This is from the Victorian Government’s Department of Justice in Australia:
It’s a pretty decent way of explaining your social media policy, or at the least incentivising staff to go and read it. Credit to them for making it public too – why wouldn’t you? (I’d be interested to know if it was produced in-house though).
(hat tip @vshiwani via @picklejar)
From the US, Emily Chapman at The Owlfred Chronicles has a post on university social media presence, and suggests that universities are often slow to embrace that whole malarkey :
Universities can be slow to embrace social media, and it’s to their detriment. Not only does having a weak social media presence open up a school to looking behind-the-times–it allows students to control a school’s image online. Unfortunately, the students who shout (or tweet) the loudest are often less-than-happy with a school.
Social media can be a strange new world for university staff not used to a generation of students for whom going without Facebook for a week is a huge struggle. However, if a university doesn’t stay on top of its image, its students will step in to fill that void–and they may not convey the message a university wants affiliated with its name. By taking advantage of pre-existing Twitter accounts and a Facebook-savvy student body, schools can easily increase their social media presence with minimal effort.
Along with the fact that if you don’t have social media profiles, someone could make a joke one which receives a lot of unwanted attention, this is one of the most important reason for universities to have a presence. Having said this, it’s a largely negative justification: a defensive position against others on social media.
I easily spend more time on Vimeo than on YouTube, thanks to the sheer quality of the videos uploaded. Just a couple I’ve come across in particular:
‘The Dark Side of the Lens’, by Astray, is mesmirising, especially for someone who misses the coast as much as I do. It’s one of those people you look at and think ‘I can’t believe they do that for a living’.
‘Wanderlust’ shows travels around Central America, New Zealand and Europe, and surprisingly, the unusual background track works well. The sections on Venice – including one shot which must have been taken from the exact same spot I took this photo from – beg you to visit.
No collection of Vimeo videos would be complete without a contribution from Tom Lowe. Simply stunning stuff, in particular with his capture of the Milky Way.
I experienced, last weekend, the confusion so familiar to people in 2010. Millions across the country, either late into the night or early the morning, will have struggled with this conundrum at an hour when their full attention on any task is hard. It is: does my phone turn the hour back automatically or not?
In my case, my Iphone did – though I assumed it didn’t, creating a whole heap of early-morning fun.
Subsequently, I have come across the ‘Light Later’ campaign, run by the 10:10 group. Their proposal is to:
The idea is simple: we shift the clocks forward by one hour throughout the entire year. We would still put the clocks forward in spring and back in autumn, but we would have moved an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening, when more of us are awake to enjoy it.
It’s a model also known as ‘Single Double Summer Time’, which it’s at all a confusing phrase. It’s a brilliant idea, and one I absolutely support. There are a whole host of reasons, which the campaign explain, my favourites being:
A measure like that, which can reduce carbon emissions, save lives, and help the health of nation, is an ingenious and long overdue proposal. Think about it – is there really that much use of having more light in the morning? A great deal of the population is traveling to work, school etc – something they would be doing even if it was dark. So few of us enjoy our mornings anyway, much better to have that extra daylight after 5pm when we can use if freely.
Our measurement of time is for the most part, entirely artificial anyway, so mucking about with isn’t a problem.
On a personal note, I see it providing several benefits. The fact that I now leave work in the dark is hardly an inspiring feeling. I’m much less inclined to cycle after work once it’s dark, or do anything except stay indoors.
I have however, failed to convince 2 of my 3 colleagues in the office of the idea, nor my housemate, who seemed to interpret the fact that nations can change their time willy nilly as nothing less than a threat to civilisation itself. Most difficult was trying to explain how it would save on carbon emissions, so I post the campaign’s explanation below:
The first reason the change would save energy and cut carbon is simple: by more closely matching the times when most of us are awake with the times that the sun is shining, we would reduce our daily need for electric lighting. Think about a summer day: few people are awake at, say, 5am when the sun comes up, but most homes have their lights on at 9.30pm when the sun goes down.
The second reason that shifting the clocks would save energy and carbon is a little more complicated. When we all use electricity at the same time this results in even more fuel consumption and carbon emissions than usual, because the least efficient power stations get fired up to meet the extra ‘peak’ in demand. At present, the peak demand period for electricity each day – the period between 4pm to 6.30pm, when most of us arrive home from work, school or university – coincides with nightfall for much of the year. So as well as switching on the kettle and the television when we get home, we’re also switching all the lights on at the same time, making that peak in demand even higher than it would have been already.
So what can you do – you can pledge support on Facebook – what modern campaign would be without it – or write to your MP to support the idea. Surely there is no harm in at least trialing it.
It seems also a weekly occurence, in the echo chamber that is talking about social media on social media platforms, to declare the ‘death’ of one network or another, due to stagnation, internal politics or ‘the next big thing’.
Facebook and Twitter are the main two everyone mentions, and tend to stumble a bit afterwards when thinking of any others. It might be because no others have made it into the ‘public’ discourse, that place where they can still be pronounced slowly by serious radio presenters as a bit ‘quirky’ but conversely, where they also allow people to create whole careers and marketing campaigns around them.
Rather than explore where social networks exist in the wider public mindset, I thought I’d explore my current experience of a few.
After university, and the almost certain physical disintegration of a network of friends moving to different places, the assumption is that Facebook provides a more permanent form of connection. But in fact, without the face-to-face conversation, some of the reason for interacting disappears – follow up links to websites mentioned, photos from events, jokes based on a talk the night before.
I was part of the mini-generation, if you will, which began using Facebook almost as soon as it was around in the UK, in my case in 2006. It became, undoubtedly, an integral part of being a student at University, playing a role in every social event, student union election and a topic of conversation itself. Yet now, with that network being dispersed, its purpose is diminished rather than increased. Not to mention, it seems increasingly absurd that I can know all the information I do about people I haven’t seen in five years since school. Is there not a chance that a static social network, on which all connections appear on a level playing field, in fact prevents us from shedding the skin of a past role – as a sixth former or as a student?
I almost feel in awe, and slightly jealous, of David Rowan, UK Editor for Wired, who recently explained why he remains absent from Facebook, and more broadly his refusal to engage fully in all aspects of social networks. His reasons included:
He also highlights a recent study:
young internet users themselves are increasingly wary of the social networks’ use of their private data. A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project — a decent sample of some 2,253 Americans — found that 44 percent of Generation Y (aged 18 to 29) now limit their online personal information, compared with 33 percent of internet users between ages 30 to 49. And three-quarters of younger social-networkers have adjusted their privacy settings to limit what they share.
The story took one news item — the announced shutdown of one RSS reader, Bloglines — and extrapolated that news into the entire RSS universe. And so the RSS reader, the humble workhorse behind the scenes of so much shared content, became the latest web tool to fall victim to the [InsertNameOfSocialMediaToolHere] is dead meme mill.
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