Birmingham City University to offer MA in Social Media, including Bebo, Facebook, Twitter
A course such as this Ma in Social Media now offered by Birmingham City University must strike a curriculum design balance between future theoretical evolutions of social media and the current practical reality of its usage today.
The course outline says, “There is a dichotomy within this nascent industry. On the one hand established businesses are seeking to co-opt the tools of social media and use them for commercial gain; on the other third sector organisations are making use of these tools to build complex and conversational communication strategies for minimal cost.”
This suggests a divide between commercial usage of social media and sociological usage of social media. How clear is this divide? There’s still some degree of resistance to purely commercial participation in some SM niches, but the resistance is good natured for the most part; there’s certainly no organised social media jihad against commercial participation in my experience, not like it was on Usenet circa 1990 with prot0-spammers Canter and Siegel being the famous focus of wrath for their incessant newsgroup spamming.
The focus of an MA in Social Media naturally needs to be on those sites that currently have the global audiences that give them relevance. Both Facebook and Twitter have that level of traction.
Right now, today, Facebook and Twitter are the current leading social media sites for English speakers in terms of hands-on results for people in the social media space, that’s why they would naturally focus on those two at present.
Yes, there’s still MySpace, but these days I think its in now primarily focused on the categories of teen networking and entertainment promotion, rather than being across all fields.
As posited by commenters James and Georg, on PodcastingNews.com where I read about this, Facebook and Twitter could somehow fail. I found their suggestions of this to be off the cuff and even naive.
While not impossible, I consider either service disappearing in under five years to be unlikely in the extreme. They both have sufficient virtual mass, velocity, inertia and viral characteristics that will see them both continue to grow in popularity and stickiness for at least the next two years minimum before reaching a plateau.
Twitter recently past its second anniversary and it’s really only starting to break into mainstream awareness.
Even a steep decay curve would see Facebook and Twitter be popular, viable services for at least three years after that.
After little more than five years, Facebook is apparently around the 200 million member mark now but how many of them are relatively active users (login more than once a week) is uncertain.
I’m prepared to wager they are both still going strong five years from now.
Ten years - who knows?
What’s a likely scenario for usage of these services?
I expect there will be spin-offs of Facebook and Twitter that are semi-private gated communities where people have to be part of some loose association, affiliation, etc. such that there is a higher signal to noise ratio for those people in their own fields.
While Facebook’s Groups go towards this, there’s still the public hubbub to contend with, such as long lost people you practically never talked with at school throwing virtual custard tarts at your virtual head for instance.
I think private or membership based sites will be the killer evolution for both Facebook and Twitter.
Accountants.Facebook.com
Architects.Facebook.com
Authors.Facebook.com
NetworkMarketers.Facebook.com
DogWhisperers.Twitter.com
MutantJugglers.Twitter.com
PigWrestlers.Twitter.com
etc.
Graduates of such a Masters degree programme would hopefully be equipped with the ability to advocate, participate and or manage aspects of such communities, so I see it as potentially a pretty useful qualification.
Their education will be especially well structured and functional if they hire guest lecturers of the calibre of @silkcharm, @mpesce @coachdeb @leolaporte @guykawasaki and other notable social media experts to teach it.
Being Australian I have to refer to the antipodean and USA experts as I’m not really in the UK social media loop.
Perhaps someone from the UK could offer some further commentary on this course and its implications
References:
http://www.bcu.ac.uk/courses/media/socialmedia
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Comments
Oh to have had such a course while I was studying at Wharton for my MBA. Who could have predicted then how powerful computers, the Internet, and Social Marketing would become… and now I spend my whole life working with them.
Charlie Seymour Jr
http://twitter.com/UltimateWAHDads
Heh.
I taught some subjects as part of a Masters of Convergent Media at UWS last Feb/March etc. I have been teaching Social Media Marketing at Uni of Sydney (but professional development, not academic) since 2005 - 1 day marketing public courses.
Usually by the time Uni’s have caught up, it’s long gone, no?