Is social media messing up today’s teens?  Adults, it seems, love to pontificate on the benefits and ills of emerging internet-based communication platforms  on young people. But how often do they bother to listen to the teenagers they claim to be concerned about?

Well, this is their chance.

Over this past week, the members of my daughter’s YouTube collaboration channel Fellowship of the Ning have recorded their thoughts on camera, and provided a candid and personal perspective of how social media is affecting their lives.

This is essential viewing for anyone who speaks or writes about teenagers and social media.

There’s quite a lot to get through – you need to set aside some quality time to watch all the videos (remembering of course that each video maker set aside an awful lot more quality time to make these for you to watch).  And you have to remember that these are teens talking about their own concerns in their own voice to their peers – you are a guest in their world. You also have to remember that this group only represent a subset of teen internet users.

Nevertheless, the videos paint a very different picture of social media and teens that you get from many supposedly expert commentators.

By way of background, last week, my daughter Jade posted this short video, asking the channel’s subscribers to share their thoughts on social media:

She asked three specific questions:

1. Why is social media important to you?
2. How has it changed you or your life?
3. What is your response to these articles:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-facebook-teens-20110806,0,7575848.story

[I pointed her toward the articles and talked with her about the questions, but that was pretty much the limit of my involvement here]

Over the next week, her five collaborators responded, each with their own unique style and perspective – followed by Jade’s own response.

I have my favorites of course. But without exception, each one leaves me humbled by the honesty, insight and sophistication expressed.  No-one – no-one – who talks with assumed authority on social media and teenagers should do so without first viewing these, and the many other videos out there made by teens for teens on what is important to them, and why.

Sam (USA)

Ella (UK)

Andrew (Canada)

Francisco (Argentina)

Kieran (UK)

Jade (USA, with a UK bias)

If you know of other YouTube videos of teens talking to teens about social media, please post in the comments. Thanks!

Update 8/25/11 – Link to LA Times piece now working!

Yesterday I have the rather odd experience of opening the media140 meeting on the impact of social technologies on science communication in Brisbane Australia – from my basement in Michigan, USA.  Skyping into the meeting, it was hard to tell whether I was making sense, or just taking the title of the keynote too literally and talking a load of Jackson Pollocks.  Fortunately, based on the ensuing questions and the tweets (following the hashtag #media140) things didn’t go down too badly.

From previous experience with Skype though, things might not have gone so smoothly.  Which is why I recorded a short video backup of the talk over the weekend – just in case.

And having done so, I thought I might as well post it here.  It’s not as immediate as I suspect the live talk was.  But on the plus side, it is a lot shorter!

ps – for those watching the media140 talk (which was broadcast from the family library), here’s an interrupted view of the books you were trying to make out behind me

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati under the slightly provocative title “Small Gods and the Art of Technology Innovation”.  The talk is now available on-line (slides and audio at least) – and viewable below – through the excellent work of the folk at CAC.

Rather sneakily, I used the opportunity to talk to a (mainly) lay audience about risk science in the 21st century – did I get away with it I wonder…?

Back in April I posted data on three indicators of “influence” for ~400 science-focused Twitter users – based on David Bradley’s list of “Scientific Twitter Friends.” Intrigued to see how these Tweeps’ influence evolves over time, I will be updating these data periodically.

In this first update (aided and abetted by @ruthseeley – thanks Ruth!), the overall number of followers (both primary and secondary) of the SciTweep cohort has increased over the past two months – as would be expected given increasing interest in Twitter.  There is the slightest hint of an increase in overall Social Capital. But this is marginal, suggesting that SciTweeps are not deviating substantially from Twitter-wide trends in increasing followers.

These data are available on Many Eyes to play around with (see the screencast below for tips on how to mess around with the bubble chart).  You can even download the original data here and dive deeper into it…

The dataset is reasonably large and no doubt holds a multitude of insights for those dedicated to mining it (although with only two date points, it is still lacking in depth).  But rather than go into deep analysis here, I thought I would restrain myself and simply focus on the distribution of the three indicators amongst the group, and changes over the past two months. (Details on the three indicators of “influence” are covered in the April SciTweet blog).

