Be my friend?

Got the new album by The National today. It's pleasant enough - doesn't distract me from the dreaded marking – but not a lot more than that. Are they the Indie U2 these days?

Anyway, having got all that about discourse, capitalism and education off my flabby chest yesterday, today's question is: social media and students – yes or no? One of the meetings I attended yesterday discussed the university's proposed guidelines on using social media and pedagogy. For the most part, the guidelines are fine and practical.

However, what wasn't addressed was the wider context. Should a university be herding students into the arms of distant corporations who will wring them dry for marketable data? Is it equitable to make elements of teaching depend on platforms some students don't want to use? Who owns this information, do colleagues and students understand the privacy settings well enough? What if they want out, and what if they say something they shouldn't?

One of my colleagues ran a module which required students to blog about various taboo subjects: one came back a few years later and claimed that he'd lost a potential job because they'd Googled him and found him confessing to a minor crime. We told them not to boast about their nefarious deeds, but everyone makes mistakes. Was it his fault? Or our responsibility to delete such things?

I sometimes use Twitter in class. If the group is shy and silent, I'll give them a hashtag (such as the module code) and ask them to send me questions like that, promising not to follow them or look at their other Tweets. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Although a lot of students aren't on Twitter and it could be seen as exclusive, I tend to feel that such a use is additional – anyone not using the platform can simply speak in the class. But I wouldn't want to make anything dependent on an external platform – I want editorial control and to be sure that privacy settings haven't sneakily changed, or that the organisation hasn't gone bust. These things are ephemeral: the university spent a lot of time and effort on establishing a Second Life campus. Second Life? Perhaps you're too young. It was literally all the rage on Friday December 3rd 2003. Or something. Now it's tumbleweed. Facebook use is already declining…

It's hard for institutions to a) keep up and b) not seem like the creepy old man in the playground. We can't tell which sites 'the kids' are going to be using tomorrow, and if we go all-in to get down with the youth, they might find that intrusive – people are researching concepts of virtual space, and whether individuals consider them 'private' or 'public'. Do you want your teachers or the institution Tweeting you, or 'liking' your pub photos? I know I wouldn't. On the other hand, many students see e-mail as hopelessly passé and appreciate a Tweet when a class is cancelled or an assignment's due.

The fuzzier element is the issue of social capital, weak or strong. Say you follow your lecturer, or your lecturer follows you. There's an element of control with Facebook (apparently: I'm not on it, and I've ensured that the various platforms I do use are furnished only with dummy names and email addresses) but slippage is easy. Either party might be horrified to realise they've just announced that they're not in today because they're hungover rather than 'unwell'. I already get emails at 3 a.m.: do I want queries by Twitter at any time of day and night? Are there professional boundaries that shouldn't be crossed? I asked this via Twitter yesterday and got an interesting range of responses. Some people saw no problem: social media isn't 'real' friendship and can be seen as a more relaxed space. Others run institutional accounts like Bath Spa's English account, which is chatty and relaxed without over-sharing (my department is thinking of starting one, though the boss is rightly keen to avoid it being vacuous and self-promoting). Gloucestershire University also runs a decent, modest English Department blog. Others said that Facebook friendship is reserved for ex-students instead of current ones. One respondent said that she would friend or follow people she's comfortable getting drunk with, which struck me as both funny and quite wise. You get drunk with people who get your sense of humour and make allowances for context, whereas student-teacher relationships automatically come replete with power imbalances. Another Twitter friend put it like this:

Twitter I only follow peeps I am a fan of. On fb I only friend those I can say Fuck in front of. Rules out a lot of lecturers.

Social media = socialising. Some I want to socialise with others I don't and viceversa. Its not the place for officialdom. 

Some more responses from academics (students and teachers), anonymised:

Too messy; tho I don’t use FB as a personal space—too many “work” folks on there— & I don’t twitter follow current UGs

 Our students and the SU really appreciate @EnglishBSU - it's been cited as an exemplar of its kind (ahem!).

wayyyy more helpful than waiting two days for a reply to an email. Definitely useful. 

No. Former students maybe, but not current crop. Alters dynamics of relationship. 

