Strategically Communicating

In Reciprocal Journalism, by Lewis, Holton, and Coddington, the authors lay out a goal early on by stating that the essay is searching for “a way of imagining how journalists might develop more mutually beneficial relationships with audiences.” It is a challenging exercise for sure, to try to come up with your own ideas on how to accomplish this, but some things that I thought of that might help included: Reddit, and how that community functions, with its up- and down votes, the concept of Wiki sites and crowdsourced information, and live-Tweeted tv shows and conversations that take place in real time, adding depth and information.

In the next reading, Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?, I took exception with the statement, “Other research shows that young people are motivated to join these sites to keep strong ties with friends and to strengthen ties with new acquaintances, but not so much to meet new people online.” I somewhat disagree. I think that this depends highly on the medium. I fondly remember MySpace, and I made many new friends through there and I believe that that particular site was geared to facilitate those new interactions, more so than Facebook is now. Some additional reading that I did helped me to fully realize that social capital is not a new concept. It existed before the Internet. One of the main articles that helped me to grasp this idea is found on Harvard University’s website. In it, to define social capital it states, “The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all ‘social networks’ [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [‘norms of reciprocity’].” From: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/programs/saguaro/about-social-capital