Social Media: Classroom Ethics?

With social media become more popular, there are new regulations and ethical questions that need to be considered. Social media can be used in so many positive ways, but along with that there are plenty of negatives that go along with it. The main point I want to hit on today is the ethical topic of social media and productivity.

Because social media is relatively new, companies have to create new policies and regulations to enforce the productivity of its workforce. There have been plenty of studies done that have found a correlation between social media use and decreased productivity in a work setting. It’s obvious that if you are tweeting a funny joke instead of filing paper work you probably aren’t being ethical at your job. This seems like an obvious comment. But, the question that I want to ask is, is using social media in the classroom ethical?

I can’t tell you how many times I have been sitting in a class and not listened to a word the professor said due to me browsing on social media sites. Is it ethical to choose to not pay attention in class? In a work setting this would be considered an unethical use of time, but employees are being paid to do something. As a student, I am not being paid, so where is the line of ethical versus unethical behavior at school?

I honestly don’t have a set in stone opinion on this matter. We’re adults. We’re paying for our education. But, we also need to be respectful. Is respect ethics? I don’t know the answer to all of these questions, but it is something we need to decide for ourselves. After thinking about social media and ethics in the classroom, it made me want to be better at paying attention and not looking at Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter for an hour. It’s really up to us to decided if this is ethical behavior or not.

Click here and here for more ethical social media articles.

Managing Social Media: Aggregators

There are so many different social media platforms out there that it’s hard to keep up with all of them. For me, I go through phases. Sometime I like to stay really updated with Facebook, other days I’m all about Twitter. Trying to manage all of these accounts and stay up-to-date with all of your friends can get frustrating and tiresome, which takes out all the fun of even having these different platforms. Luckily, there are services out there that can put all of these different networking sites into one window; they’re called social media aggregators.

The whole purpose of social media aggregators is to put all of your different platforms into one place for your convenience. There is a great article that talks about how to simplify your social networking through these aggregators. This makes it easy to see what’s going on in the social media world without having to change screens every couple of minutes.

There are so many cheap and useful aggregators out there. This article tells us what they believe to be the top five aggregators on the market today.

1. Flipboard

2. Glossi

3. RebelMouse

4. Hootsuite

5.  Flavors.me

Each of these aggregators has a free basic account available for use. These aggregators would definitely benefit the typical personal social media guru, but these can also be beneficial to a company. Can you imagine trying to manage social media for a large business? This simple tool could help manage huge amounts of customer feedback through its social media platforms. By having everything in one place it would cut out a lot of non-value added time from employees’ schedules.

Overall, I think that this is a fantastic tool for managing social media accounts whether for personal or business use. Life is more enjoyable when it’s simplified, and this is just another tool to simplify our online-selves. 

Social Media: Platforms

We all use social media in some way or another. In today’s world there are so many different social media platforms available to us at the click of a button. This includes anything from YouTube to blogging. There are six main groups that these different platforms seem to fit into: blogging, collaboration, image-sharing, micro-blogging, networking, and video-sharing. This infographic shows some examples of social media platforms and where they fit within these six categories.

Platforms allow users to communicate with others and share content. It is a huge benefit that we, as social media users, take advantage of. This really is a phenomenal tool right at our fingertips. Along with all the benefits of social media, however, there are some disadvantages. This article states a variety of concerns that social media platforms create.

One concern it discussed was negative health consequences. According to a study done in 2010 by the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, extensive social media use correlated with unhealthy behavior. This unhealthy behavior was categorized as drinking, smoking, and sexual activity.

Another concern was isolation. Although these social media platforms are to bring people together, it actually can create mental, psychological, emotional, and physical problems regarding isolation. This is because users are experiencing a decreasing amount of time in face-to-face communication and more time using these platforms to communicate with peers.

The article also touched on some concerns that have yet to be studied. These include decreasing productivity, encouraging poor grammar and spelling, privacy, and cyber bullying. We don’t understand all of the negative consequences of social media use, but we also don’t understand all of the positive consequences either.

All of these social media platforms listed above can be used in a positive or negative way. It’s important to understand the way we can use all of these different platforms for our benefit. As the old saying goes, too much of anything is too much. We need to be careful of how extensively we use these platforms, but remember that they can be used to our advantage as well.