Social Media Experiments
Welcome to Social Media Storytelling
As I’m writing this welcome to the class, reactions to the Aziz Ansari story on Babe are flitting through my social media feeds. On the one side are those who think she an example of all-too-common date maneuverings by sexually aggressive men. On the other are those who think he’s the victim of #metoo-ism gone amuck.
I fall somewhere in the middle. The report is jump starting an important discussion. But it also reveals ruptures in how journalism is handling stories in the 21st century.
The Guardian does a lovely dissection of why the issues the story raises are so necessary to have — while at the same time explaining why the reporting of the story itself is highly problematic.
It’s a discussion we’ll be having this term in my social media storytelling classes.
I’m excited to be working with this group of students. We’ll be posting our stories and updates from class here, and of course we’d welcome the sort of attention that the Babe story is currently getting. Viral would be nice, but it’s more important for me to cover stories in an ethical and responsible way.
And we have to remember that even in this age of a bombardment of video and images, there is still a power to the printed word — even if that word is printed on a screen. Recent studies have found that reading text can be polarizing, more so than hearing the same arguments spoken aloud.
It’s a tricky balance. In the social media age journalists are expected to move quickly to cover and report stories, live Tweeting, doing live videos on Facebook, and posting disappearing stories on SnapChat. And sometimes that reporting is either incomplete or takes on a life of its own, completely out of control of the initial reporter.
But nonetheless, it will be an exciting exploration to help the students figure out how to find their storytelling voices in this social world.