I'm not, for work/life balance reasons. I'm not with current colleagues either. 

I think this is something that develops when lecturing. You need clearer boundaries.

I'll add students post teaching&colleagues that add me. Use it as a work tool not personal. I live in with students so boundaries v important 

I wouldn't want to be, and as a student still don't 'friend' faculty members/academics unless they 'friend' me. 

I'm generally horribly relaxed. Probably far too open. 

Not so long as you have responsibility for marking their work and pastoral care you shouldn't. Once graduated is different. 

I have student Twitter followers; I don't follow them back 

Think there's something about public nature of Twitter that mitigates the social media fail often seen on Facebook. 

current students? Absolutely not. Past students? Maybe. 

Definitely not Facebook. A few follow me on twitter; I do not follow current students but a few former students. 

My supervisor & I bcame Facebook 'friends' after I finished though & I think that was right. 

There are limits, but imposing them requires too much guardedness. Best for me to just keep them separate! 

I’ve found both twitter and blogging to be both helpful and productive.

For me, it's about duty of care - if I have that, I have a responsibility to be professional. 

Being able to unwind and vent in a safe space for *us* matters. 

It's definitely useful, but only with staff who want to be out there. It certainly wouldn't work if it were forced. 

As I have added collegues, FB has become less personal for me. Thankfully I have other spaces. 

I would (and do) add colleagues that I have a friendship with - i.e. are not just colleagues. 

Good question... I think it depends whether they are compelled to have more contact than is purposeful. (Creepy treehouse.) 

(Further reading: http://www.dustyoldbooks.net/2013/05/on-influences-and-beginnings.html and the "Creepy Treehouse" article which I found very useful. But this is a fascinating spread of approaches. We've never had so many opportunities to communicate with/mock/spy on our students and for them to do the same with us. The boundaries are very fuzzy and we're just feeling our way towards a useful working practice.

What do I do? Well, a few students follow me and I follow them back, but the vast majority do so after graduation and I really value the network that's evolved from that. Most are fairly discreet and I never, ever reply to or reference anything I think they might blush at if they realised I'd read it. I also keep my real name off the account and don't use it for professional work: better for me, better for the university. Nor do I share personal information about me, though I do quote terrible essays sometimes, which I'm beginning to feel bad about. Certainly my instincts are changing all the time.

I'd really like your comments on this.

Just one Sonnetto, give it to me…

Afternoon all. And what time do I call this?

In my defence, I've been teaching for several hours without a break. The first session was with the English literature second-years, on the Renaissance module. Which makes me the Renaissance Man. Ahem. It was a session on sonnets today: a strict form subgenre requiring technical mastery while also avoiding cliché and predictability. There are a lot of bad sonnets around.

What I did to avoid the dreaded silence and passivity which often manifests itself when teaching poetry and in particular closed form poetry was to introduce scissors to the occasion. I gave them sonnets by Wyatt, Drayton, Spenser and Wendy Cope, but with all the lines in random order. The students had to draw on their knowledge of metre, rhyme scheme, quatrains, octaves, sestets and 'voltas' (the surprising 'turn'), sonnet history and culture to work out the correct order. So they had to develop technical and cultural skills to get it right. They did really well, some perfectly.

After that, it was into my Ethics class, mostly concentrating on the origins, meaning and application of privacy. Rather economically, I thought, I discussed the Renaissance development of the individual just as I had in the sonnets class! Individuality is a culturally and historically-located concept, owing a lot to the Reformation's insistence on private contemplation and moral self-interrogation. Add capitalism's self-defeating but lucrative need for you to express this new 'you' by constantly changing your outward appearance (new codpiece then, new iPhone now) and voilà: the self-fashioned individual. And individuals need physical and mental space. Which corporations and governments need for economic reasons but resent for political purposes. So we went from John Locke to Facebook's privacy settings in a single bound. Hugely enjoyable, though I was rather shocked by many students' cheerful willingness to abandon privacy for the sake of convenience. Facebook's business model (sell your data to other corporations) seems perfectly reasonable, apparently.

