% in the world of status updates, social media is revolutionizing the way we receive information. for some, social media is a tool. but for others a thorn in their side. >> it certainly makes us unpatient. and when we're less patient, we tend to do dumb things. >> the bombardment of social media and the payoff, still ahead on "equal time." >> from san jose state university and kteh, you're watching "equal time," exploring new issues each week and giving "equal time" to competing points of view. hello from the campus of san jose state university and welcome to this edition of

weekal time. i'm your host professor bob rucker. with the explosion of social media, people are turning to new ways to finding jobs. three of the largest social media companies in the world are located right here in the bay area. but as keith brian reports, landing a job in 140 characters or less is a lot harder than you think. >> the day revolves around social media, the 2010 grad is a communications major and she said twitter accounts was a great start to her career. >> one of my first experiences was actually doing some freelance stuff. so i would go and talk with some people about how they wanted to use social media and why they wanted to. >> social networking has become a viable profession. >> i've noticed a lot of

companies and organizations that haven't been on social media are starting to say, okay, we need to be on social media because it's not going away. social medias are good tools for self-promotion, which i don't mean that in a way of being egotistical, but in the way that you are in a way to campaign for yourself and brand yourself. >> social media knows about making first impressions. >> one aspect of social media is social networking and social networking is about -- i call it building social capital with other people. showing other people that you are somebody who cares and somebody who is smart in your area of expertise. >> larry makes a living by consulting businesses on how to use social networking channels. >> it was just two years ago i was just transitioning from my other job and i started just

exploring different avenues of self-employment. and my friends actually started asking me about facebook, using facebook and linked-in and twitter and making connections with people you never thought you would. >> sarto got a job in opinion lick relations and social media has melted geographic boarders. >> there is no language. there is no culture. you can translate what people say in other languages when you're on the internet and you can communicate with people you never thought because of a language barrier, you would never thought you could talk to them and now you can talk to them because all you do is translate everything that this person said. >> susan barnes loves being her own boss. she decided to start her own

company after her previous job was downsized in this weak economy. >> i like to play with technology and understand it from an exponential point of view. i believe in learning by experience. so i've been playing with twitter and facebook and linked- in for quite a while. >> for many people social media is becoming second nature. >> technology is continuously changing but it allows for social media to change. i think that the social connections that you create are going to last throughout the changing of the technology. the technology gives you the tools you need in order to have those connections and i think it will keep evolving and i think everyone will benefit from it. >> in addition, social media is becoming a thermostat of burning opinions. opinion has played a major role in how companies connect to people via this new line. >> customers are talking about

your business and your products, whether you like it or not. and so if your not listening, you are just ignoring a whole segment of feedback from the population or your customers, your competitors about your company. >> communication is key when diving into this world of web 2.0. it's all about communicating your message clearly to future employers and standing out from the pack. to have a shot in this fast- paced occupation, parker said you must be linked in. >> definitely try and get practice with it. do some stuff for free if you have to. look for an inturnship. get some experience under your belt and pay attention to those people that you admire. >> the game of social media is going to continue to expand and change. the possibilities are

limitless. >> when we come back, we'll explore the psychological impact of social media. we'll show you how it's affecting the brain in ways you might never expect. >> i think there is no question that the human brain was not built for 21st century media. >> and we'll explore how twitter is affecting our cognitive skills and personalities when "equal time" returns. 

% for some, impatient, tedious and mind-numbing are a few words to describe social networking. we look at social media and how it affects the brain. once again, keith bryant. >> here at the campus, a communication professor said social media is having a negative impact on the human brain. >> i think there is no question that the hume -- the human brain was not built for 21st century media. it was built for a pace and scale that social media doesn't encourage. in principal you can do it but

it doesn't encourage that. >> and people are paying a price for using their smartphones. the results is loss of focus. >> we find that people's ability to filter information, people's ability to manage memory, people's ability to do emotional work, to write all seem to be affected or related to heavy levels of multi- tasking. >> i was jealous of the college students who seemed to have adapted so brilliantly. i thought my goodness, i can't read four things at once and keep track of all of this. what is it they know and how can i get it? it turned out after a lot of research on this, they have no secret skill, they are bad at it. and in fact, the people who multi-task the most are the worst at multi-tasking. >> ceo of pediatrics now and

