Like classrooms, online communities can be structured to make thinking conscious, deliberate, clear and focused on needed outcomes. However, to get there, virtual communities require intentional dialogue leadership. For that, communications specialists must study the ways to organize and arrange interaction patterns, so they may outline a productive structuring of their time and energy. While participatory media is sought out to modestly inform audiences, it must not be confused with broadcast media—it’s social. In the attached report, I explain important online behaviors for school public relations, those that help enable community thinking. Continue reading
A growing number of people around the world are participating in online social media platforms, where floods of information are eroding barriers once imposed by national borders, religious convictions and governmental pressures. Nearly 4 out of 5 active Internet users visit online social networks and blogs, according to Nielsen (2011a). In business transactions, purchase decisions today rely more on consumer ratings and reviews than company sales pitches (Nielsen, 2011b). People are collaborating online about issues ranging from spending a dollar to the enforcement of policies. While sharing opinions in virtual venues, they’re rewriting definitions for socially acceptable beliefs, principles and activities. Mankind is distilling a kaleidoscope of data, discarding some elements, while debating and merging others. Controversial topics in online communities often explore concepts relevant to all of humanity, thereby programming minds with instructions formulated from a collective conscious. Social media is a participatory technology that’s rapidly consuming data, mixing ideas and homogenizing cultures. 
Around the world, humans are exhibiting a great capacity for compassion and social progress, as well as an equally grand tendency for cruelty. With advancements in material culture, our struggles for survival have become exceedingly more complex and unified and violent. According to the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development (Geneva Declaration Secretariat 2011), a Switzerland-based diplomatic initiative that identifies interrelations between global violence and development, more than 526,000 people die violently each year, of which 396,000 are the result of intentional homicides. One-quarter of those deaths occurred in only 14 countries, where average annual violent death rates exceed 30 per 100,000. Armed violence in non-conflict countries is sometimes more dangerous than combat zones. According to the Geneva Declaration (2011), while U.S.-led coalition troops fought in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, more people per capita were killed in El Salvador. The United Nations (2011) reports some countries have revealed decreased homicide rates in the past 15 years – mainly in Asia, Europe and North America – but their data also shows increases in others (p. 9). Central America and the Caribbean are nearing a “crisis point” (p. 10). Humankind’s constant, sometimes alarming, fluctuations in community homicides has resulted in scientific hypotheses concerning clashes between internal and external environments. Recent research suggests our DNA holds instructions for reacting violently to environmental stress. 
For millions of years, humans have mastered climate change and maximized environmental resources to arise as one of the planet’s most adaptable organisms. For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens have created material culture that’s made it possible to occupy nearly every corner of the Earth. For decades, the species has embarked on extraterrestrial exploration, including the dispatch of a planet-hunting spacecraft capable of picking through countless stars outside our solar system (Thompson 2009). Our collective human intellect combines ideas from around the world. This collaboration has given birth to a powerful economic, political, cultural and environmental phenomenon, called globalization. Globalization is the blending of cultures and commerce through complex innovations. For example, advances in telecommunication technologies are connecting businesses, consumers, scholars and activists. Innovations in automation and computerization are promoting universal standards for efficiency and sustainability. Common sets of communication skills and devices are required for sharing complex concepts. There is a growing momentum for combining languages. Scientists and mathematicians have adopted Arabic numerals for mastering and sharing concepts; it seems we’ll merge vocabularies and grammar too. 
In a globalized media landscape, the concepts of religious fundamentalism and legislative rights seem to be clashing in similar sacred places, online. Virtual battles between beliefs are occurring within contradictions in public policies and moral values. Resistance to change is sometimes expressed through various kinds of fundamentalism, when interpretations of one’s faith consumes them. Religious leaders and adamant atheists have been spreading their values for thousands of years, and many work passionately to preserve them. Extremists have committed violent attacks, while other fundamentalists recited scriptures and laws encouraging tolerance and upholding civil rights, whenever barraged by adversity. Social media has become a powerful platform for hosting both collaboration and disagreements. 
The Internet is continuing to exert a significant social and economic impact in populations on each of Earth’s continents. The World Wide Web has been changing the way people learn and collaborate since August 1991, when the first website published information explaining hypertext and Web page architecture (Blum, 2011). The Web has persisted in paving virtual highways between people around the world – some sitting thousands of miles apart, others in the same room. But what about those populations that aren’t connected? Africa, the world’s second-largest and second most populated continent in the world, has only 118 million people online, just 11.5 percent of the people – well below the world’s average of 30 percent.
Dustin Senger 