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Orality and Literacy: New and Old Ways of Communicating on Facebook. (Or what Walter Ong Said about the Network of Mark Zuckerberg)

Lic. Ciuffoli ClaraLic. López Guadalupe

This paper was presented in the The Thirteenth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, “The Crossroads Of The Word”, Manhattan College, June 7-10. 2012. This work is a synthesis of the thesis: “Oralidad y escritura: nuevas y viejas formas de comunicar en Facebook", by Clara Ciuffoli and Guadalupe López, Carrera de Ciencias de la Comunicación, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), June 2011.In 2012, the paper become part of the book “Facebook es el mensaje. Oralidad, escritura y después” (Facebook is the message. Orality, Literacy and Next), Buenos Aires, La Crujía Ediciones, 2012.

ABSTRACT

The main investigation hypothesis is that Facebook recovers certain ways of communication prior to press, where the subjective-self-defining, gestural and corporal is revalued, in detriment of paradigmatic values of Gutenberg Era such as the writing objectivity, publication distance, neutrality, immutability and print dwelling. In other words, we say that Facebook’s forms of communication are characterized by their written and ephemeral forms, and can be understood in the frame of a recovery process of an oral feature culture.

We analyze the ways of communication on Facebook under the loupe of Carlos Scolari (hipermediations, interaction spaces, interfaces), Lev Manovich (new media), Roger Fidler (mediamorphosis) and, especially, Walter Ong, whose secondary orality concept turns out to be essential to understand participation forms in this social network.

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We focus on revising what Facebook practices recover from other previous social networks and personal publication platforms.

We try to search forms of communication’ specificity present on Facebook, which participation architecture permits and restricts certain users practices and no others.

We argue that forms of communication among users recover orality features and can be thought under conversation metaphor. We consider actors, characteristics and temporal dimension of this great conversation that Facebook is, between orality and writing.

1. Introduction

What is it said about Facebook in Argentina? All mouth and no trousers: degradation of contents published and bonds set; a space that fosters trivial entertainment and exposure of our relationships, activities and hobbies for companies, government and control bodies’ benefit. The phenomenon of Facebook in Argentina was easily absorbed to the idea of Foucaultian panoptic of XXI century. In fact, this was one of the strongest metaphors that was spread on social network in local means of communication (on and off line), blogs, and academic books, feed by the fuel which maintains great part of media journalism, for adverse critics’ enjoyment and parents and teachers’ fear (Ciuffoli-López, 2010).

According to Alessandro Baricco (2008: 37) “we see the loots, but we cannot see the raid”, because of what it is said on the media about Facebook, it turns out to be too difficult to find qualitative information that can show platform users behavior. What is worst, it does not show what happens in all its dimension and complexity.

The intention of the work is to create a different map which allows a more complex vision of Facebook. According to what we have already mentioned, we argue that forms of communication among Facebook users recover orality features and can be thought as conversation’s metaphor. We consider actors, characteristics and temporal dimension of this great conversation that Facebook is, between orality and writing.

Now then, which is the form of communication’ specificity which lie on Facebook? Which is the platform’s role in the emergency of these practices? To answer these questions, we take back to Ong’s reflections.

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2. What Ong said: Word Technologies

Ong (1987) fetch McLuhan perceptions about deep technologies and ways of life overlapping. That is the reason why we cannot separate forms of communication from technologies in use in each historical moment. New mass media also implies big changes in the way people communicate, talk, think and act. In this sense, Ong’s approach leads us to think that new technologies always entail changes in the ways we perceive the world.

From this perspective, writing, printing press and computer are not only external resources, but also ways of making the word more technological which imply different social configurations and internal transformations of consciousness.

In this sense, Ong states, about writing, that:

Natural habitat alienation may benefit us and, in fact, in many senses it turns out to be essential for a complete human life. In order to live and understand completely, we do not only need proximity, but also distance. And this is what writing put in to consciousness as any other thing can do (Ong, 1982: 85).