In looking at these figures, please bear in mind that the group of ~400 Tweeps is one of convenience – it does not represent all current science Tweeps, and indeed overlooks some key figures in the Twitter community.  But for the purpose of following a group of science-focused Twitter users over time, it serves its purpose well.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus number of followers (horizontal). Watch out for the logarithmic x-axis!

Looking at SciTweep followers, there has been a shift in the modal number of followers from 133 in April to 422 in June – although these figures are approximate given the step-size used.  Clearly though, there’s been an increase in the number of people following most of our SciTweets.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus number of secondary followers (horizontal). Watch out for the logarithmic x-axis!

There has been an overall increase in secondary followers over the past two months, although not sufficient to lead to a definite increase in modal value in the plot above.

Number of SciTweeps (vertical) versus social capital (horizontal). Watch the logarithmic x-axis!

The social capital distribution has barely shifted over the past two months.  As this is based on the ratio of a SciTweep’s secondary to primary followers, it provides a measure of how the SciTweeps are faring compared to the rest of Twitterdom.  A significant shift to the left or right would suggest the cohort of science Tweets loosing or gaining influence compared to other Tweeps.  Given the similarity between the two distributions above though, it seems that the SciTweeps are holding their own, but not showing appreciably different changes in influence compared to other tweeps.

Finally, I thought it worth posting a quick screencast of how to navigate round the bubble charts on Many Eyes.  Enjoy:

Update 6/23/09:  Bubble Charts updated with correct data for @maverickny (formerly – and erroneously – listed as @maverick_NY)

Notes:

The data shown here are derived using Twinfluence.

Where the number of second order followers topped out on Twinfluence, it was capped at 30,000,000

My thanks to David Bradley for compiling the list of “Scientific Twitter Friends” in the first place.  This is largely a self-selected list of science-types on Twitter, and in no way represents the full scientific community there.  But it does provide a highly useful cohort of people who profess to have a science-perspective, and can be tracked over time.  This series of analyses uses the list as it stood mid-April.

A quick word on the plots:  These are a rather crude way of presenting the data, but provide a good qualitative indication of distributions and trends.  The number of science Tweeps represented by each step in the plots represents the Tweeps with primary followers, secondart followers or social capital lying within the range of the step.  As the horizontal axis uses a logarithmic scale, the range of values covered by the steps increases dramatically going from left to right.  As the data are roughly logarithmically distributed, this makes visualizing, comparing and analyzing the numbers easier.  But care should be taken when interpreting the plots, given the logarithmically compressed horizontal axis.  In particular, modal values are dependent in part on the use of a log-axis, and would be different if the data were plotted with a linear horizontal axis.

And finally, many thanks to @ruthseeley for help in running SciTweeps through Twinfluence – a finger-numbing task!

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/06/23/science-influence-on-twitter-june-update/feed/ 16 http://2020science.org/2009/05/16/wolfram-alpha-should-have-called-it-deep-thought/ http://2020science.org/2009/05/16/wolfram-alpha-should-have-called-it-deep-thought/#comments Sat, 16 May 2009 11:25:21 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=1528

Last night, Stephen Wolfram threw the switch on Wolfram Alpha – a ground-breaking… no, make that game changing… “search engine” that computes answers to questions rather than simply drowning you in a torrent of possibly-relevant web pages.  Itching to give it a whirl, I asked some of my friends on Twitter to suggest some questions to ask it.

This is the screencast of what happened (press play to start):

Mmm, maybe now we’ve got the ultimate answer-machine, we need to work on the ultimate questions a little more…

Frivolity aside, this is a stupendous achievement.  OK so it doesn’t handle nonsense questions that well (although all credit to the Alpha team that it at least handles some of the more “important” ones!) and it needs a crash course in “love.” But what it does do is cut through the digital dross and begin to make sense of the mountains of information data buried in the web.  And I suspect that this is just the beginning.

Congratulations Wolfram – you could have just ushered in the next phase in the evolution of the Web!

Many thanks to everyone on Twitter who sent me questions – especially @kulinowski, @chronsciguy, @eronarn, @silentypewriter, @physicus, @crc8 and @quinw

And a quick note to @physicus – Alpha may struggle with the problem of dispatching small rodents, but Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science works a treat!