Alex Priest is a student at American University in Washington, D.C. studying marketing, public communications and statistics. He has wide-ranging interests but a particular passion for social media, mobile technology, politics, and marketing. With experience on capital hill, in nonprofits, PR, marketing, and activism, he’s seen social media and mobile technology used in a variety of contexts and is constantly looking forward to the future. Read his personal blog here: www.alexpriest.com/
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Remember what life was like before Facebook and Twitter? Ya know, back in 2005?
I remember it well–despite my young age–because, as most will probably agree, five years simply isn’t that long. But apparently Harrisburg University has forgotten what life was like before social media, so they’re planning a social media blackout for next week, banning all social media services on the campus.
Eric Darr, provost at Harrisburg University and the genius behind the idea was quoted in Inside Higher Ed, “I was frankly amazed… I thought, ‘How do you live like this?’ It struck me to think, ‘What if all this wasn’t there?’”
I’ve got news for you, Mr. Darr: we all know what it was like when it wasn’t here. Facebook has been around since 2004, but didn’t really take off until 2006. Twitter was founded in 2006, but didn’t become widely used until 2009. These are remarkably recent advancements in the way we communicate, but Mr. Darr seems to think we’ve all forgotten what life was like pre-social media.
There’s a reason we use these services today–because we like them. Because they have utility. Because we learn from them, teach with them, communicate and organize with them. We share news and multimedia, information about our lives, and connect with new and old friends alike. We don’t need to be forced to remember what life was like before we had social media, because we all know already. We just like it better now.
What if, hypothetically, a university wanted to “remember what life was like” before the printed word? What if a university shut the doors on its library and banned textbooks for a week, just as an experiment?
That’d be a giant step backward, right? It’d be an outrage, a travesty in learning, a tragic and sick experiment in higher education.
Forcing a “social media blackout” isn’t that different. Less serious, certainly, but still very much a step back and probably a giant waste of time, causing unnecessary frustration for the students and faculty at Harrisburg University.
Instead of pulling an inane stunt like this, Mr. Darr, how about you challenge your university to move forward, instead? What if you were to challenge your students and faculty to communicate using only social media? What if you were to challenge them to give up all the old means of communication?
Think about it. That gives them just as much of an opportunity to reflect on how they use modern communication, and how much they still likely rely on traditional means as well. And it also forces the university to approach social media more aggressively, using it in the classroom, treating it as less of a distraction and more of a resource for learning.
That’s an experiment I’d like to see.
