1.1 The Rise of the Post-Truth Era
Following the publication of a rigorously researched and reviewed scientific paper that considered the impact of social media on young people’s well-being (Orben et al. 2019), media reporting (Harding 2019) picked up on the results that concluded that there was little evidence to suggest that social media had little wide-ranging and serious impact upon the well-being of young people. The resultant public response drawn from social media was, at best, mixed, with some welcoming accurate analysis against the usual media narratives and conjecture that “well it must be bad for them!”; however, there was much generally disbelieving, reinforced with the reporting of the study in the media, at a time when media and policy discourse (UK Government 2019) wished to place social media as a purveyor of harmful content and upset for children and young people, alongside a groundswell of stronger regulation and greater responsibility by social media companies.
This small social media event was a wonderful encapsulation of the post-truth era (McIntyre 2018) in which facts and evidence are dismissed in favour of opinion and conjecture. Clearly, as McIntyre explored in his text, social media has a role to play here—the echo chambers of opinion and agreement, in spite of evidence to the contrary, underpinned by media reporting with prolific use of sensationalist headlines in order to more sales and online traffic. Why would we believe evidence, when we’ve decided something different ourselves and we can find others who will reinforce our viewpoint?
The impact of social media on lives and organisations is still only just beginning to be understood (bearing in mind that the technological phenomenon has not been around for even a generation yet), but its impact has been significant. Political parties invest billions on social media advertising and analytics platforms in order to be able to reach supporters and persuade others, media courts social media share and click rates as a means to replace the revenue once generated by print sales, and in the midst of this cultural adaptation, social media storms take place, blowing in cultural change as a result of mass social consensus.
1.2 Social Media Storms
While there is a dearth of academic research exploring social media storms, without even an established definition of what they are, there is general cultural recognition of what it is when it happens—an event, reported through the media, will trigger a social media response that will reach a large audience, through shares, reposts and online commentary, such that the event moves into a public consciousness where everybody seemingly has an opinion on the event in question. The role of the media in influencing public opinion has long been debated (e.g. Gene Zucker 1978; Kozma 1994; Kitzinger 2004); it is generally agreed that mainstream media has some influence over public opinion. Whether this is compounded by the use of social media by news channels remains to be clearly understood. Perhaps one of the best contemporary explorations of social media storms is Jon Ronson’s (2015) exploration of the re-emergence of public sharing via social media, showing the impact of a groundswell of technologically facilitated public opinion on individuals and how organisations respond as a result.
This book explores the growing phenomenon of the social media storm in the context of educational establishments and their organisational responses. With a methodological approach that draws on aspects of virtual and offline ethnography, we present a series of case studies of public online risk-related incidents (i.e. an incident that the organisation has to deal with that is either technologically facilitated or motivated), the role of social media storm in organisational responses, and whether we can consider these storms to be a positive or negative modern cultural phenomenon.
1.3 Approach
Our ethnographic methodology adopts the use of unobtrusive data collection approaches, to exploit publicly available data from online interactive behaviours. This text is motivated by seminal works such as Cohen’s (2002) exploration of moral panics, which richly explored the nature of moral panics and how public opinion is fed by media narrative around “seven objects” of cultural identity mistrusted by the mainstream. We will be drawing upon techniques established by Internet research pioneers such as Hine (2000), Miller and Slater (2000) and Turkle (2011) in making use of both online data sources and observations from the field to inform our ethnographic account, in order to provide an in-depth exploration of the public and organisational discourses arising from four high-profile Internet risk case studies in the education sector ranging from early year to the university sector. It will consider the social construction of risk society (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990, 1991) and a new risk culture in late modernity arising computer-mediated social interactions, its impact on the organisations, and organisational and societal responses.
This book purposefully focuses on the education sector, as they are often at the front line of online incidents, media interest and social media response resulting from their habitation in what Cohen (1972) refers to as ‘Object 4 – Child abuse, satanic rituals and paedophile registers’. Under protectionist discourses specifically, people are concerned about the abuse of children and respond strongly to media reporting on these issues. Schools and other education settings are therefore sometimes the focus of these issues, either as the location for abuse (as we describe in Chapter 2), or an institution with a responsibility for the safeguarding of children and young people, with expectations that exceed far beyond the school walls. Educational establishments face challenging online incidents, due to the public nature of these organisations, the breadth of stakeholder interest and the often-salacious nature of public online incidents in this sector. The book illustrates how incidents can have far-reaching consequences, and how digital technology can be a late modern double-edged sword (see Giddens 1990) both a boon and extremely detrimental to organisations.
The relationship between the offline (organisational process) and online (the influence of stakeholders such as parents and wider communities, the role of mainstream media, the contemporary means to express opinion on the operation of the school beyond a discussion at the school gate) contexts highlights issues beyond the education section around organisational response. Moreover, social media is a platform in which virtually everyone invests and therefore has an opinion. Or, to put it another way, being able to use a technology seems to empower everyone to have an opinion on its use, regarding any understanding of its operation or any responsibility for abuse that occurs. In taking the above example of the school gate, if one chooses to express discontent about the organisation’s operation there, the audience will be smaller and geographically condensed. If one expresses the same opinion online, the audience can be extensive, and the opportunities to disseminate further are many.
Therefore, educational establishments have to find new ways to manage the event that has caused a storm to arise, and develop proactive and preventative strategies so these storms are anticipated and addressed pragmatically. They can no longer respond in private, with just the school board securitising response that would have arisen in a traditional complaint by a parent, for example, about the conduct of a teacher in class. Now, rather than going to a school, a parent engaging with the media to trigger a social media storm could place the organisation under the global spotlight. We are reminded of a case of a teacher collecting (public) photographs of pupils from Facebook in order to deliver an assembly to make them think about their own privacy setting (Robinson 2014). One of the images used was of a pupil in a bikini. The pupil, upset by the embarrassment of seeing herself in swimwear in the assembly hall, complained to her parents. This was a well-intentioned, but misguided, attempt to get pupils to “Think before they post”, and if the parent had visited the school to make a complaint face-to-face, there might have been swift resolution of the upset caused. However, one of the parents chose, instead, to go to a national tabloid newspaper, who ran the story the next day, and subsequently incited a social media storm which reached the other side of the Atlantic on the same day and resulted in attacks on the teacher, young person, parents and school. From one contributor, calls for the teacher’s dismissal were justified because no one in that position should be “looking at children online”. However, others were of the view that the young person themselves was at fault because ...