Social Media, Public Pedagogy, and the End of Private Learning

The term “social media” points to a broad range of technologies and practices that rests upon the traditional Internet, but extends into other spaces such as mobile networks and virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life). The current scope of social media is impressive, given that most social media were hardly known or did not exist a decade ago. In 2008, 2.5 trillion text messages were sent among some three billion mobile phones. Blogs, wikis, online videos, and particular social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace became regular features in the lives of people wherever web access is generally available. Facebook now has over 175 million active users and is currently growing at a rate of 600, 000 new users per day (Smith, 2009). Similarly, Twitter grew 725% in 2008, with 4.43 million unique visitors in December, 2008 (Ostrow, 2009). While many of these applications may have begun with informal personal and social purposes, they have quickly expanded across our culture. They have penetrated workplaces, where companies employ social media for both internal and external communications. They are used in politics, as was clearly the case in the recent U.S. presidential campaign. They are supplanting traditional journalism and have even managed to draw people away from their television sets. Through this quick expansion throughout the networked world, social media have become important sites of public pedagogy, places where we go to learn, and places where we learn indirectly as we come to understand ourselves in relation to others and our culture through social media interactions.