• What is Social Capital? • History of Social Media • The Big Ideas viettiensoft@gmail.com -0912 248 380

1. Week 1: Social Capital &
the Media Landscape
Ryan Thornburg
University of North Carolina
@rtburg

2. What You Will Learn This Week
• What is social media?
• Brief history of social media & audience
engagement
• Who uses social media for news, and how?
• Key components of social journalism
• Examples of professional social journalism

3. In This Lecture…
• What is Social Capital?
• History of Social Media
• The Big Ideas

4. What is Social Capital?
• Personal connections that help people act
more effectively

5. What is Social Capital?
bigger
is not
BETTER

6. What Creates Social Capital?
• Political Knowledge
• Trust
• Civic Engagement (voting, group membership)
• I have information that I trust. I know how to use
it and I have the social network needed to
activate it.

7. Social Networks
Build
Social Capital

8. What is a Social Network?

9. What is a Social Network?
• Web-based service that allows individuals to
– Construct a public or semi-public profile
– Choose and display a list of other users with whom
they’re connected
(either one way or mutual)
– View and traverse the connections made by others
within the system
» danah boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

11. Next Up: History & ‘Big Ideas’

12. Pace of Change Increasing
1700
1700s – Pamphleteers
1800
1900
2000
1900s – Penny press
– “community correspondents”

13. Pace of Change Increasing
1700
1800
1900
2000
1945 – Barry Gray put his radio mic up to the phone
receiver. (Also George Roy Clough in Texas)
1945 – As We May Think: “here is a new profession of
trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of
establishing useful trails through the enormous mass
of the common record”
1960 – launch of first all-talk radio stations in LA and
St. Louis.
1968 – BBC Radio Nottingham

14. Pace of Change Increasing
1700
1969 – ARPANET – peer-to-peer
1800
1900
2000
1980s -- CompuServe, FidoNet and BBs
1986 – Email Listserv
1990/1991 – hypertext, the WWW and HTML
1997-2000 – SixDegrees.com – first social network platform,
create profiles, list friends and surf others’ lists

15. Pace of Change Increasing
1700
1800
1900
2000
1997-2000 – SixDegrees.com
1999- Napster ; LiveJournal; Blogger/PyraLabs; BlackBerry; cross-network SMS
2002-2004 Friendster
2002 – TinyURL
2003- LinkedIn
2003-2008 - MySpace;
2003/2004 – Orkut, Hi5, Flickr, Facebook, Dodgeball
2005- YouTube, Bebo, Ning
2006- Facebook (all); Twitter
2007 – iPhone; Tumblr
2008 – TweetDeck, HootSuite
2009 - SocialFlow
2010 – Instagram; Pinterest
2012 – Vine

16. The Big Ideas
1. Your audience knows more than you.
2. Conversation, Not a Lecture
3. Process, Not a Product
4. Your most loyal readers are your best
distributors and best sources
5. The Strength of Weak Ties