I went to an event by the Social Media Knowledge Exchange(SMKE) called “Can Social Media work for me?” The SMKE is a project focused on helping postgrad students to share their work via social media. I thought it would be interesting to hear what they had to say. They largely seemed to prefer Twitter for getting their work, opinions and research out, but I’m very much a Facebook kinda girl. Either way, the guy talking in this picture, Barney Brown, is the Head of Digital Communication at Cambridge University. He has the responsibility of managing the University of Cambridge’s social media pages. So, when you search up “University of Cambridge’ on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like, the person behind the posts is often him. Lots of interesting and informative things were said by all the speakers, such as that pretty pictures of Cambridge seem to be the most popular thing with followers of the University of Cambridge​ on social media— getting tons of likes, often times much more so than news and research from the Uni—so they keep on snapping pictures and uploading them. I know it’s not a surprising thing that pretty pictures get the most attention, but I think I just found it kinda weird hearing the person who posts as ‘University of Cambridge’ talk as a person rather than as an institution. I felt this weird, stupid sense of ‘You’re the ‘University of Cambridge’ and you’re not a building or some abstract collective or institution, you’re a person! People make systems run, systems don’t just do things independent of us’ Either way, they realised that people also zoned out of Cam Uni videos that they posted when they put the Cambridge logo at the start, and so they decided to take the logo out at the beginning and get to the content of the videos at once.
——— To support me in my PhD studies, please hire me to do an illustration. Message me if interested and spread the word 🙂 Thanks!
To donate (if you don’t want to hire me): https://www.gofundme.com/tfe68rs OR Paypal:kalifadamani@gmail.com