Here’s the bottomline: You do not understand social media by teaching business students how to Tweet. Understanding the importance of social media today requires deep social rethinking and it also requires reimagining education for the digital age–its pedagogical and hierarchical methods, its emphasis on individual achievement, its grades and assessments, its divisions into disciplines, its binary of “research” versus “practical” knowledge, its tacit separation of “production” and “consumption,” and the binary of deep thinking and practical doing. You cannot teach Facebook or Twitter without understanding far deeper historical and social interactions reconfigured by the Internet and the World Wide Web that allow immediate many-to-many communication without an editor, publisher, or broadcaster mediating who sends and who receives. You cannot understand why hundreds of millions of people world wide crave and depend upon social media without revisiting deep issues ranging from the global human and labor diaspora, to ethnic division and exploitation, to cognitive issues like the brain science of attention. Does it matter if you know how to frame your “pitch” in 140 characters or less if you don’t understand, in a deep way, the changes that are transforming how we learn, work, and live together? I don’t think so.
What brings up these slightly exasperated thoughts is today’s New York Times’ “Special Report: International Education: Business Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media” By FIONA MACKAY, with the content line: “Courses study the power of such media — and the hazards.” I’m encouraged that business schools are finally waking up, in 2011, and realizing they need to be “teaching social media” but, really, unless you rethinking business itself, you are not grasping the meaning of social media, you are grasping at trendy straws. You can read the Times piece here and let me know what you think: ttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/education/31iht-riedmba.html?emc=eta1
What brings up these slightly exasperated thoughts is today’s New York Times’ “Special Report: International Education: Business Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media” By FIONA MACKAY, with the content line: “Courses study the power of such media — and the hazards.” I’m encouraged that business schools are finally waking up, in 2011, and realizing they need to be “teaching social media” but, really, unless you rethinking business itself, you are not grasping the meaning of social media, you are grasping at trendy straws. You can read the Times piece here and let me know what you think: ttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/education/31iht-riedmba.html?emc=eta1
Social media work for reasons that are anything but superficial. Social media are effective because of who we are as social beings. If you try to understand the media without understanding the messengers, you will sound like one of those foolish people who are convinced that their one bold tweet or YouTube video will “go viral.” I believe I’ve read the odds of that are slimmer than winning the state lottery.
Here’s the punchline: you should never throw out the baby with the bathwater. But if the baby is bathing in water that is suddenly turning lurid green or day-glo orange, maybe you better get her out of there until you have carefully investigated all the things that are changing the composition of the water she is bathing in. Trying out the new water without testing and understanding it first is not the solution to anything. Really. Think about it.
The Special Report in the Times details many programs in business schools that are just now deciding that maybe they should be teaching social media. About time. And, thankfully, a few of the people interviewed emphasize you cannot teach the “what” but have to actually have students engage with the media themselves. Others, though, act as if these social media are happening somewhere else, as if they are remote and exotic practices of the Other that need to be studied from afar, as if they have not already altered every major industry imaginable, global relations, the organization of our largest corporations, the fate and design of whole industries (music, publishing, even accounting and software writing), as well as the future of just about any mom-and-pop store on Main Street (our town of Durham, for example, gives discounts to shopping locally rather than online: tell any business owner “social media” hasn’t changed the patterns of their daily business lives).
That business schools now, in 2011, are batting around the idea of maybe teaching a bit about using social media (and its “HAZARDS”) is astonishing. Then again, when I look at higher education in general, I am flabbergasted at how little change one sees to any of its fundamentals–how it accepts students, how it arrays their coursework into majors and minors, how the BA degree is separate from the BS degree, how research degrees are separated from professional degrees, how “deep thinking” is considered frivolous rather than the most important job training you can have in an era of constant change, or how even those departments that are all about, intrinsically, the kinds of communication changes (reading, writing, publishing, multimedia) that constitute the Information Age [do you hear me, English Departments of America?] look as if the Internet was never invented.
If I sound frustrated, it is because I do not understand why higher education is not leading us in the Information Age. Leadership, of course, means changing all the rules and rebuilding our majors and minors, our divisions and our disciplines, to a new set of practices, concepts, relationships, and requirements. Rebuilding is hard, but institutions do it all the time. In fact, the institution of higher education we have now, in 2011, looks very little like the one of say, 1875. Even higher education in 1911, after an era of extensive and explosive change, was only beginning to take shape as the modern research university and the other systems surrounding it. Just as Taylorism had an enormous impact on business (not just the assembly line but the vertical organization of the corporation too), so too did it have a profound impact on education, including higher education. Professional schools, business schools, certification, multiple choice testing, all forms of quantitative assessment, grades and grading, placement, ranking, statistical measures, bell curves, and on and on are all institutionalized responses to the call to educate for the new industrialized, global, expanding world of the twentieth century.
You don’t understand social media just by studying the media. You understand social media by grasping the underlying principles of a massive realignment of how we learn, work, and live as a result of the new technologies sweeping over every aspect of our life. That requires more than teaching business students how to Tweet. It requires reimagining education for the digital age, rethinking our most basic institutions of education to prepare students not for the twentieth-century’s Taylorist assembly line but for the twenty-first century’s interconnected, iterative, process-oriented, collaborative, and open World Wide Web.