The Me in Social Media

I sat with a group of educators, marketers, public relations professionals, investor relations professionals, and web developers yesterday talking about how to develop a graduate level program focused on social media. This was especially interesting because as the only psychologist, my vantage point was quite different. Where marketers talk about metrics and stats in media use, I wonder about how people interpret or make meaning out of the experience. To me, the metrics might show if the net result is positive or negative but they don’t illuminate much under the hood. I always enjoy it when I get to see a different way of looking at something or thinking about something by talking with smart people. The discussions also reinforce my opinion that effective media applications come from a multi-disciplinary foundation.

One topic of discussion was, what does a program focused on social media even mean? What is social media? Is it the same as Web 2.0? Is it part of Web 2.0? Will anyone who might be interested in the program recognize what it’s about from these labels?

This got me thinking about identity (which is just another word for branding, even though it’s most often applied to people). I define Web 2.0 as when technology went interactive rather than being a unidirectional experience. No matter how you define Web 2.0, the existence of 2.0 means establishing a common term is both more important and harder than it’s ever been. This is because the world is networked. You don’t have to work hard at achieving a definition among a few geographically proximate folks with similar life experiences. With Web 2.0 connectivity, the flood gates are open to ideas, experiences, assumptions, and beliefs of all kinds.

Creating commonalities is a distinctly human activity. It satisfies to very basic hard-wired human needs: order and social contact. Social media is one of the ways people come together to find commonalities and create communities and groups.

We all know that today’s kids have experiences that we did not have growing up. Most of them are impacted by some kind of technology. Facebook is essentially the “Youth Activity Center” at my high school. It was public in that anyone in the high school could attend, but it was private because you hung out with your friends in your section of the place, clearing defining your group identity with your clothes, hair, and various other behavioral accoutrements of teenageness. I came across this lecture by danah boyd at the Handheld Learning 2008 Conference. (FYI – the conference site is also very cool with videos of many speakers and is definitely worth checking out.) Danah’s area of expertise is social media–she talks about her research findings and impression of the way social media provides what I think of as the digital construction of identity–how social media sites in particular, but digital representations of individuals in general, display an incredibly rich tableau of information about an individual, what is important to him/her, how he/she want to be seen, their environmental and social context, These identities are essentially narratives that, while public, are distinctly targeted to their audience and consequently tell as about the audience as about the individual.