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Home / Business & Management / Digital Marketing / Why We Post: the Anthropology of Social Media / Practical uses of our research 2: the school

Practical uses of our research 2: the school

In this video you will learn about how social media is used by teenagers in an English school.
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At the other end of the age scale, we worked with four secondary schools. And what we found was that teenagers now make extensive use of Twitter for behaviour such as taunting each other.
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Now the ages from 13 to 17 are difficult especially for girls associated with low self-esteem, and issues such as a self-cutting or anorexia. Now while we didn’t find that social media makes these problems worse, it was clear that this is now the place where a lot of this negative social interaction actually happens. So along with the pupils, we made a film about an example of this behaviour, which they call Twitter Beef.
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“Beef” is like a slang word for fights. But because it’s very public, Twitter, especially year 11, because our year 11 people, when they have an argument, someone will be like, oh, they’re arguing again.
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And the whole conversation comes on Twitter, and loads of people start favouriting it and replying to that tweet.
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It can explode quite quickly
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So our research led to rather different conclusions from the main literature on cyberbullying. Because if you start with “bully”, then you try and look for identifiable characters, such as the victim, or the perpetrator. Now while they exist, we found a more kind of general genre, where people some day would be in one role, and then they might move to another role. So we’d suggest that maybe you’d get more effective policy if you looked at this wider pattern, rather than trying to find apparently identifiable characters. These two examples show that it is possible to use our research for practical purposes.
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But our main goal is education, so that we can all gain a better understanding of the use and consequences of social media.

As a result of the research we also hope to change the perception of the difficult problem of taunting at schools by arguing for the need to:-

  • Shift the focus from identifying ‘victims’ and ‘bullies’ to understanding the wider context of taunting at schools.

  • Examine the the specific consequences of social media such as the use of ‘indirects’ (messages that don’t specify the person they are directed at), the ‘hiding behind a screen’ and the expansion of such behaviour from the playground to the home.

  • Understanding that although the use of social media has these consequences, this is mainly a displacement of problems onto social media. Social media has changed but may not increase this problematic behaviour.

Can you think of any other examples where you hope the study of social media could be put to practical use? Please use the comments section to let us know.

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This content is taken from UCL (University College London) online course
Why We Post: the Anthropology of Social Media
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