The point was that just as in the Renaissance, we self-fashion, only we do so in multiple forums now. We have to perform in person, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Blogger and everywhere else. Paradoxically, we perform both to conform and to distinguish ourselves. My Twitter feed tries to be trenchant and witty, to attract followers. But I can't be too creative or transgressive, because I'll be socially excluded. Learning where the boundaries are is what Foucault called disciplinarily – and its bound up with notions of the self and of power. Being visible online is an exercise in agency, but it's also a form of submitting to authority and surveillance both by the state and corporations, but also to the population which has internalised hegemonic values. We are each other's, and our own, policemen.

All in all, a glorious, though exhausting day. And being in the classroom meant I was temporarily shielded from the vicious, ideologically-driven government financial statement.

A new addiction

Everyone watching the lunar eclipse tonight?

Meanwhile, you may like this snarky, pedantic website, picking up Facebook spelling and grammatical errors. Not being in FB, I like it a lot.

Universities: where the issues are thrashed out

Actually, forget that: any comments the university doesn't like are deleted from its Facebook page, according to a source. Try not to think of the page as a means of communicating with students and the wider community. Think of it as an advert disguised as a means of communicating with students and the wider community.

Which means that the people running the site either have no idea what digital media is all about, or have been taking lessons from corporate PR departments.

Meanwhile, inhabitants of The Dark Place and students at The Hegemon are invited to join Wolverhampton's first UK Uncut action! Meet 19th March, 11.30, Queen Square for satirical frolics.

Faceteach

Students really like teaching via Facebook – and it can do everything Wolf can do!

Discuss.

(WOLF is the teaching intranet).

Is this the equivalent of one's dad pretending to like his kids' music?

Tax? Search me…

Very interesting article on how Google's effective tax rate is around 2% (and on how Ireland bankrupted itself):

 Google’s office in Ireland is the center of the company’s international operations.  In 2009 it “was credited with 88 percent of the search juggernaut’s $12.5 billion in sales outside the U.S.”  But Google doesn’t pay taxes on that amount, because most of the profits went to Bermuda, where there is no corporate income tax.

So, how did Google get its profits to Bermuda?  Businessweek explains:

Google’s profits travel to the island’s white sands via a convoluted route known to tax lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich.” In Google’s case, it generally works like this: When a company in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1 percent of revenues in 2008.

Irish law makes it difficult for Google to send the money directly to Bermuda without incurring a large tax hit, so the payment makes a brief detour through the Netherlands, since Ireland doesn’t tax certain payments to companies in other European Union states. Once the money is in the Netherlands, Google can take advantage of generous Dutch tax laws. Its subsidiary there, Google Netherlands Holdings, is just a shell (it has no employees) and passes on about 99.8 percent of what it collects to Bermuda. (The subsidiary managed in Bermuda is technically an Irish company, hence the “Double Irish” nickname.)

This set-up (as Businessweek describes it) also helps Google lower its tax bill in the U.S.  Google Ireland licenses its search and advertizing technology from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.  Obviously this technology is worth a lot—but Google headquarters keeps the licensing fee to Google Ireland low.  Doing so means that Google headquarters can minimize its U.S. earnings and thus its tax obligations to the U.S. government.  And of course, Google Ireland knows how to move its profits around to minimize its tax liabilities.

 “Facebook is preparing a structure similar to Google’s that will send earnings from Ireland to the Cayman Islands, according to company filings and a person familiar with the arrangement.”  Microsoft already has one in place. 

You really need to run away from Facebook

Read this.

The chilling bit is this: if just one of your friends uses Farmville, your personal data has been sold on to god knows who.

Maybe I'm paranoid or just a grumpy anti-capitalist, but if anyone's going to be lax about my data, it's me.

First remove the Moat in your eye

There's a bit of a flap on about the dead murderer Raoul Moat's Facebook tribute page. An ugly section of society seems to view him as a folk hero for, variously, hating women, hating the police, and evading them for a whole week.

Naturally, the politicians are outraged by this, which seems fair enough to me, but they've responded in a way that demonstrates how little they actually understand about new media. David Cameron rightly condemned the wave of sympathy expressed for Moat (though it seems that he did in fact seek psychological help and was refused), but his minions are treating Facebook like some kind of official publication to be censored.

