Dear Reader,
I decided to use the three social medias: Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
I am not a huge social media user, but I do have a Facebook and Twitter account. I use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family (I'm old school and I use email more) and Twitter for quick current things such as science topics or news. I tried to use all three for quick information on my research topic. To be honest, all three were not helpful. They did give me quick "interesting" topics similar to my search specifications, but not anything to actually use. Reddit was probably the lease helpful because it was more "blog/ I.M." on a particular subject than it was legit information. And interestingly enough, with Facebook, I was brought to a search engine rather than specific pages from the site. So in a way, It was like using Google rather than a web source. So all in all, These sites were not useful for my project parse, but if I needed a quick overview or some brainstorming ideas i could see them being beneficial. Until I can find something more agreeable with what I'm needing, I'll use these social media sources for less academic and more "entertainment".
I think a lot of us make a similar distinction to the one you describe between Facebook and Twitter: the former being used for keeping in touch with existing contacts and the latter for discovering new types of content.
ReplyDeleteI would agree and say that your topic, being highly scientific, is less likely to have a lot of mention on these types of social media sites.
On Reddit in particular, there is some interesting discussion in the sciences(ex. http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/) But you're right that much of it is best for an earlier phase of such a research project.