Working on Your Socials
by LIVIA WOOD ‘19
On Tuesday, February 19th, students and faculty attended an assembly on social media given by Laura Tierney of the Social Institute. It was her second visit to Milton; around this time last year, Tierney gave a similar presentation, introducing students to ideas she expanded on during the assembly on Tuesday.
The Social Institute—of which Tierney is founder and CEO—aims to “empower millions of students nationwide to win at social media,” according to its website. The organization hopes to “reinforce character and leadership strengths like empathy, integrity, and teamwork.”
During her two visits to Milton, Tierney used sports as a metaphor for social media; both presentations included “warm-up” and “cool down” exercises, and during last year’s assembly Tierney engaged the audience in “social sprints” which focused on seven tactics for maximizing social media reputation. Tierney began this year’s assembly with a recap of those seven tactics, paying special focus to the idea of “cyber-backing”—the opposite of cyberbullying—and encouraging students to use social media as a microphone to amplify their voices and passions. Just as she had in the previous assembly, Tierney then asked students to take part in an activity which would made them think about their own use of social media: students opened their phones to their favorite social media app and passed each phone to the student on their left. That student was then responsible for analyzing their classmate’s social media page and describing the page using three adjectives.
This year, Tierney also introduced a new activity: her presentation this year involved three “face-offs” where students debated questions related to social media. In each face-off, she had students in the audience pair up with a neighbor and asked one to take the “yes” side and one the “no” side. She would then reveal a question and each student would argue the side they had chosen, regardless of their actual opinion. The point of the exercise, she noted, was to see both sides of each issue. The four questions she presented covered many aspects of social media usage, from the implications of liking a tweet or photo to the act of sending explicit photos. After the students in the audience had debated with their neighbors for sixty seconds, she had one pair of student volunteers present both sides to the audience.
Students had had mixed opinions about the assembly. Of 61 students polled, 93.4% said that they did not like the presentation. Some students who had attended the assembly last year cited the repetition of ideas as a source of dissatisfaction. Some had more general issues, though; Elliot Smith ‘22 felt that “[Tierney didn’t] shar[e] any new information or offer [him] a new perspective on how to look at social media.” On the other hand, some students enjoyed the assembly. Evan Jenness ‘19 said that “the scenarios [Tierney] proposed were really interesting,” and that he enjoyed “briefly discussing” them with his classmates. Katherine Shih ‘22 “liked that [the assembly] was interactive,” although she also acknowledged that it “didn’t tell [her] anything [she] didn’t already know.”
The Social Institute strives to engage students and to involve them in all aspects of the presentation; according to the Institute’s website, “all material is co-developed with students.” Regardless of whether or not students found the assembly enjoyable or informative, it’s undeniable that Tierney’s presentation forced the community to think more about social media than we normally do and made each student contemplate their relationship with social media.