Photo by XinYuan Wang

With all of us (apart from Nell who started later) having completed a year’s fieldwork, we met in London for consultation for the month of May. On 1 June everyone returned to the field for 3 months of further research. During May we also discussed our plans for publications and wider dissemination.

We don’t just want to research new media, we also want to use its unprecedented capacities for ensuring that our work reaches audiences who we believe will be fascinated to know more about how social media operates across the world.

We also want this exercise in E-education to move beyond official education institutions, such as university and school, to reach anyone who would wish to be better informed about social media.

Obviously since we haven’t even finished the initial research phase this is very tentative and likely to change and evolve as we proceed. But at least this provided us with some guide as to what we might hope to achieve, and an approximate answer to the increasingly common question by others as to when they might expect to see results from the research. We certainly aren’t promising to abide by either the dates or the scale of what follows here, but who knows – we just might.

By Sept 2014, all fieldwork will be complete (other than Nell who finishes in May 2015).

Danny Miller and Jolynna Sinanan will have largely finished work on a book called What They Post, that is a comparison between what people in Trinidad and England post on social media, showing the marked differences between the two places.

By May 2015, We aim to complete the drafts of nine additional books (one for each fieldsite) of around 70 thousand words each. These will be popular and accessible accounts of what we have learnt about social media in each site. They will all have the same chapter headings, but our ethnographies have shown that the content will remain extremely diverse. Tentative chapters we have discussed might include Facebook/QQ, Polymedia – relating these to other social media, the impact on relationships, and answers to 10 questions people typically ask us, e.g. impacts on politics, inequality, gender and education. Also there is likely to be a chapter in each book on quantitative surveys and questionnaires. Most of these chapters will include 2 or 3 stories about individuals from our fieldsites who help us to illustrate the points being made.

January 2016 Launch of all our materials as Open Access to the general public through a site designed for web/phone/tablet. We hope that this will include a considerable amount of material designed to be more accessible and less academic. This will include a) short YouTube videos taken in our fieldsites by a mix of professional film makers and local informants, b) (if we can afford them) animations and infographics to explain our more theoretical points, c) a presentation of our main general insights with qualifications and caveats given the diversity of our sites. d) data from our more quantitative materials e) shorter texts that make some of the book material available in clear language. We hope to provide various guided routes through these online materials, e.g. organised by fieldsite or by theme. Our ideal would be to have much of this more accessible material available in all the languages of all our sites. Though we don’t expect these translations will be complete at the launch in January 2016.

As part of this site we would include the ten books already mentioned and (if finished) an additional comparative volume. All will be published under a Creative Commons licence. In addition we are considering the idea of creating a free MOOC or Open Access university course, possibly with UCL or perhaps Coursera. This will include lectures enhanced by these others materials such as the books and the films. We would also consider a paid version of this course for credit, including interactivity and examination within the UCL system. But this depends upon many other forces outside of our control.

At this point we believe we can achieve some version of the above. But the quality will be much better if we can gain additional funding or sponsorship which we are currently seeking (so if you know of anyone…….). We are also happy to work with volunteers who would like to contribute to these aims, e.g. helping with infographics or translation.

Further/Future Publications:-

The initial books are to be written in a popular rather than academic style and concentrate upon what each site has taught us about the use and consequences of social media. All the members of the team would also, however, wish to write a second, more academic book, in which we turn this around and ask how working with social media and ethnography has allowed us as anthropologists to learn about the fieldsites and the people who live there. Each of us also has particular themes we are interested in such as gender, education, the hospice, work/family balance, visibility etc. We also expect to write more academic journal papers, and potentially  comparative edited volumes on particular themes such as education, politics and gender.

A final component would be more theoretical academic publications that consider the implications of this study at a higher level, for example, our conceptualisation of sociality, what this teaches us about being human and the potential for comparative anthropology. But this is on the far horizon and we may have a better idea of such mountains when we have successfully navigated the foothills.

Photo by ehnmark (Creative Commons)

Ok, this is a seriously big project. Starting from today, there will be eight simultenous 15-month ethnographies taking place in fieldsites around the world. To have funding for something on this scale devoted to a given topic is unique. Given that, we have a responsibility to do things which transcend the academic outputs we are initially funded to produce. There has to be an altogether different ambition for the results of this project that goes way beyond our remit. To signify that ambition we recently appointed Sheba Mohammid as Director of Policy and Implementation and also devised a new title for the project called the Global Social Media Impact Study with its own website at gsmis.org. What these changes signify is that even while the main fieldwork is about to start, we are thinking about two future developments.

The first is to ensure there is an applied outcome and the second concerns dissemination. As it happens, the very first project to be carried out to conclusion was my own research on behalf of a hospice, just North-West of London, where for six months I studied usage by end-of-life cancer patients and the hospice itself. I have not written any academic papers, but have constructed an extensive report detailing recommended changes that use this research directly to improve communications with patients. It’s early days, but I am optimistic several of these will be implemented. Once we feel we have gained enhanced knowledge of how people use social media, then we hope that Sheba will help us to find case-studies in Trinidad. This partly because we would like to do more than simply align ourselves with the usual welfare and critical stance of social science. We want to commit to projects that demonstrably make peoples lives better. But at the same time we want to test ourselves. If we are making claims that we will understand social media usage better through our studies, then the best evidence may be not just academic papers, but creating social media projects ourselves that demonstrably work better as a result of implementing our findings.

The second shift is intended to ensure that whatever it is we learn from our study is conveyed beyond the academic audience. So under our original title ‘Social Networking Sites and Social Science‘ we intend to produce considerable academic output, but the Global Social Media Impact Study is about using the same social media we study to also disseminate the results to non-academic popular audiences. Amongst other initiatives is the hope we will raise money for films directed by Meghana Gupta. We are looking to co-create, through user generated content, enhanced e-books, perhaps a MOOC (freely available university course). Sheba spent seven years implementing e-policy and e-learning for the Trinidad and Tobago government and has been educating our team in these areas of implementation. She will carry this out working with myself together with Jo Tacchi and Heather Horst at RMIT Melbourne. If we end up having things we feel are worth saying then it makes sense to be active in soliciting an audience. The gsmis.org website is a start towards that goal.