I’ve been using social media as a form of professional development for about as long as social media has existed, so I always have a lot of thoughts about the way that we use it professionally as well as personally. Like a lot of people, I have a love-hate relationship with it nowadays because while there are things that I still enjoy about it, I haven’t been entirely happy with the landscape for quite a while.
I don’t want to sound like out of touch, talking about how it was better back in my day, but I have to say I think there was something more rewarding about an environment of blogging and Twitter (when it was good), then I really get from platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn.
And I think the reason for this is community.
Back in the day (I’m talking 2009 to 2014 here) this is where we formed our community. We did this through writing blog posts (longer, more in-depth thoughts), and comments on those blogs and on Twitter. This gave us space to share on any topic we wanted with real interaction and response. It gave us a place to get to know each other, and thus form our community which then could become three dimensional at conferences.
Nowadays, many of us, just as back then, are isolated from other teachers and ELT professionals and we don’t see them very often. The conditions haven’t changed, but the tools have, and for the most part they are worse. Twitter was already on the slide before Musk, who seems to be on a mission to elect every right-wing fascist in the world, poured petrol on the fire, and yesterday, Zuckerberg made his announcement about how Facebook is changing its platforms to allow what they would call more free speech and what I would call hate speech. It’s a deliberate, politically motivated strategy for a neoliberal tech bro to try and make even more money and gain more power by getting closer to Donald Trump.
I find the whole thing repugnant and I resent the fact that I rely on these types of people to give me a platform in order to communicate with you. It irritates me. But then what can we do about that? What choices do we have?
I’m not suggesting that we should just forget all of these platforms and stop using them completely because I don’t think that’s realistic, but I do think it’s important that we consider how we use these platforms and what we want to get out of them and who owns them and how happy we are to give them our money (because time is money – just because you’re not paying directly doesn’t mean you’re not paying them) and how we feel about who owns the content that we share with each other.
It’s not an easy question to answer.
I’m not sure I have a direct answer to give you for what we should be doing, but I do feel like this is a conversation that needs to be had, I do think we should be looking for a better solution and it’s something I want you to think about.
The Teacher James 