Who’s Social in the Media?

Humans are inherently social beings according to Frances Moore Lappe’s underlying thesis. But we don’t have to buy the book to understand that. History is littered with the attempts that humans make to breach the gullies we create through travel technology. From smoke signals to high speed internet access, communication technologies are about making a connection. What humans are good at is creating a distance problem and then solving it with communication tools.

Since this is a social media blog (yes, I realise the irony) it seems appropriate to talk about the ways we like to make connections via social media. At least communication technologies are aptly named – ‘telephone’ was a particularly sweet attempt to hide the need for human interaction inherent in the device, ‘far voice’ – and give you a sense of what to expect from them.

New Age Word of Mouth

I can’t say that I was particularly interested in digital marketing until very recently, being that I consider myself to be a journalism purist. However, learning Social Media Optimization seems to be part and parcel of new media and so I thought I might dedicate yet another post to the idea.

Long before Twitter began its sponsored tweets, I received unsolicited messages about various (American) products from companies that obviously search tweets looking for key words to react to. (This has sharply decreased since Twitter introduced the Geographical location tool.)

The Way we See the World

For the last week or so I have been conducting informal empirical research into the ways in which various organisations use social networking to spread their messages. It's been an interesting and exhausting experience, attending the SEACC and ACCESS Habitable Planet Workshop at Rhodes University.



The idea behind the workshop is to provide the delegates with knowledge of Earth Systems Science and a basic introduction to climate change and the various representations thereof.