Tweet Critically: SLC Steps Up Social Media Game
“Social media is integrated into our daily lives, but we don't often pause to think about its impact. In this class, we critically engage with the media to examine its capabilities for collaboration, potentials, and drawbacks. In writing online, students are challenged reveal the identity(s) attached to their work and to share their ideas with the ever expanding online community.” - Collette SoSnowy
You Are What You Tweet is a course focused on the “publicly-private and privately-public” nature of social media. Through posts, tweets, status updates, images, and videos, we immerse ourselves in the digital world and dissolve the boundaries between online and offline. How do we choose to present ourselves online? Are they accurate representations? How are the stories we tell online different from the ones we tell in person or write down? With so many aspects of our lives made public, do we risk exposing ourselves?
Our readings draw from ideas rooted in specific topics, like certain illnesses that have built communities online, to broader subjects like sexuality. This has included literature about feminism on Wikipedia to virtual closets, i.e. the way social media driven networks may or may not keep facets of our identities hidden from the public. The readings are derived from academic literature and popular journalism, with a focus on concepts of identity, self-presentation, social relationships, and privacy.
This is all fine and dandy, but how does You Are What You Tweet plan to give SLC a fresh take on traditional conferencing and launch the student body’s work into modernity?
Answer: conference 2.0. We all love the work we slave over during conference season and we are rightfully proud of what we have created. The most tragic part of our conferencing system is that most of the time, our professors are the only ones who get to fully appreciate the work we have all individually created.
Through the use of social media, You Are What You Tweet employs a new strategy to conferencing: our conferences are submitted in weekly 750 word blog posts which are then open to the class, and the public, for comments and critiques. As a class, we review each others’ work and offer feed back that serves to improve the depth of our projects. We are finally getting our hard work out there in the world; the goal is to make our conference blogs google searchable, broadening the SLC community and getting student work noticed.
None of this would be possible without the help of Emily Sharp, SLC class of 2004. Emily is our soundboard for all things related to our personal websites, which are linked to our MySlc blogs. Her technical solutions play a major role in the development of our social media identity(s) and our ability to share our work with each other and the community at large.
Now, let’s get real. What do we all ultimately need, JOBS. When student work becomes google searchable, our conference work becomes attached to our names in a big, public way...what better way to market ourselves for the real world than to show employers (or anyone else who might be looking) what we’ve got.
Social media platforms are an integral part of our professional and personal lives, whether we like it or not. If we can effectively employ critical strategy in the online world, we are one step closer to controlling the way we are perceived as people...and perception is everything.
Want to learn more? Follow our class hashtag: #tweetSLC
Tweet your questions: @YouTweetSLC
Prefer the old-fashioned? Email our professor, Collette at: Csosnowy@gm.slc.edu