Summary and Discussions on the use of Social Media (In defence of TWITTER)
You are invited to make whatever "corrections" and/or changes you feel appropriate!
Introduction
This is a summary and discussion of the email discussions on social media that took place on the ASPIRE email distribution list. It represents the views of the discussion participants as seen through the eyes of the author
Discussion
The view that EMAIL was the most appropriate channel for discussing "The Future of the R&E Internet" was strongly supported by a large number of participants on the aspire@terena.org email distribution list. One might suspect that due to the email channel being used for the discussion, this was hardly surprising.
Objections voiced included a suggestion that social media channels are transient (here today, replaced by something new tomorrow) and do not leave a record of the discussions as is available through the use of an email archive. These statements are a matter of opinion and with 750 million users of Facebook (launched 2004) and 200 million using TWITTER (launched 2006) and open to debate with supporters of mail having the benefit of some history with SMTP having its roots back in the implementation of "The Mail Box" in 1971. To say that social media do not leave a record is untrue. Business is increasingly using social media analytics to mine data from such channels. All of the tweets mentioning @ASPIRE4sight are accessible through the twitter interface.
A criticism of TWITTER made in the discussion is the limitation of 140 characters per tweet. This seems to rather miss the point that TWITTER provides a mechanism for delivering alerts which can if necessary contain a link to a more comprehensive source of information. Bill St Arnaud is an excellent example of this type of use of TWITTER making many tweets including links to his blog and information elsewhere. TWITTER also provides the possibility to explore a particular theme without prior subscription and to stop looking at topics without the need for prior subscription.
Another criticism of social media made on the list was that many such channels exist: blogs; Facebook; TWITTER to name just three and that this choice will lead to fragmentation of community discussion. The use of "mashups" such has been for TNC however combines the richness of streams from different media channels together in one place.
I was very happy to see the "religious wars" about the most appropriate channel to use, but in the final analysis, what matters most is the communication; exchange and continued availability of the content and this was mentioned quite strongly in the discussions.
I believe we should embrace all the available channels (including email) and use the most appropriate for what we are trying to do. Let's not miss the opportunities that social media can bring (reaching a much larger audience very quickly) through an inability to adapt or unwillingness to adopt the new and unknown.
John DYER
ASPIRE Project Manager
2 August 2011
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