The Merits of Being Totally Digital

The article "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy " delves into the issues of social media and how it has the power to both enrich and detract from our lives.

Some of the other articles I have read give great ideas to keep students interested.  Technologies like twittermap and activities such as making up a story through tweets are great ideas for reaching this new generation of students in a way they will understand and appreciate.  It puts a new spin on the creative process to give students a boundary of 140 characters or less.  The resourcefulness needed to develop a character or whole work of prose under those conditions would make students really dig deep and enjoy it too.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have made the world a little more reachable to both students and teachers.  I, especially like the ideas of students having access to teachers across the globe right at their fingertips.  It allows students to learn a new way of networking that can benefit them, later in life.  Social media provides efficient tools that would add to  student education, but there are somethings it cannot replace.

While I agree that Twitter provides fun and interesting new ways to teach, I feel that it can easily displace the needed rigors of working to foster "real" relationships.  Some even commented, in the article, that they spend so much time on twitter that they fear losing the ability to relate to people in real life.  Scientists point out that all these "weak ties" can stretch a person so emotionally thin, that they will not have the energy to put into a real relationship.  Just like learning to like twitter, for older people, if you take it one at a time, the tweets are banal; however, if you look at the whole picture, you have an interesting display of life and art mixed together.  If you have a few put a little effort into a "weak tie," then it is barely noticeable, but take that same amount of energy for 2,000 ties and you are all out of love to give.  Spending small change can easily add up to big bucks and an empty wallet.

I remember this car commercial, where a young woman is at home on the computer and breaking the fourth wall talked about how sad and pitiful her parents were because they had less than 20 friends on Facebook.  Meanwhile, her parents are walking back to their car with their friends after a day of mountain biking.  The parents are probably closer to their few friends than there daughter is to the 200 Facebook friends she is so proud of having.  The commercial cuts between the parents having fun outdoors while the daughter sits alone in the kitchen in front of the computer, pitying them.  To me, this seemed to grasp one of the downsides to social media.  Do you have friends or do you have "friends."  As Boyd was quoted in the article "They can observe you, but it's not the same as knowing you."

Yes, I do think social media has a place in the classroom and the lives of an ever-changing world that is getting smaller by the second.  However, I do think it should be balanced with methods and activities that take students away from screen, for a time.