12 abOut Campus / september���OCtOber 2010 Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). �� 2010 by American College Personnel Association and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/abc.20030 fmunication or cenTurIes, issues of civil discourse only arose concerning written and oral communi- cation. but now, new technologies for com- and social interaction, particularly social media, have dramatically expanded the poten- tial for human interaction. they generate significant challenges for institutional policies and practices to encourage and sustain civil discourse for the critical social and personal issues we and our students face. to address this challenge, we review emerging trends in social media, discuss problems that arise with their use, and provide recommendations for helping students use social media in civil and productive ways. A Brief hiSTOry Of SOciAl mediA svices, ocIal medIa are a collection of Web sites, ser- and activities that engage users through col- laboration, sharing, and democratization of roles and responsibilities. they encompass a major shift in focus from the first iteration of the Web because they allow for increased participation, connection, and interactiv- ity. Communication technologies have come a long way since e-mail was developed and popularized in the early 1970s. yearly figures from pew Internet and american life project���s surveys show that, at least since early 2000, just over 90 percent of Internet users used e-mail, with between 50 and 60 percent using e-mail daily. Online communication and socializing took a giant leap forward when mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook for Harvard university students in late 2003. since then, Facebook has amassed over 350 million active users, and multi- ple studies show that it is used by between 69 and 99 percent of college students. In 2003, Facebook marked the launch of a whole new category of communication technologies, referred to as ���social networking��� (and more recently called social media), that are used to stay in touch and interact with friends. as of this writing, Facebook���s own statistics show that its 400 million active users spend over 500 billion minutes interacting with Civil Discourse in the Age of Social Media By Reynol Junco and Arthur W. Chickering Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay. Reynol Junco and Arthur Chickering provide recommendations to help students use technology in ways that maximize their development and success.

13 abOut Campus / september���OCtOber 2010 the site each month. Other social networking sites fol- lowed���linkedIn in 2003, myspace in 2004, and bebo in 2005. Cell phones are also widely used by college students, and a recent pew study found that 43 percent of cell phone owners send or receive text messages in a typical day. One of the more significant shifts in social media was the creation of twitter in 2006. twitter is catego- rized as both a microblogging service and a social net- working Web site. twitter���s main focus is the tweet, a relatively ubiquitous artifact of our new digital lives. these 140-character phenomenological fragments have been bouncing around our society in large numbers over the last two years. they experienced explosive growth between 2007 and 2009 and have grown exponentially since then. Data provided by Compete.com show that in the year ending in september 2009, while Facebook had a 202 percent increase in unique monthly visitors, twitter saw an increase of 660 percent. uSing SOciAl mediA in reSpOnSiBle And educATiOnAlly relevAnT wAyS academIcsand and oThers have studied both the positive negative effects of these tech- nologies. For instance, there is no doubt that using online technology at high rates and in certain ways is related to poor academic and psychosocial outcomes, as presented by shelia Cotten in a 2008 issue of New Directions for Student Services devoted to the topic of emerging technologies. However, researchers have also found that some uses of technology, such as for educationally relevant purposes, are related to posi- tive academic and psychosocial outcomes. given the double-edged potential of communication technolo- gies, it is important for higher education professionals to familiarize themselves with how such technologies can influence students in order to support usage that leads to positive outcomes and also to intervene to help students whose technology use has caused or may cause negative outcomes. there are a number of issues that higher educa- tion professionals must understand in order to help students use social media in responsible and useful ways. Communicating online can benefit both learn- ing and psychosocial development but can also cause negative psychosocial and interpersonal effects. Online privacy has both conceptual and technological difficul- ties. Information shared through social media can be detrimental to a job search and a career cyberbullying and online harassment occur. a socioeconomic digital divide exists in access and use of social media. regardless of these ongoing concerns, social media technologies do serve important educational purposes. research by both greg Heiberger and the Higher education research Institute (HerI) found a positive relationship between social networking Web- site use and college-student engagement. For instance, a higher percentage of frequent users of social net- working Web sites participated in and spent more time in campus organizations than less frequent users. more of the frequent users interacted face-to-face daily with close friends and felt strong connections to them. In a controlled study, rey Junco, greg Heiberger, and eric loken found that using twitter in educationally relevant ways in a first-year seminar course increased student engagement and improved grades. On the other hand, there can be insidious effects of both shortening our communications substantially and conducting many of them online. some time ago, Justin Kruger and his colleagues discovered that Communicating online can benefit both learning and psychosocial development but can also cause negative psychosocial and interpersonal effects. Rey Junco is currently a faculty member in the department of academic development and counseling and the director of disability services at lock Haven university. He is a social media scholar who investigates the impact of emerging tech- nologies on college students in his two books, Connecting to the Net.Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know About Today���s Students and Using Emerging Technologies. Arthur Chickering is special assistant to the president of goddard College and is the author of many publications, including his most recent book, How to Talk About Hot Topics on Campus: From Polarization to Moral Conversation, with robert nash and Demethra sha bradley. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Higher Education, the Journal of Higher Education Administration, and About Campus. We love feedback. send letters to executive editor Jean m. Henscheid (aboutcampus@uidaho.edu), and please copy her on notes to authors.