View From the Phlipside - Facebook and Grades

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the movies and more. I love 'em and I hate em' and I always have an opinion. Call this the view from the Phlipside

Most parents complain that their kid spend too much time on social media like Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or whatever. And students wish Mom and Dad would get off their backs and leave them alone. Well the argument can finally be put to rest. A survey has been done and the results are in.

The great fear for parents is that the all this online stuff is chewing up so much of our kids attention that their grades are going to suffer. Let's face it we were taught to believe that school work requires all of our attention, that distractions will result in failing out of school, never getting a decent job and living in a cardboard box for the rest of your life! OK, now that we've got the parental angst out of our system let me ask my fellow baby boomers - how many of you did your homework while watching TV or listening to music? Uh, huh. And our parents complained loud and long about it (I know mine did). Surprisingly we've all managed to turn into reasonably productive adults.

So I was excited when I saw that the University of New Hampshire Whittemore School of Business and Economics had done a study looking at the effect of social media use on grades. The big answer that we had all been waiting for, one way or the other would finally be revealed. Over eleven hundred students were surveyed, across a wide variety of majors. Light users were defined as people who used social media (meaning Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, Twitter or Linkedin) 31 minutes a day or less and heavy users were at 61 minutes a day or more. After careful analysis of the data they discovered...it has no apparent effect on grades at all.

Nope it seems that college students at least have made social media such a normal part of their lives that it has no negative effect at all. The grades were pretty much the same as for the student body as a whole. The people getting the real bad news out of this was Twitter which only drew 14 per cent of the group compared to the champ, Facebook, which drew 96%.

So where does this leave the parent-child dispute? Well I'm thinking that overall the kids probably win this one. There is no inherent negative to spending some time on the social media at least in reference to grades. On the other hand it means there's no easy excuse either for the young people. If your grades stink, you've got nobody to blame but yourself .

Call that the view from the Phlipside


These are the scripts from my weekly media commentary program on WRFA-LP Jamestown

View From the Phlipside - Anti-social Media

These are the scripts from my weekly media commentary program on WRFA-LP Jamestown

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the movies and more. I love 'em and I hate em' and I always have an opinion. Call this the view from the Phlipside

This may be the worst idea to come down the media pipeline in a very long time. Or it may just be the idea in the worst taste in a very long time. I'm betting it scores very high on both scales.

I begin this little audio temper tantrum by admitting that I spend more time on Facebook than I really should. Not that it interferes with work or my personal life. At least not yet. but especially with my iPhone offering virtually ubiquitous access I check it a lot. Which is absurd because it's not as if there's always something interesting waiting for me. The occasional note from a friend, the rare but wonderful discovery of a friend I'd lost touch with (just had that happen last week again, very cool), or the random bit of lunacy that one of my siblings likes to inject into my virtual life for everyone's amusement. I mean, really, do I NEED to check it four, five, six or more times a day? No. Which is why some folks are either cutting down on their social media or just walking away. I can totally understand it.

But then you find the folks at seppukoo dot com. This admittedly tongue in cheek website offers you the chance to put an end to all of that obsessive observing of the boring details of your friends lives. By committing virtual suicide. Seppuku is the ancient Japanese tradition among the samurai of ritually killing themselves in order to preserve their honor. It's a very serious thing. The online folks (who spell the word differently) say the following about what they offer:
"Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism by disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting 'social' experience."
The "mechanism" they are aiming at is Facebook, by the way. Once you're "gone" you get a memorial wall where folks can stop by and leave you messages.

So is this a really bad idea or just a really bad taste idea? I don't think you can argue too much with the second point. Making a joke where the word suicide is part of the punchline is just nasty. Doing it with the kind of smug, self satisfied attitude found on the web site is rather sickening. If your virtual life is interfering with your actual life, or if you're not sure where the one begins and the other ends then it may be time to take a step away for a while. Surely we can call that a virtual vacation. If you really need or want to just walk away from the whole thing then go right ahead. But spare us all the pseudo-sophistication of a web site that calls making an adult decision virtual suicide.

Call that the view from the Phlipside

View From the Phlipside - Unsocial Media

These are the scripts from my weekly media commentary program on WRFA-LP Jamestown

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the movies and more. I love 'em and I hate em' and I always have an opinion. Call this the view from the Phlipside

It's probably one of the newest concerns for parent right now about our kids. Beyond their grades and drugs and sex and just the general overall cruddy economic conditions parents are worried about kids and electronic gadgets. Specifically how much time our kids spend on their electronic gadgets. Turns out its not just teens who may be affected but all of us who are spending more and more time connected to our computers, our smart phones and other electronics.

A study back in 2006 has been pointed to as saying that all this time connected to our virtual lives might be limiting the diversity of our real lives. We were, according to that study, becoming more isolated from our fellow human beings because we weren't coming up for air as often as we had ten years before. The negative effects on society in general were profound because we were exposed to fewer outside points of view and that resulted in a narrowing of our opinions since we had fewer people to be involved in our lives.

The good news is that it may not be as bad as all that. The Pew Institute's Internet Personal Networks and Community survey says that the exact opposite may be taking place. People who spend a significant portion of their lives connected digitally actually have larger networks of people with whom they discuss serious issues. And what is referred to as their "core network" the people they consider most important in their lives can be up to twenty five percent larger than average. So increased use of technology actually increases the diversity of thought we hear. In an area like ours, which is not diverse in many ways, being plugged in can be an excellent way to stay in touch with more people and ideas.

Looking back at the original study is instructive as well. The internet was pointed to merely as one possible factor in the isolation of a certain portion of the American public. Other factors included longer commuting distances, more people living alone and lower voluntary group memberships. The interesting thing to note is that isolation is pretty much the only result of those factors unlike the technology. Probably the best thing that can arise from our plugged in state is connecting with friends and arranging to meet them somewhere face to face. The Pew study shows that's still the favorite method of connecting with the most important people in our lives.

Funny enough, that's what the teens have been doing all along.

Call that the view from the Phlipside