The Pros and Cons and Safety Aspects of Social Networking

I'm preparing a talk on the pros and cons of social networking, with some tips on keeping safe. The talk is going to be to a group of 6th formers (ie 17-18 year olds).

I've been doing my own research to see how many social networks these youngsters belong to, and it turns out to be a modest 2 or 3 on average. Then I made a list of the ones I belong to, and had a bit of a shock.

I currently belong to -- wait for it -- 63 social networks. I say "currently" because I am about to join more, and look at another one without joining it, to see what they have to offer. The reason I don't wish to join the second one is that it's for teenage girls. (I'll come on to why I'd want to look into such a network in a second.)

Of course, it all depends on how you define "social networking". The website What is Social Networking says:

"Social networking is the grouping of individuals into specific groups, like small rural communities or a neighborhood subdivision, if you will."

That sounds pretty accurate, although I'm inclined to go further. I come from an Economics background, and I quite like the economist's definition of money:

"Money is as money does."

It takes a bit of getting used to at first, but actually it's a succinct version of the observation by Douglas Adams:

"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands."

So, applied to social networking: if it looks like a social network and people behave in it as though it were a social network, then it's probably a social network.

On that basis I have lumped together a whole load of applications that enable me to post messages, see other people's messages, comment on those messages, share files and follow or befriend people. In other words, I've included social bookmarking applications, video sharing websites, general social networks like Facebook, specific or focused social networks like Wired Journalists, and what I suppose we might call quasi-social networks like Friends Reunited.

Why is any of this important? Before I go into that, let me just explain why I'd want to look at a teenage girls social network -- and I can assure you that it is not for the sort of reasons you might think! I was reading in an article on social networking in Information Age about the benefits to business of social networking, and it mentioned a site called BeingGirl, maintained by Procter and Gamble. The article states:

"The same technologies can be applied in a marketing capacity. Involving customers and prospects in a community built around products and brands is proving to be a powerful way to maintain loyalty and engagement. 

Procter & Gamble is one notable leader here with its BeingGirl website. The social network provides an environment in which young girls discuss and get answers on many of the awkward topics that arise as they enter their early teenage years, with P&G introducing marketing material for its relevant products at pertinent points."

So I am interested in questions like, does this look like a genuinely useful site for girls? What's the product placement actually like? Is one of the things we should be educating kids about the fact that product placement goes on (including in television programmes)?

I'm coming at this from a number of angles.

Firstly, I see nothing wrong in companies deciding to start a social network in order to engender customer loyalty. Ten years ago I signed up to The Beano website. The Beano is a comic which has been part of the British comic landscape for what seems like forever, and is full of cartoon strips that are so stupid as to be hilarious. Now, the Beano website had all sorts of silly features on it, and it was just a good laugh. And it was an example of product placement.

Another example: I myself started a social networking site called ICT in Education. I stopped promoting it or nurturing it because I felt that it was actually diverting attention from my main website -- although I haven't shut it down because there are nearly 200 members who may be upset if I did so. Given that I often mentioned my articles in discussions where I felt such a reference would be useful to people, that was a vehicle for product placement too.

Secondly, issues like product placement have always been important. Or, to put it more generally, media literacy has always been important to teach. Right from the time I started teaching I made it clear to my students that they should always look not just at what is being said, but who is saying it, and what they're not saying. Nothing new about that.

Thirdly, if people find a social networking site like BeingGirl useful and helpful, and the products are good, that's what's known as "good customer service" isn't it?

So what does this have to do with my talk?

Well, it seems to me that a question like "What are the pros and cons of social networks?", and the supplemental question "And how do you keep safe in them?" raise a number of issues. Taking the first one first:

• The answer will differ according to whom you ask. The advantage of BeingGirl for P & G is, presumably, marketing opportunities and (hopefully) customer loyalty. The advantage for a young girl is the facility for discussing issues and getting advice.

In addition, the answer will depend on:

• The exact nature of the social network.
• How active it is.
• Who belongs to it.
• What sort of facilities it offers.
• The quality of the information posted on it.
• The quality of the discussions posted on it.
• The quality of the resources that people share on it.

As for the pros and cons of social networking sites in general, for me it's the same as the pros and cons of social networking, ie interacting with other people, per se.

The answer to the second question, about safety, must partly depend on how one defines "safety". Everyone seems to think in terms of sexual predators, but without wishing to denigrate the importance of that in any way, it does strike me as a somewhat narrow definition. What about identity theft? What about safety from economic predators?

(I was looking at a website this morning on which people can post their stories and articles and earn a share of the advertising revenue. The "small print" says that the site owners reserve the exclusive right to use your work forever, and also to do with it as they like, including chopping it up, featuring it anywhere they like, and so on. Loads of people have posted their stuff on this site, thereby depriving themselves of other sources of income from that work in the future. I hope their earnings from the advertising revenue compensate them for that cost. Shouldn't we be making sure that youngsters are aware of the importance of not selling the family jewellery as it were?)

What about protecting your reputation, or ensuring the "safety" of your future job prospects?

As for why I belong to so many: it's because they mostly do different things. Where I am a member of two or three that do the same thing, it's because I like to try things out. And, to be honest, I'm active in only about three or four of them. Let's face it: if I were active in all of them I'd be spending at least a day a week socially networking online!

I guess that's one of the big disadvantages of social networking: it can be so time-consuming!

