Preparation Outline: Davis, Social Media, Social Identity, and Social Causes

Anna Davis, Social Media, Social Identity, and Social Causes

1. Gain attention: Discuss how I used social media to learn about my roommate before even meeting her.
2. Connect to listeners’ interests: We all have used (or can use) school sponsored online forums to find activities, organizations, clubs, and teams that interest us.
3. Establish credibility: These online connections and groups helped my college friendships develop quickly and meaningfully, and gave me a sense of belonging on campus before I even arrived.
4. Speech Thesis: Today I’d like to share with you how social media is being used, not only to help students connect but also as a powerful tool to advance social causes and motivate us to act on their behalf.
5. Preview main points: I am going to discuss a concept known as social identity theory which explains why social media is so good at connecting you to others and share some data on how quickly social media rose to prominence. Finally, I will explain social media isn’t only for entertainment but can help everyone connect with and get involved with social causes.

1. Social identity theory drives us to connect with others.
   1. Definition: Social identity refers to how you understand yourself in relation to your group memberships.
      1. Michael Hogg, professor of social psychology at Claremont University, believes that group affiliations provide us with an important source of identity
      2. Affiliation means that we join groups, and perhaps link with them online.
   2. One of the founders of social identity theory, social psychologist Henry Tajfel believes that the groups to which we attach ourselves, both online and offline help answer the question, Who am I? (Tajfel, 1979)
      1. We associate with certain groups to help resolve the anxiety brought about by the question of identity (Tajfel, 1979).
      2. By choosing groups, we define self and develop sense of belonging in the social world.
   3. Social media provide a platform for social identity formation with Facebook being one of the best known.
      1. Think of all the ways the site allows you to proclaim parts of your identity: “friending” people, groups, and even brands.
      2. “Liking” posts also says a lot about you and your beliefs.
      3. But relationships are not really declared until they are “Facebook official.”
      (Transition: As you can see, social identity theory gives us insight into the reasons behind the popularity of social media sites: They let us proclaim to ourselves and the world, “This is who I am.”)
2. The growth rate of social media sites in the last decade show how important these platforms are to our lives.
   1. Marcia Clemmit’s 2010 CQ Researcher article on social networking stated that Facebook had over one million members in 2005—just one year after its launch. (Clemmit, 2010)
   2. Associated Press May 2013 article put the number of active Facebook users at over 1.16 billion members. (Associated Press, 2013)
   3. Twitter, another popular site, has experienced similar growth.
      1. Shea Bennett, editor of the Mediabistro blog AllTwitter, reported in an October 2013 article that Twitter had 218 million active users in June 2013. (Bennett, 2013)
      2. Twitter also attributes success to allowing users and communities to connect and follow each other.
      (Transition: People around the world define themselves socially and answer the question, “Who am I?” on social media sites. This caught the attention of social movement organizations.)
3. Organizations of all kinds use social media to get their messages across to global consumers and spur their members into action.
4. Princeton.edu defines social movements as “a group of people with a common ideology who try together to achieve certain general goals.” (Social Movement, n.d.)
5. Two major political groups that do this are: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
   1. Both communicate their messages and build support through social media sites, i.e. announce events and circulate petitions.
   2. So useful that the nonprofit organization Social Movement Technologies was created to help individual social movement organizations get out their message. (Social Movement Technologies, n.d.)
6. Activists use social media to motivate like-minded people to get into the fight.
   1. Austin Lee, seventeen-year-old skateboarder from St. Cloud, Minnesota fought for three years to get a skate park funded in his hometown. (Unze, 2010).
   2. After no success, he decided to use Facebook and created a group to build support of 1085 members to the group.
   3. In a 2010 article, David Unze of USA Today reported that Lee won the approval—and $500,000—for his skate park.
   4. We can all use social media to find people who identify with similar goals and causes.
   (Transition: Today I hope I’ve shown that the skyrocketing use of social media sites over the past decade is no accident.)