Using Social Media in Religious Education by Will Kahn-Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at bluesock.org.
If you’re planning to do slides, you’ll need to set them up for Present sections and anything else you want to cover.
Present
Social media is often a website or service that is created and maintained by a single company. Because of this, you’re not in control of the service and there are a variety of things that can happen that could make the service unusable.
This section talks about the things that can happen and the possible ways to alleviate those problems.
Present
In order to use the service, the company requires you to abide by their terms of service. If you violate the terms of service, they can suspend or terminate your account preventing you from accessing the service and your data.
The terms of service are written in legalese and are often difficult to read for people who aren’t trained to read legal language.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains a list of “terms of (ab)use” which is both informative and eye-opening [1].
| [1] | http://www.eff.org/issues/terms-of-abuse |
Have participants pick a social media web-site, find the Terms of Service link, and skim through it. Read the parts that seem interesting.
Go around and mention things you saw in the Terms of Service that were surprising.
Present
Most social media service companies don’t have someone you can call for support. Sometimes they have email addresses that you can write to with issues, but often they don’t respond or aren’t very useful.
One of the reasons for this is that the social media service company consists of 100 people, but they have a user base of millions of people. They can’t possibly handle the issues so they make it difficult to report problems. They do their best to help, but generally, their best isn’t very good.
For example, it’s almost impossible to get someone from Google to help you out if you encounter a problem. There is no telephone number you can call to talk to a human being. They do have a support email address, but when the response you get back is not helpful, there’s little that you can do.
Have participants pick a social media site. Go through the web-site and find the “help” and “support” pages (if there are any).
Is there a customer support help forum?
Is there a form for requesting help?
Is there an email address for requesting help?
Is there a telephone number you can call for support?
Present
Social media sites often disable accounts. Sometimes it happens because the person breaks the Terms of Service. Sometimes it happens by mistake. There are probably other reasons.
If your account is disabled, how does that affect your ability to participate in workflows using that tool?
For example, if you use your Google account for many things and it’s disabled, how does that affect you? What can you do about it?
Present
When the service has an outage, there’s nothing you can do but wait for it to get resolved.
Present
If the service is discontinued or changed in some fundamental way, you either have to roll with it or find another service. This is true of all service providers, but with social media services, it happens very often.
For example:
| [2] | http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ |
| [3] | http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline |
Present
If the social media service removes a feature you require, changes their terms of service in a way you can’t work with, disables your account, or otherwise prevents you from using the service:
Some social media services run software that you can host yourself on your own server. When you do this, then you’re in control of your data and you’re in control of changes.
However, running your own software brings its own set of administrative and expertise problems.
Sometimes you can pay for a service and in doing so, you should have a contract which gives you some rights to how the service changes in the future. Sometimes this can help.
There are FLOSS project alternatives and options to many social media services. Choosing a FLOSS alternative allows you to host your own instance, but also allows you to participate in future development of the software.
For example, Status.net [4] is a FLOSS alternative to Twitter. LimeSurvey [5] is a FLOSS alternative to SurveyMonkey. WordPress (the software) [6] is an alternative to WordPress (the service) [7].
| [4] | Status.net: http://status.net/ |
| [5] | LimeSurvey: http://limesurvey.org/ |
| [6] | WordPress (the software): http://wordpress.org/ |
| [7] | WordPress (the service): http://wordpress.com/ |