious and unconscious negotiations.

Call it expanding and contracting, cycling and then recycling or moving forwards and backwards. That’s the way research goes. I am midstream a thick media reporting project. As I sort through my quasi-professional-identity crisis as a designer, journalist and researcher I have full warrant to borrow tools and techniques from all disciplines.

I borrowed elements of affinity diagraming to draw new conclusions about so much of what I have learned this semester.

1. I wrote short summaries of my research findings on individual Post It notes.

2. I stuck the post it notes on a big blank wall. I organized and reorganized them until they made some kind of subjective, judged sense.

3. Then, I gave each stack a topic. I now have organized clusters of thoughts and seeds of ideas about how to move forward.

Questions

1. What kinds of people should I talk to next?
2. How does language connect communities and culture?
3. What are the analog things in our life that mimic the social layer?
4. What gap is social media sharing expression filling?
5. What filled the expression gap before?
6. Will we get social media fatigue (too many chicken nuggets)?
7. Social media satisfies impulsive behavior and thoughts. What other part of our life does this affect?
8. Why do we gather where we do online?
9. What gets left out when shared (broadcasted) content is personalized for us?
10. How are people who share to social media like and unlike journalists?

“One click” tools like retweeting and liking content make social participation easy. Harry Hochheiser and Ben Schniederman say “Social networking tools illustrate the importance of leveraging existing social ties to generate perceived community in From Bowling Alone toTweeting Together: Technology-Mediated Social Participation.

It cannot be accidental that they refer to these communities as perceived. I recently posted about the great resource our social media acquaintances are in my algorithm post. However, there is also the dilution of content in our state of information overload.

Hochheiser and Schniederman’s gently claim that these communities we are in are perceived. Because it is so easy to passively interact with those in our social feeds, do we end up crafting communities that truly exist or are they only perceived. Without going too far down the “what is reality” path, what we learn here is that like in traditional media even in social media, leaders emerge.

These leaders emerge from the group of general social media users. Everyone consumes. Those that only consume are often called lurkers. He says, then, some become contributors, collaborators and leaders. They do not define each role and break down the difference between a contributor and collaborator.

My guess is that a collaborator is someone who posts something on Facebook (a contributor). A friend then comments on that post, which makes that friend a collaborator. If the author responds, he then also becomes a collaborator. Once they are in “engaged participation” in the community, say a Facebook Group, or a long thread of posts, they have become a leader.

The reader, the consumer is playing a role s/he’s never played before. The reader is influencing the experience for other readers. They add value to the content written by the author, may that person be writing for CNN or on Facebook.com.

As a collaborator’s reading experience is hyper mediated by contribution, on say, is their reading experience hypermediated across platforms?

It’s possible that leadership on social media platforms has changed the way they read what professional news authors publish. How then, if at all, should journalists change the way they write and collaborate with their readers and collaborators?