Quiet As It Keeps: Social Media as an Academic Resource

I didn’t realize how big of a role social media played in my education until I began trying to cite sources from Facebook and Youtube. Social media is a pervasive source of communication, information, and education. By the time I graduated from high school, I had already learned to navigate social media platforms like Facebook with ease and it was the main source through which I got the news as opposed to my parents who primarily read newspapers and watched the news on television. The ability to share videos and articles as well as read people’s reactions to them made social media platforms particularly attractive. I find myself using wikipedia much less now than I did in middle and high school. Social media platforms today are a similar collective collaborative accumulation of knowledge with the added plus of news being updated and commented upon in real time.

As laptops are allowed in most classes, information is easily accessible as many students do wander onto social media sites instead of taking notes. The ability to access social media platforms via mobile devices makes information accessible almost anywhere at anytime. When introducing articles and Youtube videos into a paper or class discussion, I do what I did in high school by siting the original source and leaving out the fact that I first encountered the information through wikipedia, Facebook or Youtube. Based on my experiences, Barnard has not made explicit the type of media that is disallowed. As a Mellon Fellow I find that social media platforms are being transparently used to discuss and site social phenomena where on the other hand my intro Africana Studies courses focus primarily on written text such as books and published articles. However, as our world begins to digitize, I would be interested to see how academic institutions deal with the reality that students may be using social media platforms to get their information and the rules and regulations they may put around such usage.