UCL launches free online course examining global social media impact
Anyone with an interest in how social media is used around the world can now sign up for Why We Post: The Anthropology of Social Media , UCL's first MOOC (massive open online course). The free five-week course, provided online via the FutureLearn platform, takes a comparative and anthropological approach to social media use around the world. The content of the course is informed by key discoveries from a five-year European Research Council-funded project known as the ' Global Social Media Impact Study' which looked at the uses and consequences of social media globally. Nine researchers from UCL Anthropology spent 15 months examining social media use by people living in different places around the world. These included a factory town and a rural town in China, a town on the Syrian-Turkish border, low-income settlements in Brazil and Chile, an IT complex set between villages in South India, and small towns in England, Italy, and Trinidad. Course participants of the MOOC will meet many of the people who informed the study through films, engage with the research team through video discussions and lectures, and encounter their ideas through animations, infographics and text. The course, which starts on 29 February 2016, is suitable for anyone interested in social media - from professional marketers wanting to understand cultural contexts, to anthropologists, to those who simply have an interest in the topic. Professor Daniel Miller (UCL Anthropology), one of the course developers, commented: "Few topics currently elicit as much discussion as the uses and consequences of social media, with daily claims about its impact on everything from cognition to politics. But how much is really known about its global impact?
