One-Day Seminar
Social Media: Uses and Abuses
Friday June 26 2009
University of Leicester
http://usesandabuses.wordpress.com
http://www.le.ac.uk/mediacom
The Media and Communications department at the University of Leicester is
organising a one day interdisciplinary event on the uses and abuses of social
media. PhD submissions are invited. The call for PhD papers has now past but
we would like to invite you to attend as a non-presenting deligate. Please
contact Jennifer Jones ((jmj10 /at/ le.ac.uk))as soon as possible to reserve your
place - 10 spaces are now left.
Invited Speakers include:
Professor Rachael Gibson
University of Manchester
Professor Andy Miah
University of the West of Scotland/Fellow at FACT, Foundation for Arts and
Creative Technologies, Liverpool Toby Moores CEO of Sleepydog.net/Visiting
Professor at Institute of Creative Technologies, De Monfort
University Dr Gillian
Youngs University of Leicester
Social media is the latest phenomenon in the new media world and it is
opening up whole new ways of thinking about media and its place in our public
and private lives. The social networking boom has quickly been
followed by the
explosion in micro-blogging. This one day seminar, organized by PhD students
at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester, aims
to capture some of what is happening and present current research on it.
Relevant issues include but are not limited to:
* "Make things and get excited": New media, collaborative culture and the
reaction to the credit crunch
* "Why aren't you following me back?": The (new) rules for human interaction
* Networks of networks: Making connections and revisiting the importance of
weak ties
* Social Media and the digital divide
* New media, political parties and citizen participation
The event will integrate new media into its form as well as content
so the aim
is to set new benchmarks in academic practice as well as research focus.
Presenters will include academics, practitioners and PhD students.
The plan is
to make it an entirely paper free seminar - with a blog forming the central
communications hub for all information about the day. This will include
guidance on Twitter for those who are new to this form of micro blogging to
facilitate an event back channel. This will not only connect the
event in real
time to outside, online discussion and collaboration - it will also
increase the
event's profile on search engines and allow for live updating of discussion
'We are aiming to make this an exciting 'first' in terms of bringing
together the
theory and practice of social media', explained PhD student Jennifer Jones,
who is leading the organization of the event with the support of PhD Tutor Dr
Gillian Youngs. 'Images can be tagged on photo hosting sites, blog
entries can
be aggregated and we'll have a dynamic and multimedia stream of information
that can be tapped in presently, or at a later date, at our
fingertips and ready
to be mashed up and (hopefully) used for future projects. There is no better
way to demonstrate social media tools than to get people to use them in
collaboration with an offline "face-to-face" event.'
More details will be available on the event's blog:
http://usesandabuses.wordpress.com