doctor glenn o'keefe said social met yorking is taking a toll on adolescence. >> and there are other kinds of things that can play out online from social interactions, social addictions heightening the anxiety and comparing yourself to other kids. >> as the author of the american academy of pediatrics she said facebook is making children depressed. >> so online where there is no check and balance, there is no end point and they can go on for hours and hours and click away and start comparing each other more and more and they see kids invited to other parties and they might see kids talk about grades and other things they do. it can harm kids self-esteem. >> in san francisco, associate professor adam gas alley is studying how older and younger people are interacting with

people in their environment. >> people are familiar with interruptions in their daily lives and it is media based, especially texting and internet and e-mail popping up. that would be an extension of our work to understand what that impact might be on our performance. >> professor suggests that people turn off their phones and log off the web. he said we have the choice to limit our media diet. >> there is a time to use and a time not to and we can make the decisions and use our knowledge of what is negative consequences to make informed decisions and to use it more effectively. >> reporter: he said fiddling around can with distractions while trying to complete a task is detrimental to the brain. >> it should be recognized that when you interruption a task with other activities, there is often a cost to pay. >> it's reducing our patience. >> san jose state university professor andrew woods said the problem is that we want

information fast and quick. >> with internet communication and social media, i'm just going to whatever works. and if it's a little complicated, i'm going to switch to somewhere else. similarly in social media, if this conversation is awkward, i'll go to another one. and i don't know if it makes dumber, it makes us better at multi-tasking but makes us less patient and then we tend to do dumb things. >> when we come back, we'll sit down with a panel of experts in search of solutions. stay with us. 

% welcome back to the campus of san jose state university and this edition of "equal time." we have some special guests. >> i'm roberto gonzales at ellen gpr. >> i'm faith gee hill a contact coordinator at a digital agency. >> and i'm david debtman at san jose state university. >> and i'm dean eckles at stanford university. >> thank you all for being here today. let's get into it. all universities and businesses now are talking about social media. how to use it and in corporate it in education and business. but the phenomenon seems to be out of control. how do we understand it and how

are we using it? >> there are information you can get from any different source online or you can actually pay for it. you can get free tools like google analytics or subscribe to places or get investment in social media. >> and we want to do research to find it's impact on academics. >> it belongs in akah deemia because everything belongs in academics. and for educators in the classroom, it's important that we leverage technology to help fulfill our mission because some things technology does well and other things it doesn't do as well and we need to -- and what we're doing now is to figure out the affordances of technology versus face-to-face interaction and then rebalance based on that.

>> what we heard in our earlier report is that some people believe they can multi-task and learn at the same time. now their academics, in my department in journalism, we would say, we don't believe that. what are your thoughts? >> i would believe it depends on how you are influencing your students and talking to your students. if your allowing them to be on twitter or to participate in a tweet chat during a lecture, is that encouraging -- are you letting them participate in the classroom or asking them questions while they are doing this, do you have a copy of all of their twitter handles so you know what they are talking about? i believe that multi-tasking and learning is achievable. how else can you expect us to right down notes while you are talking. >> well, dean, you are studying this at stanford. is that something we can believe, that you can learn while you are multi-tasking online? >> i think there is still a lot of uncertainty about how multi tasking works. in the recent multi-tasking workshop at stanford we brought together people studying this

across a lot of disciplines. there was cases where experience with high technology like video gaming was able to sharpen people's ability to multi task and to complete tasks quickly. on the other hand a lot of work done by clifford das who we saw in the video suggested the exact opposite. but part of the question is even what is multi tasking? if i'm tweeting while in class about the content of the class, is that really multi tasking? the same way as somebody who is surfing facebook or surfing the internet in an unrelated manner. i think it's important to distinguish the two kinds of multi-tasking. >> there was a recent study that i learned at a school in iowa, their 11th grade students that the teacher decided to put in place some type of new media. they call it the back-chanel. they use that in order for students, shy students to communicate. there are some students that

