I have finally settled on a thesis! One step down, five hundred million to go. I'm going to be looking at facebook groups formed after the Iranian protests and Haiti's earthquake. Don't ask me what I'm looking for I don't know. But it fits in with my general theme of social media and social change.
I was going to concentrate my research on Twitter, but I realized Twitter sucks to research. The fleeting presence of tweets, and the site's lack of archives make research pretty much impossible. Too bad, a lot is going on there right now. One thing I did realize while searching through a plethora of tweets surrounding Haiti, is that nonprofits are really doing a poor job at using social media. Nonprofit orgs do so many interesting things, yet they tweet about it like, once a month. Come on people -- you could get so many people interested in your work by broadcasting the cool things you do. Just a thought - to any nonprofit workers out there.
Welp, back to searching for academic literature on my topic. To the online library indexes!
5 comments:
This is related to your thesis, though it has nothing to do with social media: The Red Cross had a number to text to do receive $10 donations and they raised a lot that way. That would be easy information to track down.
There was also a report on using techonology: social media, text messaging, etc. on either NPR or MPR. You could check their archived stuff and potentially find some other resources.
You could also contrast Haiti and the Iranian conflicts with the tsunami in SE Asia and Katrina and the lack of social media and its outcomes, just a thought.
This is such an exciting topic! I'd be interested in reading it when you're finished!
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Hi Colleen! Just ran across this post in my google reader.
This sounds like a cool research project!
Let me know if you need to reach anyone inside of Facebook (the company) for help/info. I have a lot of friends who work there (including my roommates) and have lunch their often. Good luck!
Dave Fowler
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