2.1. Writing or the way to capture the world from orality

Writing is the most radical technology of the three word technologies stated (writing, printing press and computer), because it started: “the reduction of dynamic sound to the motionless space, separation of the word from live present, the only place where spoken words can exist” (Ong, 1982:84), and this way “it transforms in a same movement speech and thought” (Ong, 1982:87).

Thus, one of the most radical social transformations related to writing is distance between author and reader: the author is beyond the reader. “The word in his oral environment is directed by a real person” while in writing “words are alone in a text” (Ong, 1987: 102) and audience is “imaginary”. These characteristics are then deepened with printing press.

As we will see later, by analyzing forms of communication on Facebook, one of the features which stands out is that the distance obtains a relative aspect among social network participants.

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2.2. Printing press, or text fixing and its materiality

For MacLuhan:

“Printing is the extreme phase of alphabet culture, which causes human detribalization and decollectivisation at first instance, elevating visual alphabet characteristics to the higher defining intensity. Thus, printing press entails phonetic alphabet individualizing power further beyond of what handwriting would ever do. Printing press is individualism technology” (McLuhan, 1962: 191)

Although we do not agree on McLuhan’s fatalist interpretation, which place printing press as the first cause of modernity social changes, it is important to identify some printing press sequels that help us to think if they are still in use or they were replaced by digital media, especially through Facebook.

We are going to review some highlighted points for our analysis.

Dictionaries and “the right thing” “Printing press caused exhaustive dictionaries and enhanced desire to “the right thing” in language. (…) “Cult” languages prove the idea of language, basically making it appear as something written. Printing press reinforces language sense as essentially textual. Printed text, not only written text, is the text in its complete and paradigmatic way.” (Ong, 1987: 129)

Reading alone Printing press was also one of the main factors in private life concept development that we have today, which qualify modern society. “It generated smaller and portable books, different from those of manuscript culture, preparing the scene psychologically for reading alone in a quiet place, and with time for a silent reading” (Ong, 1987: 129).

Intellectual property idea Printing press also participated to form a new sense of intellectual property of words. This deeply differs from prior eras. In primary oral cultures, as well as in manuscripts, there was not a strong idea of intellectual property or piracy. However, when printing press appeared, real ordinances which prohibit text reprint to any person different from an original editor came up (Ong, 1987: 130) That is why we can say that typography had transformed word in merchandise and we can think that printing press stimulated property over ideas.

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Finiteness feeling One of the most important implications of printing press is the idea that a text is concluded. This finiteness sensation that produces a printed text, hence, finished, closed, affected not only literary creations, but also the philosophical and analytical ones. (Ong, 1987: 130)

This point is very important for our text analysis of the texts that appear on Facebook.Writing fixation has more to do with printing press than writing. If in orality there is an unavoidable relationship with referent – someone does, someone says, someone defends what he says - , with printing press, it seems that text can be independent from the person who writes it, it can be separated and can acquire autonomy.

Intertextuality is typical of printing culture that considers texts as closed. The idea of “originality” and “the new thing” go hand in hand. In manuscripts, it was assumed that there always was intertextuality and all adaptations and modifications were considered as new forms (Ong, 1987: 132) Is Facebook closest to manuscript or to closed author text?

Continuing with the development of Ong, with printing press it appears fixed point of view: “Reader audience was born: a considerable amount of reader clients, unknown personally for the author, but able to have certain points of view almost established” (Ong, 1987: 133).

It is supposed that printed text represents the author words in his definite or closed way. This can be assumed, partially because of linotype preparation form which, at the printing moment, it cannot accept changes easily. However, manuscripts, with their observations and comments at the margin maintain, out of their own boundaries, a dialogue with the world and they are identified with interchange dynamic of oral expression (Ong, 1987: 131).

Other practices which are typical of printing press are text revision and edition. Due to materiality of printed text, revision prior to “printing” (Ong, 1987: 122), on printing press era, implies thousand and thousand copies enhancement. Moreover, titles, indexes and pages are typical of printing organization.

