Performance politics in the world of social networking – should teachers get involved?
Ok …So now I’ve taken social networking to the next level…crossing over into a virtual social world is something that had never crossed my mind previously!
After setting up an account on Facebook, I was presently surprised to find some old friends from university. Exactly as Helen Pidd stated in the Guardian article – Are you connected? Face book is similar to a ‘souped-up free version of Friends Reunited’, surpassing the old idea of just finding friends, here you can make them as well. Aside from my personal pleasure, are social networking sites appropriate for use within an educational context?
Facebook has similarities with another networking site – Myspace, which has been viewed by many (including me prior to this Reflective Narrative) as simply a site to construct networks through music affiliations. Although music can have a particular function for Myspacers, such as providing space for up & coming or established singer/songwriters to showcase their talent and achievements, as well as conversing with new and old friends, Myspace is a means of telling the world “this is who I am”, “this is what I do” and “these are the people that I know or who want to get to know me”. It is a place to reflect on lessons in life, should it really be used as a place to reflect on lessons in school?
Although Myspace pages are a public way for young people to collect and converse with friends, many Myspacers use it as much more than a popularity contest, (even though many members request to be added to the ‘top friends list’ of others). Creating a page on this site is great for developing media literacy as members are able to post picture presentations, videos, messages and blogs whilst positioning their social networks through categories such as Myspace Music, Myspace Film and Myspace Comedy.
What also becomes interesting is alongside the networking preferences set by Myspacers when “genre-ising” personal sites, their conversations and blog posts can indicate the types of audiences these members are looking to attract.
L Scheidt (2006) discusses five audience typologies (set by K.M Langellier, 1998) which social networkers “perform” to. According to this article, online audiences are characterised as either:
1- Witnesses who testify to the experience
2- Therapists who unconditionally support emotions (the research shows that this category is a
position mainly adopted by females!)
3- Cultural theorists who assess the contestation of meanings, values and identities in the performance
4- Narrative analysts who examine genre truth or strategy
5- Critics appraising the display of performance, knowledge and skill
An example of a Myspace blog outlining a member’s experience can be said to fit quite neatly into the first category of audience types, which according to Scheidt (2006) is a popular category bloggers use when interacting with audiences. Out of the 89 blog entries Scheidt studied, 50.6% of them fitted into the first category.
Censorship and privatisation are continually present themes on social networking sites, enabling members to gauge just how much information they are prepared to show or share with others. Myspacers and the Facebook Community are able to toggle between what information is made available for public consumption and what is retained in the private sphere. Students can therefore control the privacy of their information. On Facebook, private networking takes place behind the “front door” of the site’s face page:
Public/private boundaries remain quite distinct behind the site’s front door, friends are categorised by network regions and passers by can be limited in what aspects of a person’s profile they see (dependent on the privacy settings set). This is similar to Myspace, yet the difference lies in the fact that non-myspacers can be part of the audience and view members’ pages without setting up an account. Therefore educators choosing to use Myspace as an educational resource are able to view their students’ public pages to check on tasks set or blog posts. However how will students feel when teachers face their “front door” page? Do they need to worry about their own or their friends frank use of language? Have they lied about their age on their profile? Can privacy settings be placed against their photos? Actually, student blogs can be searched for in Myspace, so accessing the front door page may not be necessary but educators should be prepared to sift through thousands of blogs, unless students have tagged their Myspace page with an unusual name. An important consideration for educators is the fact that student’s sites can be accessed from their blogs; this would then involve the educator’s morality and the trust of the student. Educators approaching a students’ front door page may be faced with content which they find disturbing which would therefore place the educator in an ethical dilemma – whether to involve parents or consider issues of child protection. What then does this mean in terms of trust?
Educators choosing to use Facebook or Myspace as an educational resource will need to create an account in order to interact with their students. What are the implications when building a profile? Will students be invited onto the educator’s site as ‘friends’? What will this mean to the young person and how will this change the dynamics of teacher/student relations?
From a completely different perspective, in terms of the public/private distinction, surely censorship must also be perceived as the right of the anonymous user? Audience members who wish not to get involved in the pages they view (such as educators) may soon be forced to take a position – either get involved or leave this area! Social network communities such as Myspace are utilising monitoring software in order to track anonymous audience members who literally show no “business” on these sites apart from being a spectator or voyeur. Of course, some may view this favourably considering the social climate of undesirable internet users, but tracking site visitors may intimidate and put off potential audiences.
It seems that social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo) used in an educational context have no place in the school setting. Unless being used for a group media project to learn visual design, content usability and the integration of particular tools (media player, hit counter etc) on a page set up solely for this reason, these sites should remain for personal pleasure and not be used when assessing the learning of students. Young people, who use these sites, do so for a particular reason – to express to others who they are or how they choose to perform their identity. Although students may or may not be aware of the extent of their audience, privacy controls allow them to restrict specific information to their social circle whilst allowing other virtual acquaintances to access different areas. It therefore becomes difficult to see why educators would want to use such sites with their students. When considering the blogging facilities on either of these sites (as mentioned above), student’s personal pages are only a “click” away and here students will express themselves in a way which may be considered inappropriate for formal organised settings such as schools. If blogging is to be used as an educational tool, then it should be done so away from Myspace, Facebook and Bebo…crumbs, is there no place left sacred for the student?
