Is the Community a Medium? Is “That’s Me!” the Message? The Story Of #Placevent: We Are Using Social Media to Hack the Academy
Abstract
University students attending socio-humanistic classes are frequently demanding an actual opportunity to apply their digital skills, their informal education and their innovative ideas about communications to local companies and public bodies. Their expectation is to find or to create job opportunities in a depressing national framework. In January 2013 we started a “Workshop for events planning and students’ placement”, quickly replaced with the hashtag #placevent. We run a research/action plan observing and collecting students’ self and community representation, using both digitalethnographic methods and assigning them problem-solving tasks. We suppose that ritual practices of the Internet interaction are developing, although these have not been codified, because in any community we can observe a process supporting and enhancing shared social meanings and identities. Additionally, we found that individuals may belong to and identify with more than one community contemporaneously and serially, changing affiliations with great fluidity. The main result of this activity is that students feel empowered by witnessing their belonging to a group promoting innovation through practices of communication, as well as by overlapping and matching networks of relationship and widening the community or engaging new shareholders.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
AGCOM. 2013. Relazione annuale 2013 sull’attività svolta e sui programmi di lavoro. Napoli: Autorità Garante per le Comunicazioni.
AGCOM. 2012. Annual report 2012. Lines of intervention and prospects for developments. 2011 activities and results summing-up the 3-year mandate. Roma. Telecom.
Altman, Irwin. 1975. The environment and social behaviour: Privacy, personal space, territory, and crowing. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Bandura, Albert. 2001. “Social cognitive theory of mass communication”, in Media Psychology 3: 265-299. doi: 10.1207/S1532785XMEP0303_03.
Bazzarin, Valentina, and Pina Lalli. 2012. “Collective tellers. Web collaboration: two examples”, in Multi-faceted nature of collaboration in contemporary world, edited by T. B. Valic, D. Modic, U. Lamut, 116-129. London: Vega Press Ltd.
Bazzarin, Valentina, and Pina Lalli. 2011. “The Medium is the Community: A pilot laboratorial activity at University of Bologna to tell and promote the city”, in McLuhan Galaxy Conference. Understanding Media, Today, edited by Ciastellardi, Matteo, Cristina Miranda de Almeida, and Carlos Scolari, 323-330. Barcelona: Editorial Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
Bazzarin, Valentina, Marco Scarcelli, and Stefano Ghirlanda. 2011. “Caribbean Pirates or Robin Hood’s crowd? Perceptions of Illegal Behaviors and warning signals in Internet seas and forests comparing American and Italian adolescents’ perspective”, in McLuhan Galaxy Conference. Understanding Media, Today., edited by Ciastellardi, Matteo, Cristina Miranda de Almeida, and Carlos Scolari, 56-59. Barcelona: Editorial Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
Boyd, Danah, and Nicole Ellison. 2008. “Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship”, in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1): 210-230.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The rise of the network society, Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel, and Gustavo Cardoso. 2006. The Network society: from knowledge to policy. Washington: Center for Transatlantic relations.
Child, Jeffrey T., and Esther A. Agyeman-Budu. 2010. “Blogging privacy management rule development: The impact of self-monitoring skills, concern for appropriateness, and blogging frequency”, in Computers in Human Behavior 26: 957-963. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2010.02.009.
Child, Jeffrey T., Paul. M. Haridakis, and Sandra Petronio. 2012. “Blogging privacy rule orientations, privacy management, and content deletion practices: The variability of online privacy management activity at different stages of social media use”, in Computers in Human Behavior 28: 1859-1872. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2012.05.004.
Child, Jeffrey T., Judy C. Pearson, and Sandra Petronio. 2009. “Blogging, communication, and privacy management: Development of the blogging privacy management measure”, in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60: 2079-2094. doi: 10.1002/asi.21122.
Evans, Elizabeth. 2011. Transmedia television: audiences, new media and daily life. New York: Routledge.
Florida, Richard. 2011. The Rise of the Creative Class. Rivisited. New York: Basic Books.
Gitelman, Lisa. 1999. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jenkins, Henry, 2008. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21St Century available online: http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0¬A3E0-4B89¬AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF. Last accessed January 2014.
Johnson, Norman A. 2009. “Anger and flaming in computer-mediated negotiations among strangers”, in Decision Support Systems 46 (3): 660-672. doi: 10.1016/j.dss.2008.10.008.
Kaplan, Andreas. M., and Michael Haenlein. 2010. “Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media.” Business Horizon 53: 59-68.
