Newhouse Social Media // Curated by colleagues from the 2012 MAYmester PRL530 Social Media for Public Relations class in the Public Relations Master's Program at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University.
I love Frontline. They produce some of the best journalism and each episode is always on a strikingly relevant topic.
Their February 2nd episode digital_nation is no different, which poses the question, "Is our 24/7 wired world causing us to lose as much as we've gained?"
In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, Frontline presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world... [and] embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations.
You can watch the full 90-minute episode online now for free at PBS or Hulu.
Today's learning and questions: As many people have noted for this week's comment, I also just last night became overwhelmed with the realization in class of how our present and future are changing before our eyes because of social media. When I was home over winter break I was watching old home videos with my sister from the mid 1990's and my dad came up on the screen excited to show our first family computer to the VHS recorder. It had a green and black screen. In 1996, my family got our first AOL e-mail accounts. Now, BARELY 15 years later, the world has changed right before our eyes. I can't help but think that if that much change could occur in a decade plus a few years, what is coming in the next decade?
It is an exciting thought, but also a scary one, possibly fueled by my horror at the recent Bruce Willis movie "Surrogates". But in all seriousness, where do we go from here? At what point does online media become saturated in its usefulness and cross the line into being a problem? Years from now will we even work at an office? Will our children go to an actual school and will we ever talk to people on the phone? The scary thought is that the notion that in a few years all of these parts of our daily routines will not be the same doesn't seem like extremely out-there idea.
And what about safety? For some reason I get the idea that many murderers, rapists and other criminals aren't necessarily up on their social media skills, but what happens when they are? I have seen many people on Twitter than have their location automatically attached to their tweets through cellphone GPS. What happens when a young girl babysitting unthinkingly tweets "Babysitting until midnight, the kids are asleep and im so bored!" with the GPS location attached and the information is in the hands of the wrong people?
Just a few questions to think about.
