Social Media Extraordinaire Damian Radcliffe

University of Oregon's Carolyn S. Chambers Professor of Journalism, Damian Radcliffe

Today I was privileged to attend a guest lecture by Professor Damian Radcliffe (no relation to Daniel) in my Data Journalism course at the University of Oregon. The PowerPoint that supplemented the lecture can be found here. Professor Radcliffe is a leading authority on social media as well as someone who has garnered my utmost respect in my last six months of knowing him. I have taken and am currently taking courses taught by Radcliffe at the University of Oregon and I even had the honor of writing a feature profile on him this past winter -- which has unfortunately gone unpublished. Radcliffe was brought to the University of Oregon because of his social media acumen and his constant efforts to stay ahead of the curve in the journalism industry and some of these reasons were the main topic of his guest lecture today.

Radcliffe covered many points during today's lecture on social media and one of the first he covered was the importance of being aware of your digital footprint in today's ever-changing social media climate. He stressed the importance of taking advantage of your privacy settings on all social media accounts that allow you to manage them. Radcliffe himself noted that he owns two separate facebook accounts; one for his professional life that allows his life's work to be accessed by anyone who wishes to seek it out and one for his personal life that friends and family can access to see trips of his vacations or photos of his daughter. The latter account is patrolled by privacy settings, effectively ensuring his work's digital footprints and his personal life's digital footprints are on separate paths. This sort of responsible social media management is important in order to preserve your online integrity to potential employers or any other party because they will search for you on your social media platforms and whatever they may find will be held into account.

Another social media topic we covered today involved the new concept of ethics in social media. More specifically "point of death" media. Radcliffe cited the posting of a video on facebook that captured the slaying of a police officer during the terrorist attacks on the office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The original poster of the video Jordi Mir captured the video (linked previously) and immediately posted the video to facebook and then took it down 15 minutes later after realizing the sensitivities involved in the situation. But by then it was too late and the video had been shared a number of times and ripped onto youtube. By taking down his post he removed the consent to use it but soon after he was bombarded on social media as well as disturbed at his home by journalists who wanted to use his footage.

Radcliffe then posed the question, where do we draw the line in a situation like this? Along with being under a constant barrage of the media as well as the general public Mr. Mir also was dealing with the traumatizing fact that he had just witnessed a murder outside of his home and nobody in the media stopped to consider this before engaging Mir. I think this will continue to emerge as an issue and in bigger numbers as we move into the future and is something that needs to be explored more by journalists and academics alike. A line does need to be drawn and the discovery of that line has the potential to be a marquee achievement for this generation.

I left Radcliffe's lecture with a better grasp on social media and its intricacies however I did leave with questions as well. But I think that's what good lectures ultimately do, they inform you but also leave with questions that push you to do your own research.