are not outspoken. so they have their laptops while the class is being -- the lecture is going over and they have also students interacting online with the same topic and this makes the shy students speak up through social networks rather than speaking up in public. >> some people might have concerns about that. our staff had this incredible discussion about this before we went on the air with this and we're talking about 5th and 6th graders, talking to teachers about being on facebook and interacting and all of that. is that the appropriate thing for young people at that age to be on facebook? >> well appropriate is a value judgment. and theoretically you're not supposed to be on facebook when you are that age, but still i think something like 70% of 7th graders have social media accounts. i think the problem right now is that we don't know how it works and we haven't figured out how to live our lives in an online environment. and over time things should

shake out in terms of our ability to go ahead and deal with it, it's just for us we're kind of caught in the middle where all of the rules have changed, especially in the classroom, everything has kind of changed and now we have to decide whether we're going to put up a wall and say no or how can we use it to benefit everybody and to be realistic about what we have. >> and you make two good points. is it too young for that age group and how do we know what they are learning while they are on at that young age? our staff was talking about how they feel pressure already when they go on facebook as college students to -- students to measure up to others and doing what they are supposed to be doing or feeling guilty or depressed if they are not doing it. >> i wanted to go back to what you first started out with, that social media is going out of control. i think there is for certain people. we know certain people in our lives without the use of facebook and twitter will just

gab about anything about their day. however, i think as younger students and children in general are learning to navigate the digital atmosphere, i think they are learning good skills about what is important to share in your daily lives. i think that as students and people are growing up with social media, we'll find that babies have facebook accounts because the parents have created them for them. and people have digital footprints before they've come out of the womb and that effects how they will be seen in the future. >> you realize you are frightening viewers with that. >> but the idea is that students and people in general start to learn more about accountability, about what is private, and what can be kept private and how you can use online media affectively instead of sharing everything as you start learning from a younger age. >> and dean, as you continue to study this in college, what about college students telling what they are telling us, that

there is pressure on them when they use facebook and others. i heard the story recently that someone was looking at pictures about a party that someone was invited to and the reaction of the student was, well i wasn't invited to that party. is that what we are getting from facebook and other sources? >> i think social media can prompt the feelings of being left out and it's worth contrasting with some of the more panic we had about television some time ago. so with television, people were talking about the mean world syndrome or the scary world syndrome. by tuning into the television, you were starting to think the world of a much more violent and frightening place than it really was. i think social media can do the opposite. it can create a friendly world syndrome where it seems like everybody is having a good time and everybody agrees with my point of view. so i think social media can provide this biased picture on to what is going on in the world, which for some people could lead to feelings of missing out, for others could

lead to false polarization, feeling like everything is either with me or against me in some kind of political view. so it is worth thinking about what kind of lens on the world does social media provide masked with the media we were familiar with. >> and as much as the companies can place limitations and controls, this is a free society for free communication so there are some things we can't stop. and are there concerns about that? >> well to go back to what was being said before, i think that social media is intense in terms of the pressure to be on facebook or to text people or to tweet or to do whatever. but something that chris pin thorough at university of washington discussed was the idea of communication imperative. people will bend communication technology to meet their own needs and desires. and in all of this, we really need to pull back and look at say, okay what, are the things that have been going in face-to-

face physical world that we've completely glossed over? like there is no peer pressure in the physical world, that dating isn't incredibly stressful, weird activity in the physical world but it's like online dating is really weird or going online is strange, it can't be that much different than what we are doing in physical space. i found that what happens is that basically the internet has a multiplier affect and the media has a multiplier effect over what is already going on in our day-to-day lives, whether with students or in the workplace. >> but does it distract the workplace. roberto, you know we clamp down on that in journalism and we said sometimes during instruction, not appropriate. what about in a workplace? >> well i say this, anything you are doing live you have to limit yourself and limited amount of time to do things. you can surf online for an hour or two hours of your day and then spend the rest doing your real work. you can use that social media

