Thursday 22 August 2013

Can social media build community?     

My blog addresses just this question. 

You’re invited— full impunity—to offer any sound suggestion. 


Issue 1: ATTENTION SEEKING OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENT?
As social media users, are we doomed to being serial narcissists – trying to turn our ordinary lives into a visual and verbal feast others can only envy?

Daily, our so-called friends on Facebook present their gourmet meals, concert tickets and glamour purchases for our attention. See Ian McManus’s discussion on the way Facebook nourishes this unhealthy way of life.

But the same articles highlight our deep need for belonging, and for integration into multiple communities.

Can social media deliver this? Can we use social media to create, join, and enhance online communities – and encourage others to become members?
With your help, this blog will attempt to answer these questions

Dear fellow students, here's a link 

Or two that help to make you think:

- the research behind it – why we want to belong: 

see

  and the need for community that propels people to join Facebook, as I recently posted in Ian's discussion:
see

Share your thoughts, and help build my community on building community!

POST 2
thanks for the encouragement as this blog begins. Continuing the theme of acknowledgement, I have been examining websites and blogs of support groups, to examine the way people's experiences can be validated via social media, giving them the sense that they are members of a community of fellow sufferers. Look, for example, at the comments in this blog on the experience of miscarriage. What does thier language tell us? what emotions are they expressing? Is there a common thread in the nature of their comments?
http://themiscarriageblog.blogspot.com.au/2009/02/other-type-of-two-week-wait.html