Week 1: Social Capital & the Media Landscape

Ryan Thornburg University of North Carolina

@rtburg

What You Will Learn This Week

• What is social media?

• Brief history of social media & audience engagement

• Who uses social media for news, and how?

• Key components of social journalism

• Examples of professional social journalism

In This Lecture…

• What is Social Capital?

• History of Social Media

• The Big Ideas

What is Social Capital?

• Personal connections that help people act more effectively

What is Social Capital?

bigger is not BETTER

What Creates Social Capital?

• Political Knowledge

• Trust

• Civic Engagement (voting, group membership)

• I have information that I trust. I know how to use it and I have the social network needed to activate it.

Social Networks Build

Social Capital

What is a Social Network?

What is a Social Network? • Web-based service that allows individuals to

– Construct a public or semi-public profile – Choose and display a list of other users with whom

they’re connected (either one way or mutual)

– View and traverse the connections made by others within the system

» danah boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

Next Up: History & ‘Big Ideas’

Pace of Change Increasing

1700s – Pamphleteers

1900s – Penny press

– “community correspondents”

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Pace of Change Increasing

1945 – Barry Gray put his radio mic up to the phone receiver. (Also George Roy Clough in Texas) 1945 – As We May Think: “here is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record” 1960 – launch of first all-talk radio stations in LA and St. Louis. 1968 – BBC Radio Nottingham

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Pace of Change Increasing

1969 – ARPANET – peer-to-peer 1980s -- CompuServe, FidoNet and BBs 1986 – Email Listserv 1990/1991 – hypertext, the WWW and HTML 1997-2000 – SixDegrees.com – first social network platform, create profiles, list friends and surf others’ lists

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Pace of Change Increasing

1997-2000 – SixDegrees.com 1999- Napster ; LiveJournal; Blogger/PyraLabs; BlackBerry; cross-network SMS 2002-2004 Friendster 2002 – TinyURL 2003- LinkedIn 2003-2008 - MySpace; 2003/2004 – Orkut, Hi5, Flickr, Facebook, Dodgeball 2005- YouTube, Bebo, Ning 2006- Facebook (all); Twitter 2007 – iPhone; Tumblr 2008 – TweetDeck, HootSuite 2009 - SocialFlow 2010 – Instagram; Pinterest 2012 – Vine

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The Big Ideas

1. Your audience knows more than you.

2. Conversation, Not a Lecture

3. Process, Not a Product

4. Your most loyal readers are your best distributors and best sources

5. The Strength of Weak Ties