to enhance your work, to look for more information and get feedback from other people and make conversation, ask questions and actually reach out broader than just limiting yourself to the physical world. >> fake -- faith, i worry about the social interaction. i worry about the ability of students to talk to each other. it's great you can use social media to interact and go out and date and make plans, but what happened to the one-on-one conversation? isn't that important? >> i think that's leaving out the fact that a lot of people use social media in order to meet other people. when you look at successful companies where people join a community they are not necessarily a part of previously and to meet other people and to talk with them at a constant basis, i think to go on with roberto's part about using twitter in the workplace, in my agency we encourage as long as it's appropriate in the

appropriate language. but in order to communicate with other colleagues, to share findings, to share with people other things that we have found in the industry, i think it's really important to build those social skills threw social media. even if it isn't face-to-face, that doesn't mean it does not open the door to meeting later in the future. >> there is no question that administrators, faculty, we use blackberries and we use our phones and interact with skype and all of that. but i still wonder, for young people who are still learning how to interact with human beings, trying to get into the business world, trying to get into the academic world, are they hiding too much behind that technology? >> well i think one of the big challenges of social interaction through technology is so many of the queues that we normally rely on, the signals from other people and situations that tell us what is appropriate to do, what are the norms in this space, they are absent online. and furthermore a lot of the situations, norms, communities can be collapsed because it's all available to other people

or it may change in the future who is observing and who is the audience of what you are producing. and so a lot of the basic signals that we rely upon to have fruitful social interaction in the physical world are lacking online. and so the thing is we're stuck with that. because of globalization, a lot of us are going to be working in a way with people who are somewhere else. and so we need to figure out how to make that work for us. >> now we're stuck with it, which i believe we are, then we have to incorporate it. that's why the school of journalism is incorporated social media across its academic mission because we see the value of using it as a teach book tool. we are using facebook here to interact with the community. but here is my concern. what about false information from sources that may or may not have the credibility we would like. for years we've had rate your professor, we've had people talking about teachers on facebook and on twitter and often times here, maybe you could help me with this, i hear

students telling me your class was nothing like i saw online before i came in. are you worried about that or concerned about that? >> i wouldn't say i'm concerned about it. it's really -- students have their own peer networks and talk to each other about the classes and how they want to operate in the class. and this is a whole thing about there is a lot of talk and early research that said oh, there is a problem with people being on line and affecting face-to-face interaction and i don't think research support that's at all. people who have obsessive compulsive behavior will be online even more as well as in physical face-to-face. people primarily use new media to manage their physical friend network and their family if they have people in other cities, if they were raised in the central valley and now going to school here and that's the way they maintain the relationships. as far as the interruption issue, i saw some research that showed that the average time that anyone in their office can

go without being interrupted is about 3 minutes. so this is not a new media phenomenon, again, it is something that can increase the affect but not something we haven't dealt with in the past. >> and we put the depression in our previous reporting on this as a facebook possible phenomenon. do people get depressed when they see so much messaging bombarding them about what they are and what they should be doing and associating with? >> sure, there is depression. and there is depression in physical work as well. if anything, i think social media enhances the people who are actually depressed, usually a lot of time it's because of social problems they may have. some of them could be shy or having social issues. and social media is a new way to communicate, a new way to reach out to people. people who are like them. maybe they are different. there is the odd person where they stand but they can reach out to somebody in china and

talk to them and somebody like them and then that will stop their depressions. >> and there is a focus on cyber bullying. the more students and individuals get involved, do you think that could be a concern of the future? >> i'm sure that cyber bullying is a very reel issue and it happens as well as regular bullying in the real life. it happens. but at the same time, you see initiatives where people combat that? a positive way. when you look at campaigns like it gets better and people using social media in order to encourage young gay people to be proud of themselves and know the life they are living isn't going to be the only life they are living. and i think that when you look at anything in a way that there is only one side of it, it's a little silly. >> it's a little close-minded and we have to remain open- minded. facebook, join us sometime. and of course join us for

another edition of "equal time."