As we will see with analysis, forms of communication that exist on Facebook are half way between proper practices of Gutenberg era and those closest to recover oral culture features. Ong’s ideas will guide us to analyze what happens in this new field with finiteness feeling of written texts, the distance between author-reader and, publication revision and edition ideas, among other features.

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2.3. Secondary orality or the way conversation is transported to digital media

Ong acknowledges a post-typographic moment with electronic media. This does not imply going against text, because electronic media produce more printed texts. But, what he does argue is that electronic media (radio, telephone, TV) “lead us to secondary orality (…) which has amazing similarities with antique orality in its participation mysticism, its existence in a communitarian sense, its concentration in present” (Ong, 1987: 134).

In these communication media, there is a more deliberative and formal orality, permanently based on writing and printed material usage, which turns out to be fundamental not only for equipment production and operation, but also for its usage (Ong, 1987: 134).

There is a strong group sense: it converts listener in a group, in contrast with writing, which puts them as individuals (Ong, 1987: 134).In contrast with unavoidable primary orality spontaneity, we tend to go to the extremes “because we searched the inside, we decide that spontaneity is something positive” (Ong, 1987: 134).

Orality is not synthetic, but repetitive, there is an “oral tendency to redundancy, from oral custom to narrate before simply juxtapose” (Ong, 1987: 100). Brevity of a variable world has priority, in a process where people who participate, once educated, will move to new places, searching other spaces. “In an oral thought economy, past matters which do not have certain oral relationship with present, in general, were forgotten” (…) The past is not considered a categorized field” (Ong, 1987: 99).

This orality present relationship and the past recovery as something that always has connections with actual situation, with an actual events series, is the way Baricco also recovers this present relationship from a functional past, activated by the Barbarians (Baricco, 2008).

Although the concept of secondary orality of Ong applies to radio and TV electronic media, where sight and hearing have priority and there are no written texts, we believe that same can help us to understand and clarify some communication practices in the network that we can see on Facebook. This is the reason why we will take it to group some characteristics which move away from printing culture and we see on Facebook. In turn, it will be useful to understand which are the conversation logics and test out forms of communication on Facebook, to see if they correspond with oral conversations standards that Ong argues.

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3. Conversation payers on Facebook

3.1. “I communicate”: body and presence apart from literary figure

On Facebook “someone does”, “someone says”, “someone” defends what he says…

Any reflection about written communication models are based on the idea of distance between author and reader, then also transferred to speech under the submitter-recipient diagram, inherent of massive communication media. However, how can we think about this relationship on Facebook?

In opposition to writing objectivity, Facebook is a space where the subjective-self-defining is present. In this social network, writing is moved away of objectivity and impartiality presumption which has the classic figure of the literary author, and it is presented in context, holding hands with an “I” which supports it. A proof of this is that on Facebook, you cannot write anonymously.

Facebook is a conversation space where all participants connected take part in a synchronic or diachronic way. As in oral conversation, when an identified “I” speaks, Facebook conversations are maintained by an exchange of different “I”.

Inside different friends’ network, each profile is and “I” that communicates information. Pictures, texts, videos and links published on the wall are always supported by and “I” who, at the same time, is a referent of that publication and put it in contact.

That is why we say that information value on Facebook is directly related with the person who says it. As in Google, that the value is given by links (Page Rank), that is to say, by the web sites who linked with each new site, and that is the way positioning is built. On Facebook, the references are “friends” of our net of contacts and people who we follow and the ones who follow us. Precisely, this is the principle by which Facebook select “relevant” information that is published on “News” page of our profile, which at the same time, is the first one we see once we log in.

Thus, far away from distant author-reader relationship of printing culture, on Facebook, possible interlocutors are part of the built “friends” net. Here, we have no place for “imaginary” reading audience. Participation refers to identities that are far away from the net, which is

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rebuilt and reaffirmed on Facebook referents of “I” that have a strong correlation with the offline world.

