Headspace
A question that comes up more frequently than most in discussions of social media is “What’s it for?” It’s usually connected to concerns about return on investment which, given last week’s post on scuba diving, are entirely reasonable. Why would you spend a lot of time and effort on something without knowing what it’s for? There’s a problem with this question though, because it doesn’t quite make sense in the context of social media. Social media isn’t a tool, like a hammer. It’s more like a park. It’s a space.
Imagine you and I are walking near the middle of town, and come upon a beautiful park. The grass is green, the fields are dotted with flowers, and the bushes are full of songbirds enjoying the bright sunny day. As we look out over this verdant landscape, I turn to you and ask, “What’s it for?”
It doesn’t really fit, does it? But it’s not because the park isn’t useful, but because what it’s for depends on who you are. A poet might sit and compose there. A musician might use the space to practice. A family might picnic there, the children running and playing, the parents watching. People might play baseball there, or pick flowers, or even dig it up and start a coal mine. Someone who’s tired might sleep. There are any number of things you could do with a park, but it’s hard to really pick out what the meadow is for, because it’s not for anything. If you were reading a book in this park and I interrupted you to say “That’s not what a park is for,” we could have a long argument about what it is and isn’t for, and never get anywhere.
This isn’t so with a hammer. There’s lots of things you can do with a hammer, you can build a house or crack a skull, but it’s constructed with a purpose in mind. Hammers are for hammering and pulling nails. They’re tools, and they serve a purpose. There’s a tendency to think of social media platforms like a hammer. To think of them as a tool to get some job done, whether it’s getting the word out about a new product, talking with students, or efficiently showing off your lunch. And you can use it for all of these things, to be sure. But is that what it’s for? There’s a pretty big difference between hammers and parks or, more broadly, between tools and spaces. And there’s a tendency to look at social media as a tool, because there’s a part of it that does something. Twitter broadcasts messages of 140 characters or less to followers, for example. Those are part of its mechanics. A park has mechanics too. The grass grows, insects breed, songbirds breathe, etc. But none of those things, while they make up the park, say anything about how the park can or should be used.
Social media platforms aren’t a tool, they’re a space. They’re good tools only insofar as they are successful spaces. Take the idea of using Facebook as a marketing or engagement tool, for instance. If no one used Facebook, it wouldn’t be a good tool for it. There would be no one there to listen. It’d be like handing out leaflets in an empty park.
So social media is like a park. It’s an online space. Actually, it’s a lot of different online spaces. To answer the original question of “What’s it for?” you can give the same answer we would if someone asked what a park was for. It’s not for anything. What matters about it is what you want to do there, not what it’s for. Poets use social media to compose. Charities use it to talk with volunteers and donors. Some people use it to take pictures of their lunch. Everyone has a goal, and the usefulness of the space can only really be measured in terms of that goal. A city park is a great place to have a pickup football game. It’s a poor place to pan for gold.
Some goals you might have for your social media preference, with reference to academia, are to get to know your students and other academics, or to interact with conferences and publications. You might follow news to learn about it and react to it early. News on Twitter travels faster than earthquakes, after all. Maybe you want to give a personal voice to your research, recruit people to your academic society, or get more submissions to your journal. Your goals are going to govern whether it’s useful, because there isn’t an inherent usefulness that can be evaluated. It’s what makes social media risky, but it’s also what makes it interesting.
Thinking about it as a space carries with it ideas about what you should do there. A tool is something that you use for your purposes, but a space is something you share with everyone else in it. If you’re at the park and someone starts shouting about the sale they’re having, does that make you want to go buy their things? It doesn’t seem very likely. If you only come to the park once a month, can you be surprised when no one knows your name?
In short, social media platforms aren’t really for anything. They’re not twelve step programs, or top ten lists. They’re spaces created so people can use them for things. Succeeding in these spaces requires you to have a clearly articulated goal (or more than one), and working toward that. Just like succeeding in any space does. The thing that makes Facebook different from the park is that it’s much larger. You can’t start a football game with someone in Thailand at your local park. But you can share an idea with them, and cook up a new paper over social media.
I’ll get into the specifics of goals, platforms, and their relation to higher education in later posts. To start with, I really want to stress that what matters is how you think about social media in general. Online communication is something we all know how to do, and while we could stand to to improve, it’s not so alien to how we talk with people in our daily lives. And how we engage with them, which is the topic for next week.
