On Blogging Literacy

Comments, contrasts and comparisons on the advent of the Social Media Release 

and Learning with Weblogs

In their piece, The Social Media Release as a Corporate Communications Tool for Bloggers, the authors define the social media release (SMR) as a blend of the traditional press release and digital social media. Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Also called USG - user-generated content or CGM - consumer-generated media, in effect, it turns messaging from a one-to-many monolog into many-to-many dialog. In essence, their study examines the impact this new tool will have on bloggers.

The authors remark (p. 3) that whether SMR eventually becomes an accepted standard within an industry or market still depends on whether its users find it easy to use and useful. Examining the SMR using the TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) naturally places their study focus towards the extent SMR is accepted as a technology by the PR industry and the bloggers that surround it, versus the way it is used and the validity of its published content. True, SMR has the potential to play a role in the progression of media communications. It is ideal, as the authors suggest, as a vehicle that has the capacity to allow for more external comments from users. However, along with the media affordances of the technology, in my opinion, the integrity of the content will have a big say about acceptance.

The biggest challenge I see with SMR's is that an originator, say a consumer products company like Johnson & Johnson, loses control over the delivery of information on its product. Opinion flamers in their zeal for misadventure can easily introduce doubt in consumers' minds about a product. For instance, a rumor can be started that many Q-Tip (a J&J product) users have had the cotton ends get stuck in their ears requiring expensive medical visits to remove them and sometimes, even permanent hearing loss. Should it become viral, J&J, despite its army of attorneys, would have little ability in quenching these flames, to say nothing about finding and prosecuting the originator for defamation.

I see a contrast with this issue from Blogs, A Primer by Barclay Barrios on The Lifecycle of Online Scholarship. Mr. Barrios remarks that in the summer of 2004, bloggers were given press passes first to the Democratic and then the Republican National Conventions, in effect, implicitly legitimizing blogging as a form of journalism and recognizing the power of blogs to shape public opinion. A truly momentous occasion in media communications no doubt. I can understand the author's rosy prognostications about blogging's future and to be fair, his focus was on its potential in the classroom. However, My perception is that it didn't take long after this for blogging's more nefarious capabilities to emerge as more and more blog posts filled with negative, heavily-biased, outright untrue information about candidates and their positions. In these partisan times, this has only increased.

The downside? An AP-NCC poll survey conducted last month about public trust covered in last Friday's edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found a majority of Americans place blogs, banks and Congress tops in having the most distrust. Only 8 percent of Americans are extremely or very confident in their trust of blogs. 54 percent said they have little or no confidence in blogs or other citizen media, according to the poll. If this is the case, the value of SMR becomes somewhat more murky.

In their article, Learning with Weblogs: Enhancing Cognitive and Social Knowledge Construction, authors Helen S. Du and Christian Wagner investigate the impact of weblog use on individual learning in the context of university senior-level business education. The authors work off of a constructivist model where individual learning is process-oriented and knowledge is developed by learners as they build their own cognitive mental models. They contend (p. 3) that weblogs can contribute to collaborative learning where it emerges built through sharing and social interaction.

Not surprisingly, students in the study had no difficulty in handling the technology, (students seem able to work pretty much with any tech), but had to get used to writing for this new medium. (p. 12) Ultimately, their research suggests that weblog performance can be a significant predictor of student learning outcome, possibly better than traditional coursework measures. The authors do mention in their findings that blogs need a healthy balance between individualism and collaboration and i agree. I feel that although learning using weblogs may be enriched, it has limitations as far as creating a better collective outcome than an individual one. 

I see support for this contention in When Blogging Goes Bad by Steven D. Krause. In his experiment in using blogging in the classroom, he found that collaboratively-written blog spaces can be a technical challenge, since most blogging programs just allow writers by invitation to post, not truly collaborate. Blogging, by nature is personal and thus, has limitations to generate dynamic discussions. Since blogs are more individualistic rather than collaborative, they may be better suited as online personal journals. So long as these points, both advantages and limitations, are kept in mind, and curriculum is deployed accordingly, blogging has its place in enhancing education and will likely increase. Our use of blogs in this course is an example of this.