Using Social Media for Collective Knowledge-Making: Technical Communication Between the Global North and South

Abstract

This article examines changing social media practices, arguing that technical communicators and teachers understand their roles as mediators of information and communication technologies. Drawing on a case study growing out of a colloquium on technology diffusion and communication between the Global North and South, the author proposes that technical communicators be attentive to the participatory nature of social media while not assuming that social media replace the dynamics of face-to-face human interaction.

Keywords:

• case studies
• collective knowledge production
• global north and south
• ICT
• social media

Notes

This distinction between the Global North and South replaces descriptors such as “first world and third world” or “more developed and less developed” nations as a basis for discussing socio-economic differences between countries that have more wealth and global influence, and those that have fewer of those attributes. Countries in the Global South generally have lower rates of human development as indicated by the United Nations Human Development Index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics), while countries in the Global North have high index ratings. Some countries in the southern hemisphere are highly developed and wealthy, however, and some countries in the north are not. These terms are not geographically absolute. But the term “Global North and South” consciously elides other distinctions that maintain primacy of certain nation states, and it is, therefore, more favored by scholars working in the Global South.

The video segments in the Technological Emergence collection illustrate the April 2011 colloquium format, which was designed to encourage group discussion among all colloquium participants to generate collective knowledge-making on colloquium topics. One participant led discussion on each of the day's seven topics, which were introduced by a prerecorded video segment. The segment leader was initially joined by three or four discussants to open the discussion, followed by general discussion among all colloquium participants. These recorded discussions were then posted to the Technological Emergence collection and opened for one year to further comments from people anywhere with Internet access. The collection closed for further comments at the end of June 2012, but it is still available at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/techemerge.

As early as 1993, futurists such as Rheingold predicted that “virtual communities could help citizens revitalise democracy, or they could be luring us into an attractively packaged substitute for democratic discourse” (p. 276). In its utopian guise, the Internet could enable an all-inclusive information environment, what Rheingold termed “Athens without slaves:” “[I]f properly understood and defended by enough citizens, [the Internet] does have democratising potential in the way that alphabets and printing presses had democratising potential” (p. 279). In this early phase of sharing the Web, technical communicators struggled to adapt print-based notions of audience analysis to this new information environment where audiences could no longer be clearly targeted. In a utopian spirit, we sometimes considered the Web to be all-inclusive, even universal, in its audiences.

Young discusses the notion of inclusion and exclusion in political spheres in Inclusion and Democracy (2002), finding that justice demands global democratic institutions.

A map showing where our contributors reside is available on the front page of Technological Emergence (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/techemerge).

The storytelling section of Technological Emergence is available online (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/techemerge).

See Mark E. Kann's (2009) article, “Multimedia in the Classroom at USC: A Ten-Year Perspective,” for a detailed account of how this mutual learning environment can benefit students and teachers.

See Longo's (2010) article, “Human + Machine Culture: Where We Work,” for an extended exploration of instrumental aspects of a culture built on human + machine relationships.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernadette Longo

Bernadette Longo is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Professional and Technical Communication in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is author of Spurious Coin.