Social Media and Student-Instructor Relationships

This post tees off of one begun by Melanie Booth over on Prattlenog, where she asked her fellow members of the academic community for their perspective on the boundaries and norms of connecting with students via social media. 

Melanie’s question generated a fairly good mumber of responses, but a slight majority of them displayed a trend that is troubling to me. I respondee in the comments section on the original post on Prattlenog, but I want to expand on it here.

A number of instructors responding to Melanie voiced concerns that connecting with students on social media crossed some sort of personal/professional dividing line. Some even suggested that they only wished to connect with students through a second, “professional” profile, keeping their personal profile to themselves. I highly disagree with both stances.

First, this stance is based on the conflation of “social,” “personal,” and “private.”  Education, it should be remembered, can be defined as a form of socialization within a discipline of knowledge. To be social, then, is not necessarily the same thing as being personal — unless one believes that every classroom is the instructor’s personal space. Even, however, when being social is being personal, to be personal is not necessarily to be private. 

This notion of privacy on the Internet is a legacy of the early years of the Internet, when the myth of online anonymity was born. Somehow the belief (despite IP logging and the use of cookies) that the Internet allowed anonymity meant that it was inherently predisposed to privacy. In other words, because it was possible to pretend to be anyone and therefore protect their identity, then the Internet both was and should be a place where a user could say anything without any consequences in the non-online world.

Privacy on the Internet, then, became the privacy of being able to shout before a global audience with the protection from consequences. It was the privacy of identity, not the privacy of action. This lack of personal responsibility on the Internet has become its most dangerous and most destructive quality. 

So when faculty members at colleges and universities say that they want to avoid social media connections with students, the position they are taking is untenable. Although they likely do not realize it, what they are saying is that they want the liberty of behaving in a way that is publicly inappropriate without their students witnessing it.

Choosing a second identity for students to connect with is just another extension of this logic. Essentially one identity — the personal profile — is the genuine identity, while the second identity — the professional identity — is a blind, a mask from behind which the instructor presents his-or-herself to students.

This is fundementally inauthentic. I feel this is a deeply disturbing and frankly unethical position to take. It is also fundementally inauthentic, during an era when the search for authenticity on the Internet is rising .   

The Internet is a public place, like a town square or a city park or a sidewalk. If what a faculty memebr is doing online is inappropriate for a student to see or know, then why is it appropriate for anyone to see it? Or to put it another way, just as with the those other physical public places, don’t act inappropriately on Social Media and it won’t matter if students connect with you there.

In short, I say this to my fellow instructors in the world of academia: be genuine, be you, but be responsible for what you say and do on social media, and being connected to students will not be an issue of concern. Authenticity trumps all.