I listened to a Tory MP, Chris Heaton-Harris, on the Today programme this morning (listen here). He explicitly said that Facebook should close down the tribute page in the same way that the BBC would refuse to broadcast offensive material. The interviewer pointed out that the BBC is a public body with legal responsibility for the programmes it makes, which is a good start, but he didn't point out the central difference which makes new media legally and culturally interesting. Unlike the BBC, Facebook isn't a content generator. It doesn't make the sewage, it provides the pipes along which the sewage flows. Its main business is to analyse the material and sell it to advertisers. Telling Facebook to censor pages it hosts is like suing the phone company every time somebody swears during a conversation.

Furthermore, if you're likely to be offended by a particular Facebook page, don't go there. I don't watch soap operas because I don't like them - I don't watch them then complain about them. The MP's complaint was that his young daughters could view these pages. I found this a very curious argument for a Conservative, as their central political philosophy is private responsibility over state intervention. Rather than telling Facebook to censor its users' pages, how about engaging in some active parenting? Educate the children, and if necessary, block access to the unsuitable material.

Finally, I'd view the Moat tribute page as a public service. It's a record of the fact that a small number of people in this country hold some offensive and misguided views. Don't censor them and pretend they don't exist - argue with them, point out the error of their ways. Instead, these Tory Scum think like this:

Heaton-Harris said the page contained anti-police statements, which should be taken down. Cameron said he was making a "very good point".

Really? Have we got to the stage when holding an opinion - however dumb - you don't like justifies censorship? I think this is very sinister. I agree with the PM that many of the opinions aired are revolting - but I think it's very very wrong to silence people with whom we disagree (other than fans of Friends: they're beyond the Pale).

Damn. I hate defending corporations against governments. That's what happens when you get an evil government, I guess.

Why I resist Facebook

I know, I'm a hypocrite: my personal details can be gleaned through a careful read of my blog and other social networking sites, like Librarything.

And yet: I still feel like I'm using those sites. No ads, for a start, and I pay for Librarything. Facebook, on the other hand, is a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up your personal details for sale to some very bad corporations, overseen by some extremely dubious individuals. And yes, I know it's useful. That's how it's successful. But it's more useful to them than it is to you.

Don't believe me? Then read this. PayPal's a sordid libertarian right plot too.

This bit of the Facebook terms and conditions is particularly Orwellian:

"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience."

I wouldn't buy anything made in North Korea and I won't participate in this enterprise either.

Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web.

"TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". 

Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. 

 I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," 

Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.

Sophisticated media - same old users.

All hail Maxi Sopo, who updated his Facebook status to tell all his friends about his new home. As you do.

Unless, of course, you're a fugitive from justice, like Mr. Sopo. He'd skipped off to Mexico. One of his friends works for the US Department of Justice. Now he's back under lock and key.

Morning all! It's ten hours since I was last in the office, meaning that I spent much longer at work than at home over the last couple of days. I'm genuinely thinking about bringing a pillow in so I can nap under the desk. I tried that over the summer and it worked very well, apart from banging my head on the underside every time someone knocked on the door.

Bow your heads

Morning. Natural Blues's grandfather has died: pop over there and sympathise in the way only caring atheists can. Shockingly, the news came via her sister's Facebook update - isn't that horrifying?

Where have all the nerds gone?

Turns out I'm late to the party. I've been blogging for about 9 months - just when everybody else is giving up, or at least very rarely posting, according to this Guardian article and the New York Times, which noted that only 7.5m of the 133m Technorati tracked were updated within 120 days. Apparently everybody's Tweeting or Facebooking.

Which is odd: both those outlets are more about social contact than content - I'd have thought there'd be room for both, unless Twitter/Facebook fans have nothing to say and the good grace not to say it at length on a blog. Don't worry though - I'm going nowhere. Either I drone on here or send my colleagues mad…

I'm off to Fleet Foxes tonight - will be intriguing to see what they're like live, as I think they're good but too tame on record.

Facebook? You're having a laugh

I posted a link to some research about Facebook and poor grades correlating. Now I notice from my Academia.edu page that someone googled my name and 'facebook'.