On the other hand, the “I” who communicates, is gesture and body. As it happens on TV that there is an “I” – and a body in scene- on Facebook the “I” who communicates does it, but not only through writing. Also, he participates and “acts” through pictures and videos; agrees, approves, manifests likes and dislikes using publication mechanisms like “I like it”, strongly related to indicial and gestural orders.

This way, as it happens in others secondary orality spaces, we find on Facebook with a more deliberative and formal orality, constantly based on writing usage, but maintained by an “I” that is body and gesture, and is the unit which grants sense to all conversations that are developed on the net.

3.2. “I” observe: from a fixed viewpoint to “my viewpoint”

“The reader audience is born: a significant number of reader customers, unknown to the author, but -without a doubt- able to deal with certain viewpoints which are more or less predetermined” (Ong, 1987:133).

Unlike writing, where a unique viewpoint is presented to the reader, on Facebook, the same “I” is the one who communicates and observes from his own viewpoint. Even unlike other personal publishing media -such as blogs, on Facebook, a “unique” medium is built for each user, which constitutes a node in the network and there is no way to retrieve other viewpoints.

Both the information posted by the user and that obtained through their News feed as well as the path through the different conversations appearing there, are unique for each user, and this depends on his own position within the network.

As a consequence, Facebook departs from the idea of a fixed, equal viewpoint for all, which is characteristic of the writing culture and the mass media. In contrast, Facebook introduces a viewpoint starting from this “I” who communicates information, shaped up as the element granting union to the network fragmentation.

3.3. “Footnote”: the role of “commentators” and “circulators”

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On Facebook, the “I” who communicates information and observes, also makes comments and circulates information. All these activities originate the conversations that take place within the network. Users “share” and “circulate” contents which go from one profile to another, like “Chinese whispers” which assign new meaning to the information at each step of the process. Apart from that, comments are the core in conversations because they validate, enrich and make the ephemeral posts on the network perdurable.

Therefore, “commentators” and “circulators” of information become relevant in the network. In this way, the modern figure of the “author” in his role as “creator”, and the idea of “closed works” -characteristic of the printed cultured- lose their importance. In this atmosphere, typical oral speech “murmurs” and “rumors” are commonplace among network users, “commentators” and “circulators”, who are not subject originality, but to redundancy, repetition and remix. These practices are similar to those that Ong (1987) describes regarding ancient manuscript readers of the period before printing press times. At that time, text adaptations and modifications were seen as new versions (Ong, 1987:132).

Those manuscript readers were less away from the author and less absent than the readers of those who write for printed texts (Ong, 1987:131).On the other hand, “originality” and “new” are characteristic of the printing press, and intertextuality is also related to the idea of closed works.

None of the aforementioned closure of works is present on Facebook. Unlike other collective participation platforms such as Wikipedia, in which there are no trails of authors, here, the “I” preserves his personal marks through his name, picture and other elements that make up the user’s profile. However, at the same time, that enables and makes easier the sharing and recycling of contents with other network users.

On Facebook, we cannot speak of plagiarism or copy; instead, we should speak of sharing, circulating and spreading. Half way of departing from the idea of author, the network privileges the collective sense of conversations, in contrast to the written culture which considers individuals separately.

4. Conversations

4.1. “Conversations” are written

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First of all, Facebook is a writing space. Users update their “status”, post and share their links, videos and pictures. They leave comments on their walls or others’. They do so through an ancient word technology: writing. However, in this case, ink (or writing) is digital. In this conversational space, the first communication channel is writing-reading. In order to be part of Facebook, people must know how to read and write. In contrast to other secondary oral spaces -such as television- Facebook is the son of the reading and writing culture and literacy is necessary in order to participate.

This kind of conversation is both written and hypertextual. Although the latter is a characteristic shared with other means of digital communication on the Internet, we find that conversation hypertextuality on Facebook has elements that keep continuity with the printed culture of quotes and intertextuality.

