Amp08 – Using social networks for positive change

This session was, for me, the least successful or useful. I think partly it was the timing; it was, perhaps, too serious a subject for the time of day. I'm not saying we shouldn't discuss serious subjects in the evening, but coming after the fun of playing silly games, a quite amusing overview of the first two sessions and a period of mingling over wine and nibbles, it suddenly felt overly worthy and "serious". I think this was also because it was a subject that was obviously very dear to the hearts of most of the people in the room (which was so crowded people some needed to sit on the floor!), and several of them were rather more concerned with getting their own agenda heard than actually listening to each other.

It really reminded me of that "state of the union" panel they have at every single comics convention. You know the one, it starts off all fired-up about whichever brand-new publishing ventures are around that month, and it's all fresh and exciting and enthusiastic and overwhelmingly positive, then always, but always descends into arguments about how to get people who don't read comics to start reading comics. And it always, but always ends up with exactly the same suggestions coming around and being shouted down. Everyone has their own favourites and their own dislikes which are someone else's favourites and people are so busy arguing the merits of which is better that they lose track of the initial positivity and the actual methods of outreach. This session was just like that, only people were arguing over which social network was better instead of which comic. And although there were a few really interesting points to be made, they kind of got lost in the noise.

One of the issues raised was how to train younger people to utilise social networks to maximise their potential for when they leave school¹, which kind of struck me as a bit unnecessary because if anyone knows how to use social networking, it's people who've grown up with internet culture being a part of their entire lives. Kids in school now can't remember a time without the internet, and are pretty savvy about how to use it. I was interested to learn that Facebook's terms of service apparently exclude children under the age of 18 who aren't in formal education, though. Is that because Facebook is worried about potential paedophiles who'd sign up as children, and couldn't be verified because they're not on school records? That makes sense, although, as someone pointed out, do things like that mean that terms of service are replacing human rights? I would have loved for that discussion to have continued, but someone hijacked it and started banging on about something else, and then proceeded to dominate the rest of the session without giving anyone else much of a look-in. By that point, my attention started to wander and I started thinking about dinner…

¹There was an entire session about Youth and Social Media which apparently focussed a lot on this issue. According to Utku, even he was older than the age group that session focussed on, and he's only just in his twenties!