Katya's Five Minute Guide to Social Networking

The above powerpoint is from 1999 and excerpted from day-long workshops I used to lead when I worked at NYFA and design and ran a program called "KIT: Knowledge in Technology - Technology Planning for Arts Organizations."   

Before we jumped into the technology tools, I always covered technostress.  It is really about how  individuals within the organization could be more comfortable with adopting technology tools.   It got at the human barriers around technology adoption in the early days:  stress, fear, anxiety, frustration.  What happens when you don't have the time to experiment or play so you feel comfortable?   

Since the participants were from arts organizations, we made them draw pictures of what techno stress look like.  I would scan the pictures and embed into my presentations to do the debriefing - and overtime would have user-generated content in the curriculum!   One of my favorite drawings was the metaphor of being in a foreign country and not being able to speak the language.

I went searching my harddrive for that visual after reading Katya Andresen's Five Minute Social Network Guide where she used the analogy of travel in a foreign country to explore social networking tools.

"to most of us (including me), social networking—using the web’s latest and greatest ways of connecting to people—feels akin to being a stranger in a strange land.  People have their own customs online, they act differently, and it can be hard to find your way around.  It seems so foreign and intimidating.  At least it did to me, until I figured out I should simply apply the same skills of assimilation I’d apply anywhere else outside my experience."

She goes on to introduce her travel analogy and link it to exploring social networking tools.

I've been reading Henry Jenkin's book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide" - I ordered after I heard him speak at the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning briefing (Nancy Schwartz recently wrote about it here) and read his white paper on participatory culture.   He defines participatory culture as a culture:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they
care what other people think about what they have created)

Our conversations here in the blogosphere are participatory, although it would be nice to have multimedia conversations.   After listening to both Katya's and Michael's comments about fundraising widgets, it made me realize that they enable a participatory culture ...

Somehow that's connected to what Nancy is talking about in Second Wave Adoption and what Michelle from the Bamboo Project refers to do in her recent post about technology adoption and nonprofits.