Social Media

I’m about to head out to a social media forum at UC Davis. The idea is that there is a need to understand ways to communicate with college applicants if you want to attract them to your campus, but there are many other ways the technology can be useful to university work, and I want to find out more about those sort of things…

Being a social person I’m interested in social media but have resisted, for a long time, signing on to things like MySpace and Facebook, because, well, I have two blogs, they are already getting neglected.

And then Ravelry came into my life.

Ravelry is a social network for knitters and crocheters that this morning stands at 281,975 members. Lest this sound completely innocuous and old-lady-ish, I should fess up that among the 25 or so groups I’m a member of (some of them genuinely dedicated to bits of knitting and fiber arts) out of the by now thousands of groups (some are outlined here ), several are shall we say not particularly old ladyish. An IVF doctor, interested in a sudden spike in traffic directed to his blog from Ravelry, discovered not just one but TWO groups of knitters and crocheters who are childfree by choice, one of them a great deal more vociferous about it than the other, which at least tolerates the presence of self-professed parents (“parenttrolls” are apparently a feature of CFBC groups on the web). The Lazy, Stupid and Godless group not only tolerates but encourages profanity (“twatweasel” is the most interesting word to have entered my lexicon since my twenties, I think).

I will be interested to see what transpires at this forum. But I doubt they’ll be discussing much knitting.

(A phenomenon I’ve encountered though is that people don’t tell you they’re on Facebook. If they are, they’ll find you; if you aren’t, you don’t get it, and they’re not going to waste their breath. No such restraint exercises itself among Ravellers, though.)