I had a facebook page for about two weeks over a year ago because I teach new media and thought I should know how it worked. I hated it. I would rather chop down trees with my molars like my beaver cousins than engage with such tedious, pointless nonsense again. Where's the creativity? The privacy? I can see the point if you have family and friends on different continents, but even then, you could use e-mail and Flickr for photos. Knowing whether someone is having beans or eggs for breakfast, or receiving animated pints of beer just makes me angry.

Read a book. I don't, frankly, know your motivations for reading this blog, but at least I've written something, pointed you in (hopefully) interesting directions, and am open to commentary and discussion. Facebook seems so much less creative and open: a wave rather than a handshake.

Log off RIGHT NOW, students

Now, I'm no social scientist so can't speak for the validity or otherwise of this research, and you should probably distrust any newspaper coverage of scientific research, but how's this for a directly relevant headline for my colleagues, students and friends?

STUDY FINDS LINK BETWEEN FACEBOOK USE, LOWER GRADES IN COLLEGE

Unfortunately, it all unravels quite quickly:

“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there,” said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study…

though the students who used Facebook heavily studied less and were getting lower grades than they thought. OK, it's a small and flawed piece of research, and may only suggest that people disinclined to work have a new hobby, but it's interesting anyway. Perhaps I'd be a better lecturer if I didn't blog so much. I wonder what P Z Myers thinks of that idea.

O Brave New World

I blogged recently about a Digital Media lecture on social networking I went to - and asked for your responses to the new social formations promised by the information age. One of the participants has certainly responded to our suggestions that social-networking trains us to surrender personal information to any authority, commercial and public: the gentleman behind Unluckydip.com is closing down many of his accounts.

If you're bothered, matey, read this: 'Facebook users unwittingly reveal details' and this: 'Mobiles could spell the end of privacy': basically, Google et al. are tempting you to run location-sensitive applications - so that they (and whoever is tapping in to your account) and all the world's advertisers, know where you are for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, if you think technology can be fun, you'd be right. You can now use free Guardian APIs to do odd stuff, and one fan has tracked the history and characteristics of swearing in the Guardian. According to the graph, 'wank' is much underused. To the comment boards!

All readers, please comment

I just helped out with a Digital Media lecture on social networking sites, which was fascinating. We talked about the various ways SNSs can be conceptualised, their relationship to the public sphere, and the notions of SNSs as loci for performativity.

So: please leave a note on this post (anonymously if you wish) saying whether I a) know you in person, b) consider yourselves my friend, acquaintance, colleague, stalker or other and c) whether you think there's any difference between being an online 'friend' and an offline/real-life friend. Just out of interest.

I realised during this lecture too how many SNSs of which I'm a member. While rejecting Facebook, I'm on three fencing forums including the main British Fencing one, Librarything, Flickr, Academia.edu and several others.

I'm doomed…

Over on Bad Science and on Newsnight, Ben Goldacre is ripping Susan Greenfield and another 'researcher' to shreds for the ludicrous claim, as the Daily Mail puts it, that 'Facebook = Cancer'. She says 'there's no evidence for this but…' - which echoes the infamous Chris Morris paedophilia episode in which Dr Fox makes the same claim about crabs and paedophiles sharing genes (can't embed this one, but it's at 1.15).

The basic idea behind this ludicrous story is that use of Facebook etc. = loneliness = susceptibility to disease. Fair enough. In that case, holding tutorials yesterday made me very susceptible, and my daily routine (read books, teach, read books) means that I'm a high-priority case. I demand screening! Compensation! That bastard Gutenberg and his pushers Waterstones, Bangor University, Wolverhampton University, Amazon, ABE and all the other backstreet book dealers should be strung up for this. My entire life has been predicated on George Eliot's maxim: 'the world outside books is not a happy one' - and now I discover that hiding myself away with one will kill me.

Face/Off

No-longer-cynical Ben has withdrawn from Facebook - presumably because it was a facile waste of time. His decision is reinforced, according to his account of proceedings, by the blackmail tactics employed by that august institution, which extended to flashing photos of 'friends' with the logo 'X will miss you'. But the simulation fails - Ben's married to one of his 'friends' and the rest of us will still see, know and love him - symbolic exchange rules! Screw Facebook. He's going home.