No proofreading

Paradoxically, in spite of the aforementioned, conversations on Facebook are “written”, but text edition is absent, which brings us closer again to the practices of pre-printed culture before Gutenberg times.

Users write and point out elements, but do not work on words as “elements” with a materiality of their own. We do not find there a possibility to use bold text, underline or highlight a piece of a text, change typography or color. Moreover, users are not able to write headlines over the messages written on walls (something that Facebook shares with medieval manuscripts), nor sign the published texts.

Texts appear as a continuum, as a literal transcription of oral conversation. There are no hierarchies between paragraphs and words. In many cases, spaces are scarce – those silences which writing and, specially, the printing press provided as a resource to state those things that could not be translated from the verbal word.Proofreading and edition of texts are common practices of the written culture, specially of the printing press, in which texts are revised before “printing” (Ong, 1987:122). The idea of “revising” a text is related to that of “permanence” in time. To improve edition in printing press times means to improve thousands and thousands of copies that will last.

On the contrary, on Facebook, “written conversations” are at the same time “mere words to the wind” within endless posts that circulate every minute. Words are not written in order to

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last, but for the writer to be involved and their duration depends on the impact they have on the network.

As a consequence, conversations on Facebook are “written”, but not “edited”, and they differ in this regard from the modern idea of the autonomous text, independent from the writer. Texts here are “attached” to their authors and open for commentators and circulators to use them at the same time.

4.2. Acted conversations

On Facebook, conversations are not only written. As mentioned earlier in this chapter and the previous ones, the publication and connection formats that Facebook recovers are related to corporeality and gesture. The body is present because the pictures, tags and texts published are attached to an “I” who communicates and -as mentioned before- is also a “body” and “gesture”. Tagging a friend in a picture means to expose the body of someone else. When someone “likes” or “dislikes” a contact’s post, it constitutes another gestural way of “saying”. These are practices evidencing approvals and forms of pointing out things, which go together with written text.Facebook strongly recovers participation forms that are close to the indicial and gestural fields. They allow us to take distance from the written text and discover other ways of expression, “raise our hands”, and join in. All of these elements transform the conversation members into a “tribe” surrounding a text, picture or video.

Halfway between oral and written communication, Facebook grants its consent to oral culture. Conversations are “written”, but body and gesture go together with those written words.

4.3. Conversations are open

On Facebook, the sense of distance –a core concept in writing and printing press culture, where the author is separated and beyond the reader- is not so important. The person who makes a post and the person who writes a comment have the same weight. This balance is obtained from the participation architecture of the platform (Lessing, 2001) and because conversations are always supported by a referent. The referent is the “I” who communicates and departs from the “I” author.

In addition, the platform architecture allows for two-way bonds between “friends”, who can make posts on their walls alternatively and publicly; this way, all their contacts in the network can follow their conversation.

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In that regard, we can see that Facebook is quite different from the conversational exchange taking place in blogs; there, the words of the author remain fixed on the main publication and readers (who are not linked in a particular network) only have the right to reply in the space reserved for comments, always in an inferior hierarchy level. Giving the fact that Facebook is a social network in which there is an “I” who communicates for others, our “friends’ comments” have the same or more value than the original post on the wall; furthermore, future comments on a post are notified by e-mail to those taking part in that conversation, so that all interested parties can follow the conversation.

Moreover, the conversation remains open due to the fact that the distance between “authors” (referring to the “I” who communicates), “commentators” and “circulators” of information is relative. As aforementioned, these roles are paramount in the network, because their participation validates and extends the short life of a post and because they keep the conversation alive as long as someone takes part in it.

Taking into account the site architecture, wall posts are always open to comments. A person cannot write a text, post an album or video, or share a link without allowing comments. The replies and comments are the core of participation on Facebook (“Write a comment”) and the “I” is always present in the posts of those invited to participate.

