10 Truths About Social Media

Apr 29 2016

What started as an internal video production experiment for faculty is now developing into a possible venue for public online courses. NYU Shanghai Professor Clay Shirky presented ten truths about social media, through a series of videos produced by NYU Shanghai's instructional design staff. The videos are an experiment in reaching multiple audiences. The lectures are in English with Chinese subtitles, opening up an online platform for accessible, bilingual education.

“We wanted to test video hosting inside China. We wanted to know what it was like to translate English subtitles on a technical subject into Chinese,” Shirky said.

According to Shirky, there are probably a few million people in China whose work can benefit from learning about the “human basics” of social media--both its underlying goals and the limitations that social coordination creates.

Social media has become extraordinarily powerful over the years in China. Shirky said that people are “interested in so much of its analysis, whether it’s today’s funny gif or the quarterly results of Baidu versus Tencent.”

His series breaks down social media’s consistent social patterns into digestible, insightful episodes that appeal to a variety of audiences including programmers, analysts, mobile phone companies, those looking to launch education businesses, language learning services, or anyone curious about how social media really works.

He added that refining the production process has opened up project opportunities including online course videos that feature other faculty members.

“Because this project is testing so many things at the same time, there’s lots of different strands of thought. We’re also thinking about online education and how we might shape that as we go forward,” Shirky said, admitting that he is considering expanding his work into a verifiable online course.


Introduction

01 Pair is the Basic Unit of Social Media

02 Three is a Magic Number

03 Groups Get Complicated Quickly

04 Scale Defeats Density

05 Cost Shapes Networks

Halfway Point

Case Study: Baidu Tieba

06 Cost Affects Scale

07 Large Networks are Made up Small Networks

Case Study: Renren vs Weibo

08 Links have Direction

09 Fame is an Imbalance of Attention

Case Study: Wechat Public Pages

10 Massive Inequality is the Norm

Conclusion