Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

I’ve wittered about this before, but I’m still concerned about the dangers of encouraging new people to use social media tools without supplying some sort of pastoral care, or covering some of the social and legal implications that they may encounter.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of the time we evangelists are, ourselves, fairly new to all of this and so are unaware of all the potential implications.

For a start, it never dawned on me that by using Twitter I could find my comments, accompanied by my name and profile information, feeding into a BBC news page; or that by moderating comments on my blog I become legally responsible for their content.

A friend on Twitter today asked if someone could write an article explaining social reporting, and in reply was pointed to a post by Paul Henderson which said:

“social reporters get the offline stuff online, then you can link to it, comment on it, aggregate it, remix it”.

I think that’s a good, brief definition. In the context of this post I would add that if we are encouraging social reporting then we should also be helping people to understand how their published content may be used, and that while that may be exciting it is also mostly out of their control.

A couple of weeks ago Stuart Parker persuaded Jon Hickman and myself to have a conversation on film around the question ‘What is a digital mentor?‘. As a result I suggested to a few friends that maybe (and crudely speaking) a ‘social media consultant’ helps people to use and get the most out of the tools, and a ‘digital mentor’ has a more pastoral role. From their replies I got the impression I may be in a minority regarding this distinction, but one respondent confirmed that I wasn’t alone in my general concerns:

“I’d consider myself very web-literate, but recently I got a potentially libelous comment on one of my blogs that really stumped me. I wrestled with what to do about it for literally days. I am in the lucky position of knowing a couple of excellent web journos … who I felt able to ask for advice.

“In a way, the tech stuff is easier to deal with than the general/etiquette/legal/fuckwittery etc. stuff. We not only need to give people the tools but also the confidence.”

I want to do something practical, but I’m not sure what. Any thoughts welcome!

• Possibly related posts

  1. Digital mentors?
  2. Blogging for the sake of it may be no bad thing
  3. Should we tackle the digital divide or live with it?
  4. Why NOT blog about what you wouldn’t talk about?
  5. Braving the subtleties of online social interactions

Digital engagement,Social media