What is more, conversations are not “simultaneous” and “comments” never show a “closure”. This feature is present in other publication platforms on the Internet, but they have some differences. For instance, in blogs, there is a clear difference on the hierarchy between a “comment” and a “post”; and in spite of the opening of the latter, it constitutes a finished publication.

As a consequence, if the main issue in a blog is the repercussion of the main post, on Facebook, the main issue is the “reply”. In this latter space, publications without “feedback” seem to be something in between, like isolated phrases that speak to a “wall”, and the conversational flow stops for an instant.

Taking into account everything aforementioned, we affirm that the forms of communication used on Facebook are closer to oral conversations, than to the closed and finished world of writing.

5. Time

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5.1. Words are no better than… Facebook

Facebook is circular. Conversations are not attached to one person; they have no fixed space or time. Conversations appear all the time within the conversational flow of millions of users, like cybernauts that surf the Internet.

The platform works taking into account two logics: publication in reverse chronological order (inherited from blogs) and the sense that time is “live”, “real time”. There is always someone posting contents, making comments or saying “Like” on Facebook. Each online action “flow” appears constantly in the “News feed” of his network “Friends”. The quantity of actions, notifications and conversations in the News feed is infinite. Rapidly, ones are replaced by others; as a consequence, they have a very short life and are difficult to retrieve as the time goes by.

However, there are different alternatives to “highlight” the most important publications within the network of friends. Conversation reputation is built by the community itself by means of comments, “Likes” and other means of participation. When a publication has many comments and “Likes”, it will appear as “top stories” on the user’s “news feed”. This mechanism works as a publication filter; as a consequence, users not only observe their friends’ last posts, but also the “top stories”; that is to say, the ones that had a bigger impact on the network.

This reputation system organizes the chaotic Facebook murmur; nevertheless, people talk constantly and words are no better than…Facebook. This is the reason why conversations tend to repeat and to be redundant.

Brief. Redundant. Short-lived. We’ve found new intersecting points between verbal speech and other means of communication taking place on Facebook. As stated by Ong “orality is not synthetic, but repetitive, and there is an oral habit to tell, rather than merely juxtaposing” (Ong, 1987:100).

5.2. Our entire past is on Facebook

In past oral cultures, the past was not a categorized field. “In an oral economy of thought, past issues which had no oral relation with the present were generally forgotten” (Ong, 1987:99).

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The relation between orality and the present, and the recovery of the past as something related to a current situation and current facts, is the way Alessandro Baricco (2008) recovers that present relationship of a functional past, activated by the barbarians.1

We are not going to analyze here which are the steps a person follows until he can master Facebook completely. However, we can affirm that there is a first approach to the platform; and once the person can master the basic tools, he will use Facebook towards the past, to find old acquaintances, former school mates or friends left in his “hometown”.

As with written culture, Facebook works as a library of contacts in this sense, a kind of people’s history file. This quality emerges specially with those users who have finished their schooling (either primary school, secondary school or college), due to the fact that they start to meet again with people from those life stages through this network and post pictures representing those moments. Such a possibility arises because Facebook is organized as a big warehouse offering search tools to find people with whom we were connected at some point in the past.

However, the published “memories” are fully connected with the person’s present context in the network. They are published as conversations where the people appearing in those pictures are referred to (tagged) and they are part of the network, with notifications being sent to their email accounts so that they know.

Usually, this first stage consisting on making the past present in the network is then followed by a stage where the focus is on the present and the future. The connections with the past are already visible in the network, which is used to tell things and post pictures of whatever the person is doing now, which is related to “real time”, and in order to connect with new friends. The axis is present-future: chat with others, schedule events, share links and likes.

That is the reason Ong’s idea of conversation (1987), which always reactivates the past elements in a present context, comes in handy to weight up the present ways of sharing and looking back on Facebook. The platform is used not only to post the last holidays pictures, but also to rebuild anecdotes as from the images in a collective way, as some sort of revival of the conversations which used to take place face to face.

