I've been looking at the material on the Social Media Tools course, and in light of my learning curve of a relatively new user of social media, I've been thinking about its uses, advantages and disadvantages as compared to email, a media I've been using almost daily for well over a decade now.

Email has definitely expanded and improved communication for me. I and my children keep in touch with my Mother-in-Law who lives a couple thousand kilometers away (the jokes are obvious here, but I'll be good and not go there...), I maintain contact with a friend who lives a 5 hour drive away, and I use it to arrange lunch dates with friends who live close. Not to mention the file sharing and conversations with clients, instructors and professional contacts.

But I've also been in a number of situations, both in school and out, in which a number of people in different locations need to discuss something, and use a group email list. This works, and in my experience it has certainly gotten stuff accomplished when a face-to-face meeting or teleconference wasn't possible. But it's not the most effective way of doing things. I find it highly intrusive to get interrupted every few minutes by a group email, and annoying to be away from my computer and return to find several dozen emails waiting from that discussion. Email is a very in-your-face medium for computer users, you have to deal with it, even if dealing with it consists of hitting the delete button.

By contrast, a group discussion board like we have here on the Landing, means that I can pick one time that's convenient for me, and look at the whole discussion, commenting where I feel it is appropriate. It also means that I can ignore discussions (or sub-discussions) that aren't relevant to me, and I don't even have to delete and email.

A open group discussion also has the benefit of having readers and commenters that the writer of the post may not have realized have something relevant to say. An email discussion goes to only those who are on the list - if you aren't on the list, you aren't part of the discussion. But it's very easy to fall into the trap of only talking to people who think like you, who are educated like you, who are similar to you in many ways. An email discussion would tend to include only those similar people. But a discussion post (or a blog post, for that matter) allows everyone to see it, and therefore is much more likely to offer perspectives and solutions that the author(s) didn't see.

A fairly radical example of this, is just recently in the United States, the team building the security system for internet voting (which they had hoped to use for the last election, but didn't, fortunately) released their system to the public to see if it could be broken. This team of (by anyone's standards) extremely bright people, had built a system that they couldn't crack themselves. But that was from their perspectives, their experience, their biases.  Within two days, another team had cracked the system. And it wasn't used for the election. Opening up the conversation allows smarter conversations.

Social media can be scary, however. Not just because of the learning curve, and inherent scariness of any change, but because it is, by its nature, egalitarian. It really doesn't work as a top-down medium; in fact it is next to impossible to make it work as a top-down medium. It allows all participants equal voice. Within business structures, within government, yes, even within universities, all of which are still very much structured around top-down governance, this can be highly disconcerting, uncomfortable, even.

As McLuhan pointed out decades ago, each new medium is initially used in the same way as the previous medium, before people learn, play, explore, and figure out new ways of using it that the old didn't allow. Social media is still in its infancy, and mostly used in imitation of the (relatively) old media of email and websites. But social media is not email. It is not a website. It has it's own strengths and weaknesses which will be explored over the coming decades.

Exciting, no?