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Social Networking
[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'
9/6/2007
SOCIAL NETWORKING AS 'GEOGRAPHY'
WHILE SOCIAL NETWORKING vendors are starting to integrate social networking into their collaboration products, some schools have taken the initiative by using already existing social networks and websites for academic projects, as part of their curricula.
Even geography professors, for instance, are finding that social networking has application to that discipline. According to James Craine, assistant professor in the Geography department at California State University-Northridge, “Social networking is a part of the larger domain of cyberspace, so it is my belief that since there is indeed a spatial component, the study of these [virtual] spaces is certainly relevant to geography. There is a lot of new and unique research being done in other departments at other universities (mostly in communication departments) and that is now being introduced into geography in a modified form.”
So, Craine and the students in his Geography of Media seminar
launched a MySpace page; they wanted to see if they could develop and expand a
geography "friends" network by the end of the semester. The page offered a study of
"virtual identity and the study of virtua," reports Craine. "Virtual spaces are just now
finding their way into our discipline, and it's pretty exciting to see the results coming
to fruition in the form of articles and books by geographers." The class ended up
with close to 500 MySpace friends and got picked up in search engines, to boot.
Craine also teamed up with Assistant Professor Chris Lukinbeal at Arizona State University, and Lecturer Jason Dittmer at the University College London, to create the website Aether. The premise? To share resources and showcase work with geography of media such as advertising, television, and newspapers, and to publish an eJournal on the subject. The website, say the geography-minded academics, has given them a space to network and connect with other "like-minded geographers."
The truth is, each of the commercial social networks has its own standards of what is considered appropriate user-generated content and what seems like a school's effort to grow its own networks. Generally, school profiles created by students stand the test of time, but when such profiles come directly from school administrators, they are flagged for investigation—and often are removed.
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