Social Media
Social Media: How Connected Should We Be?
In an age where connecting with anyone on Earth is as simple as pressing a few keys together, several questions emerge:
- Do various forms of social media (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube etc.) create meaningful relationships?
- Are our students suffering from a lack of thinking skills at the expense of a preponderance of communication skills?
- Do our students know what to do with the mountain of data they have at their disposal?
- Do social media narrow socio-economic gaps or widen them?
The fact that many schools and in fact school divisions, including Holy Spirit and Elk Island Catholic, are considering student access to social media sites, makes this topic timely and pertinent. Before one can attempt to answer any of these difficult questions, a few relevant statistics, recently listed in the December2010/January 2011 Educational Leadership Magazine, should be considered:
- 61 percent of adults who regularly go online- and 73 per cent of online teens- interact with one another on social networking websites (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2010)
- People spend 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes per day on the site (Facebook, 2010; Hepburn, 2010a).
- 50 million messages daily (or 600 messages per second) are posted on Twitter, a microblogging site with 145 million users (Alexa, 2010; Compete, 2010; Hepburn, 2010b; Weil, 2010).
- You Tube has 24 hours of new video uploaded every minute and receives 2 billion daily page views (Hepburn, 2010c)
While one could go on and on with this type of data, this much is clear, social media is a phenomena which cannot be ignored. It consumes massive quantities of resources, the most finite of which is time. Perhaps the final and most important observation to be made is this: if students are spending significant amounts of time on various social media, what time are they giving up? Sleep time, exercise time, family time, time for reflection, time for prayer, ……..
I look forward to your comments and thoughts.
December 8, 2010
Don Marceau
