Results pending: Pa. school social media blackout experiment

September 20, 2010 by Erik Kludasch 

University blocks sites for one week during social media conference

Could you get by without tweeting, Facebooking, MySpacing or instant messaging for a whole week?

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania is asking the same question, and the school’s blackout of social media sites last week gained national attention.

The ban was not a punishment, but an experiment, Harrisburg administration said.

The goal of the test is to get students, staff and faculty thinking about social media and what Web presence means socially, for technology and in business.

“Our goal is to challenge people to think about how they came to rely on [social media],” said Steve Infanti, Harrisburg’s associate vice president for communications and marketing, in a blog on the school’s website.

He explained that this kind of study is important to technology students and that the issue found a home at HU, where academic programs already exist to support the research.

“As a science- and technology-focused university with new media design, learning technologies and management and e-business among its academic programs, HU looks at social media as a fact of life for millions of people,” Infanti said, “so the real question we are addressing is not whether we connect, but where and in what ways we should connect to benefit from online networking’s pluses and avoid its minuses.”

The project was inspired by HU Provost Eric Darr’s observation of his teenage daughter conducting simultaneous communication on Facebook and her iPhone, but it has taken on a serious academic slant.

The school’s administration said they hopes to advance the academic conversation about social media to a more strategic level.

With that goal in mind, HU planned blackout week to include the HU Social Media Summit, which took place Wednesday.

The sold-out event featured panels of experts discussing the very issues the week of social media silence sought to illuminate. Talks like “Twittervention: Social Media and Legal Issues for Employers, Educators and Parents” addressed some of the things that motivated the blackout study.

One of those issues is the role of social media in communication among higher education faculty and administration and between teachers and students.

“We too have used lots of social media, some successfully, some of it not so successfully,” Infanti said. “University faculty, in particular, use social media to communicate with colleagues about curriculum ideas, but what if they had to rely on face-to-face meetings?”

Infanti said organizers of the project wondered how a shift back to in-person communication might affect the outcome of academic discussion.

HU blocked the IP addresses of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and AOL Instant Messenger for the campus’s Internet connections, but researchers know that students can still check, update and chat online by walking down the street to a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Darr told the press that, although he was amazed watching his daughter’s multitasking and wondered how she could live with such constant connection, neither he nor the university is against social media.

“Rather,” he said, “it is about pausing to evaluate the extent to which social media are woven into the professional and personal lives of the people on the Harrisburg campus and contemplating what has been gained and what has been sacrificed.”