Sven Laumer visits school in Weißenburg
To address the importance of digitalization at an early stage and to make younger people aware of it is an important matter. For this reason, Sven Laumer goes out to schools regularly and discusses digital topics with students, being an advocate for this topic and showing opportunities when tackling digital topics in future careers.
Today he was a guest in Weißenburg and had the opportunity to speak with the pupils about the rise and challenges of social media. Going back 20 years social media platforms emerged to provide everybody the opportunity to share content on the internet. Before social media, only a few people were able to build a website and share content. For example, Sven Laumer shared his experience when, during his studies abroad, he always went to an Internet Café to upload via FTP a new version of his website to share experiences and pictures with family and friends. He explained to the pupils how social media platforms were developed to make things easier and how they quickly gained high popularity.
On the other hand, Sven Laumer also talked about the dark side of social media, next to their popularity and the extensive use behavior. In our own research the Schöller Endowed Chair for Information Systems, we discover this dark side in our studies. Sven Laumer therefore as well discussed with the school’s pupils today how social media influences their life, how they collect explicitly and implicitly data, what these platforms can do with this data, and the role of data protection and privacy acts are. Together they also discussed how social media can be addictive and what first signs of social media addiction are.
School visits are a great way to see the interest of a younger generation in the positive and negative sides of social media, especially because they use these platforms a lot themselves. Thank you for the chance to discuss social media and our research with the next generation!