In this regard, Facebook recovery of past is something always linked to a present situation. We can observe that conversations swing in two directions. On the one hand, the present-past

1The main thesis guiding the work of Italian author in Los bárbaros. Ensayo sobre la mutación (2008) is that we are in a process of long-standing cultural mutation to which it refers as the barbarism of the culture.

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axis, which occurs when users post pictures and information, and when they tag people who were part of earlier stages of their lives. On the other hand, there is the axis leading the present to the future, which arises when the connections with the past become visible in the network and are used to tell what the person is doing now, as well as to connect with new friends. Such present-future axis implies chating with others, scheduling events, sharing links and likes. Therefore, Ong’s idea of conversation (1987), which always reactivates the past elements in a present context, comes in handy to weight up the present ways of sharing and looking back on Facebook.

6. Open-Conclusion

Finally, as a temporary closure to the weft we tried to build along this work, we consider that the forms of communication analyzed on Facebook are a symptom of a broader cultural transformation that surpasses said social network and includes other digital culture expressions.

It is our intention that these conclusions help to find the bonds that link the current forms of communication with the ones used in the past, as well as to enlighten future processes of tribe restructuration that will take place in new interaction spaces.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lic. Clara Ciuffoli@clarinetehttp://ciuffoli.tumblr.com/http://www.linkedin.com/in/claraciuffoliHolds a degree in Communication Sciences from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).She wrote the book “Facebook es el mensaje” (2012) with Guadalupe López, Buenos Aires, La Crujía Ediciones.She is teacher at University of Buenos Aires since 2004.She leads the Content Management and Communication Area for User Experience Department at MERCADOLIBRE.com since 2009. She has also work as a Marketing and Communication Manager at Énfasis.com Publishing House. And she was responsible for the website and portals of the National Library of Teachers, for the National Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2004-2006).Since 2004 she has taught on the subject Introduction to Computer Science,Telematics and Data Processing, Social Sciences College (UBA), in the chair of Alejandro Piscitelli.In addition to the teaching job, she has actively participated in the development of educational projects such as Facebook Project (http://www.proyectofacebook.com.ar) Rediseñar2010 (http://www.catedradatos.com.ar/) and the current Future digital media (www.catedradatos.com.ar)

Lic. Guadalupe López@guadalopezhttp://guadalopez.tumblr.com/http://www.linkedin.com/in/guadalopezHolds a degree in Communication Sciences from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).She wrote the book “Facebook es el mensaje” (2012) with Clara Ciuffoli, Buenos Aires, La Crujía Ediciones.Experience:LA NACION S.A (July 2008 - present). She has worked at the Multimedia and Interactive Development area of since 2008. She currently works as a Coordinator at lanacion.com blogging platform which is also dedicated to developing social media strategies, and newsroom journalists training in digital media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter.National Library of Teachers, National Ministry of Education, Science and Technology(2006-2008). Responsible for the website and portals of the National Library of Teachers.

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University of Buenos Aires (2004 – present time). Professor / TeacherSince 2004 she has taught on the subject Introduction to Computer Science,Telematics and Data Processing, Faculty of Social Sciences (UBA), in the chair of Alejandro Piscitelli.In addition to the teaching job, she has actively participated in the development of educational projects such as Facebook Project (http://www.proyectofacebook.com.ar) Rediseñar2010(http://www.catedradatos.com.ar/) and the current Future digital media (www.catedradatos.com.ar)

BOOK written by Clara Ciuffoli and Guadalupe LópezFacebook es el mensaje. Oralidad, escritura y después. La Crujía Ediciones, Buenos Aires, 2012. http://lacrujialibros.com.ar/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=10182

OUR PROJECTS

Book: “The Facebook Project and the Post Universidad”.Prologue of Stephen Downes.Download the e-book version

Facebook Projecthttp://www.proyectofacebook.com.ar/

Alejandro Piscitelli Chairs WebSite http://www.catedradatos.com.ar/

FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS SOCIALEShttp://www.sociales.uba.ar/

UNIVERSIDAD DE BUENOS AIREShttp://www.uba.ar