Q+A: New UNLV journalism prof discusses why social media is ‘two-edged sword’

By Ian Whitaker

Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016 | 2 a.m.

As an assistant professor of emerging media at UNLV, Benjamin Burroughs is no stranger to the world of tweets, snaps and vines.

The 34-year-old arrived at UNLV’s journalism school this fall, where he teaches social media and sports media classes and helps students decode the often complex world of online interaction.

Previously, he studied global media at the London School of Economics as well as the University of Southern California. He received his doctorate at the University of Iowa.

We sat down with Burroughs to talk about his work and what students need to know about the world of social media:

How did you become interested in the field of emerging media?

I grew up in a generation with the Internet, so it’s always been something I’ve been fascinated with. I could see it was changing politics and journalism and sports, especially. I started in communication studies and always had to argue that the Internet was important and was changing things and would be important in the future. I fell in love with the arguing.

What’s the one thing students need to be taking away from a social media class?

One thing we’ve been talking about in my social media class this semester is immediacy and the speed at which information is processed. Students have to know how to be in these spaces, but they also have to know how to act morally and ethically in response to the quick pace by which information travels. That can be a really serious challenge.

Social media: scourge or savior of humanity?

Social media is a two-edged sword. Even in the moments where it’s at its worst, it can also be really good. It’s the way in which we use it and the way in which we understand the platforms and the differences of the media that we’re engaged with. A classic example is the Boston Marathon bombing. On Reddit, you had all these people coming together to track down who the bomber was. They were following the police blotter and gathering all this information. On the one hand it was a great example of crowd sourcing information and people coming together to right a social ill, but on the other hand you have a mob mentality. They actually ended up [accusing] somebody incorrectly. Social media can do a lot of good, but at the same time it can do a lot of harm to people. It can champion a social cause and it can also be the source of extreme hate and bullying. That’s the potential but also the danger inherent in this new mode of communication. We’re in a moment where we are all trying to grapple with that change.

Do you think social media helps or hurts when it comes to finding consensus on hot button issues like gun control and police brutality?

Absolutely, social media can act like a bubble and echo chamber, and that can have really harmful consequences. It can lead to frothing at the mouth about certain things, but on the other hand some people might encounter things that they might have never known about because of social media. It may click in their minds and cause them to think, ‘Oh hey, maybe not everyone thinks the same way as I do.’ There are moments where it can rupture the way in which we view the world and see things. So I think it actually is doing both of those things, or at least it has the potential to do both. Being able to rupture or de-center somebody’s really tightly held belief can actually be pretty powerful. Police brutality is a really interesting example now, because things are so visual and there’s the ability of people to record things. That opens this interesting space for debate about the role of police protection and I’m not sure that would have happened as forcefully or as openly without social media.

Most students today will have grown up with social media. Is there anything they don’t know about it?

I hate to say this because I think students are more savvy than the general public about this, but you find students are kind of mindless when it comes to the surveillance. But I actually think students are kind of OK with the tradeoff of their personal information being used by corporations. That’s one of the reasons why Snapchat [a social media platform where messages disappear after a certain time] is such an interesting example. In talking to students I found that it was a platform that initially caught on partly because of this idea of ephemeral media, that whatever they posted wouldn’t be permanent. So rather than worry about the permanent digital footprint they’ve been told continuously that they need to guard against and monitor, they migrated to a platform where information is fleeting.

Do you have a favorite social media service?

I think Vine is really interesting right now. I think students feel like they’ve kind of been there, done that with Vine, but recently I’ve seen public relations experts, especially in the sports field, starting to use Vine a lot for short-form content. They’ll replay things like clips from NFL or MLB games, little clips that can keep up with the speed of digital media. They can exist on Twitter, they embed really easily and of course that creates these questions of copyright and who can own the content and spread it.

Any social media site that you just can’t stand?

I didn’t really get Twitter until journalists started using it as a way to break news. I’m a sports journalist myself, and I had to quickly adapt and understand how Twitter was changing the nature of the production of news. It was a learning experience for me understanding that it had its own culture and language with things like hashtags.

It’s often said that people are actually less happy in the age of social media. Do you ever think that it will go away?

I don’t think social media is going to ever disappear completely. I think it’s going to adapt, it’s going to evolve and it’s going to change. I’m not sure that some of the large existing platforms are going to continue indefinitely. Obviously Facebook and Twitter have been much more savvy in the way they’ve diversified compared to early social media companies. I don’t think it’s going to go away in the same way books aren’t going to go away. We still have books, we still have radio, it’s just a little bit different. The same thing will be true of social media. In the future, it could look dramatically different than it does right now with advances in things like 3D technology. There are endless opportunities.