This article was first published on 3rd February 2009.

The Case for Print-On-Demand

Terry Freedman's PoD books

The article below was first published on 20 December 2006. It still stacks up now, but I have one or two additional comments to make at the end.

What could be better than receiving a box of books? Receiving a box of books that you wrote, of course! Is there a place for self-publishing in schools?

The books I refer to are the two booklets I wrote, on Every Child Matters and Boring ICT lessons. These were produced by print-on-demand, through Lulu, but published by, an therefore assigned an ISBN number by, Terry Freedman Ltd.

I ordered 10 copies of each in order to be able to comply with the UK requirement to send 6 copies of a newly-published books to various libraries and agencies. And that, of course, leaves 4 copies of each for me to send to reviewers and casually leave lying about when guests come to the house....

But isn't this just a case of vanity publishing? Well, yes and no. "Yes", in the sense that you pay the costs of having it printed and bound, whereas in mainstream publishing those costs are borne by the publisher. And "Yes" in the sense that if it's a niche product it would be hard to find a mainstream publisher that will take it on, which leaves doing it yourself as the only option. But "No" in the sense that if, as in my case, you have been approached by mainstream publishers and declined their advances and therefore made a free choice about whom you want to publish your book. And also "No" if the book has virtually no market at all (cf The Long Tail), which is what I should like to consider now.

Print on demand is a very good option when you need  very few, perhaps even just one, copy of a book. The origination costs, ie the fixed costs of setting up the book, are not spread over a large number, and so the fixed cost per book is relatively high. On the other hand, you don't have the twin problems of trying to find (a) start-up capital and (b) room to store hundreds of copies. In the case of Lulu, it's easy to amend the text of your book very quickly too, which in education, and especially the educational technology field, is a must these days.

So, what does all this mean for the ICT (Educational Technology) leader in a school?

I have long believed that if you want people to take something seriously and treat it with respect, it has to look good. What can look better than a publication which looks like it just came from a bookstore? Most schools do not have the facilities to be able to even begin to compete.

So, if I were a Head of Department or subject leader in a school now, I would use Lulu for a number of purposes:

• The staff handbook
• The 3 year strategic plan
• Information about assessment
• A year planner or calendar with important internal events (like report deadlines, term dates) and external events (like conferences) pre-filled in.
• Students' completed projects (added Dec 09)
• Students' leaving portfolios (added Dec 09)

If you wanted to produce your own textbook to distribute to all your students, it may be better, because cheaper, to go down a more traditional self-publishing route. That means, finding a printer who does short print runs, ie 500 or 1000. The biggest barrier to this avenue is the advance cost.

I'm not convinced that such a strategy would be cost-effective: On the one hand traditionally-published books are much cheaper as a rule. On the other hand, it's hard to beat the cost of a ring-binder and handouts or, of course, an online collection of resources.

But for the purposes of boosting your team's morale and creating a great impression with inspectors, having a dozen each of a few publications printed is hard to beat.

Reflections, two years on

Having read this article again, two years after I wrote it, the question arises: do I still agree with it? Broadly speaking, the answer is 'yes', but it's not quite as simple as that.

It is definitely the case that print-on-demand works out more expensive per copy than going to a short-run publisher. However, the issue for me would be: how many copies are required, or are you likely to sell? In other words, the more narrow the niche, the more attractive becomes print-on-demand. So if, say, you want enough copies for your ICT team and perhaps a few more to hand around, I would think that print-on-demand is the way to go.

However, I would not recommend print-on-demand for fiction writing if you can possibly avoid it. Self-published fiction is still associated with rubbish that is not good enough for mainstream publishers to bother with. I think that perception is slowly changing, because most new writers simply do not get a look in these days, and there have been some notable self-published successes. (Update: I accidentally referred to 'non-fiction' in this paragraph in the original version; I have corrected this, although hopefully the context, and the following paragraphs, will have indicated that I'd made the error, which was a slip of the pen as it were.)

In fact, if you have the stamina and the time, there is probably a case for saying that the best thing you can do is self-publish your novel (say) and market it incessantly in the hope that it will come to the attention of a mainstream publisher. But don't count on that happening, not least because you will be hard-pressed to even get it reviewed.

There's another caveat here. The CEO of Lulu didn't do anyone any favours when he said earlier this year that Lulu publishes the worst collection of poetry in the history of mankind. (See this article for a report on that by Angela Hoy, and this article for a follow-up.) I should not go so far as to say that he did a Ratner, because everyone knows that Lulu does not edit manuscripts (you'd have to purchase that service as an extra), and that many, probably most, self-publishers have received 'critical' acclaim from nobody other than themselves and their families and friends, who for the most part are too caring and too polite to say, "Sorry, but you just can't write. Take up painting instead."

Even so, I don't think comments like that help the general perception, based on a bygone era which possibly never existed, in which manuscripts were either eagerly snapped up by publishers willing to invest money and time into them, or were taken to a vanity press.

People's perception of self-publishing is better in non-fiction, certainly in the UK, possibly because people recognise that a lot of non-fiction would not be commercially viable for a mainstream publisher. Also, if you are recognised as an expert within your field, people in the same field are almost certainly not going to be deterred by your book's self-published status.

Of course, these days you can easily avoid physical books altogether and go down the ebook route. But why not do both?

I'd be interested in hearing about your views and experiences in these areas.