Katz, Elihu, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch. 1973. “Uses and gratifications research.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 37: 509-523. doi: 10.1086/268109.
Kietzmann, Jan H., Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, and Bruno S. Silvestre, 2011. “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media.” Business Horizons, 54(3): 241-251.
Levy, Pierre. 2000. Collective Intelligence: Man’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. New York: Perseus.
Livingstone, Sonia. 2003. The Changing Nature and Uses of Media Literacy. Working paper. London: London School of Economics.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding media; the extensions of man, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lampe, Cliff, Nicole Ellison, and Charles Steinfield. 2006. “A Face(book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing”, in Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on computer supported cooperative work, 167-170. New York: ACM Press. doi: 10.1145/1180875.1180901.
Lampe, Cliff, Nicole Ellison, and Charles Steinfield. 2007. “A familiar Face(book): Profile elements as signals in an online social network”, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 435-444. New York: ACM Press. doi: 10.1145/1240624.1240695.
Lampe, Cliff, Nicole Ellison, and Charles Steinfield. 2008. “Changes in use and perception of Facebook.” in Proceedings of the 2008 conference on computer-supported cooperative work, 721-730. New York: ACM Press, doi: 10.1145/ 1460563.1460675.
Lampe, Cliff, Rick Wash, Alcides Velasquez, and Elif Ozkaya. 2010. “Motivations to participate in online communities.” In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems, 1927-1936. New York: ACM, doi: 10.1145/ 1753326.1753616.
Papacharissi, Zizi, and Alan M. Rubin. 2000. “Predictors of Internet use.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 44: 175-196. doi: 10.1207/s15506878jobem4402_2.
Papacharissi, Zizi, and Andrew Mendelson. 2007. “An exploratory study of reality appeal: Uses and gratifications of reality TV shows.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 51: 355-370. doi: 10.1080/08838150701307152.
Papacharissi, Zizi, and Andrew Mendelson. 2011. “Toward a new(er) sociability: Uses, gratifications and social capital on Facebook”, in Media perspectives for the 21st century, edited by Papathanassopoulos S., 212-230. New York: Routledge.
Park, Namsu, Kerk F. Kee, and Sebastián Valenzuela. 2009. “Being immersed in social networking environment: Facebook groups, uses and gratifications, and social outcomes” in CyberPsychology & Behavior 12: 729-735. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2009.0003.
Putnam, Robert. D. 1993. “The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life.” The American Prospect 13: 35-42.
Putnam, Robert. D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Tambini, Damian. 1999. “New Media and Democracy: The Civic Networking Movement.” New Media & Society 1: 305-329. doi:10.1177/14614449922225609
Treré, Emiliano, and Valentina Bazzarin. 2012. “Anatomy of the Italian Web TV ecosystem. Current issues and future challenges”, in Digital Communication Polices in the Information Society Promotion Stage, edited by De Nicoli and Sousa, 87-110. Minho: Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS), University of Minho.
Treré, Emiliano, and Valentina Bazzarin. 2011. “Exploring Italian Micro Web TVs: how high-Tech bricoleurs redefine audiences?” ESSACHESS - Journal for Communication Studies 4: 35-37.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7358/ijtl-2015-001-bazz
International Journal of Transmedia Literacy (IJTL)
Registered by Tribunale di Milano (22/10/2014 n. 328)
Online ISSN 2465-2261 - Print ISSN 2465-227X
Editor in Chief: Matteo Ciastellardi
Managing Editor: Giovanna Di Rosario
Managing Committee: Matteo Andreozzi, Stefano Calzati, Ugo Eccli, Cristina Miranda de Almeida.
Board Committee: Alan Albarran (University of North Texas, United States), Rogério Barbosa Da Silva (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil), Giovanni Baule (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Laura Borràs Castanyer (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain), Derrick de Kerckhove (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California, United States), Marsha Kinder (University of Southern California, United States), Raine Koskimaa (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), George Landow (Brown University, United States), Paul Levinson (Fordham University, United States), Asún López-Varela (Universidad Complutense, Spain), Lev Manovich (City University of New York, United States), Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States), Marcos Novak (UCLA - University of California, Los Angeles, United States), Massimo Parodi (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), Bruce W. Powe (York University, Canada), Kate Pullinger (Bath Spa University, United Kingdom), Marie-Laure Ryan (Indipendent Scholar), Alexandra Saemmer (Université Paris 8, France), Carlos Scolari (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain), Susana Tosca (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Alessandro Zinna (Université Toulouse II, France)
© 2001 LED Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto