Internet and web – Page 156

The Thanksgiving holiday and an over-indulgence of turkey, football and college basketball has thrown off my circadian rhythms. So I’m a day late with this week’s Friday Five. Technically, I should’ve taken the week off, but this particular topic is timely, as it relates to the Advanced PR Institute I’ll be helping out with on Dec. 3-4. (“Developing a Technology-Savvy Communications Approach” is the theme for this institute, and if you would like to attend, there’s still time to register if you hurry.) Anyway, my co-faculty and I discussed some pre-reading for the conference participants to help bring them up to speed on the impact of new technology on PR, and we came up with this list of materials:

1. Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing, by Lois Kelly. (Executive summary available online. So is my review of the book.)

2. The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The whole book is now available online.

3. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. (I also reviewed this book.)

4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott. The introduction and chapter 1 are available online (PDF).

5. Now it’s your turn. What other book about technology, social networking, the web 2.0 world, etc., would be on your list of recommended reading for higher ed PR folks? Leave your recommendations in the comments below and I’ll be sure to share these recommendations with the folks in Austin on Dec. 3-4.

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Race and class may have something to do with how people select social networking sites, and may mirror real-world race and class issues, a recent study suggests. As reported on the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, the study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, “argues that a student’s race, ethnicity, and upbringing play important parts in predicting which online social networks he or she will join.”

The report, “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites,” by Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, summarizes the results of Hargittai’s surveys of more than 1,000 students at the University of Illinois at Chicago about their social network preferences. Among the findings: White students favor Facebook, hispanics prefer MySpace, and “Asian and Asian-American students prefer Facebook, but they also use other social-networking sites, like Xanga and Friendster, that are less popular with other ethnic groups.”

Class also plays a role in social network selection. “Students whose parents have lower levels of schooling are likely to use MySpace, while students whose parents have more formal education lean toward Facebook. And students who live at home are much less likely to frequent social networks than are their classmates who live on the campus.”

What should campus officials take away from the study? Ms. Hargittai says the results show that online social networks evoke real-world communities and demographics. “Online actions and interactions cannot be seen as tabula rasa activities, independent of existing offline identities,” she writes. “Rather, constraints on one’s everyday life are reflected in online behavior, thereby limiting—for some more than others—the extent to which students from different backgrounds may interact with students not like themselves.”

It’s interesting, but my high school classmates who are into social networking tend to reflect this class breakdown. (There aren’t many of us into social networking; we graduated in 1978, after all.) Most of us were from lower-middle class backgrounds, and we’ve gravitated to MySpace. A few of us are on Facebook, too. Some of us are on LinkedIn, too (more my college classmates than high school). So maybe the class divisions play out in social networking even beyond the college years.

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