March 26, 2012

Social Media, take a bizzilion

So another social-media conundrum showed up on my doorstep this past week.

As one of the managers of the PHS facebook page, I've taken it upon myself to occasionally check to see what people are posting to the page. The page was - and is - set-up to display only posts by the official PHS folks when you land there, but clicking can let you see posts by everyone - including this one...

...which directs you to this thread on which some of our students have taken to creating their own meme images. It's a simple enough site, one that's in the same vein as I Can Haz Cheezebuger on which people can type in their own messages to display over top of standard - and somewhat cliched - meme images (success kid, most interesting man in the world, socially awkward penguin).

The thread was started by one of our students. He's clearly named himself; his call. Most of the images have been posted anonymously, though one or two were perhaps foolishly signed. All are tied to Princeton High School by the thread title. Some are less than polite. Some are downright vulgar or offensive. Most are moderately funny and specific to PHS.

I'll include a few examples so you know the kind of stuff I'm talking about...






Here's the question now that I've seen these. As an officially designated person in charge of monitoring the PHS Facebook page, do I...
  1. ...inform the principal? He's made issue of OnlyAtPrinceton, a hashtag that students (and possibly teachers?) were using to 'discuss' Princeton on Titter. This isn't as popular (only about twenty-five meme posts so far and already fading by the time I'm writing this up on Saturday morning), nor is it nearly as negative.
  2. ...delete the post? I've deleted posts that were openly offensive or purely advertising. 
  3. ...leave the post and ignore it? After all, people have free speech, and if the school goes about the Facebook page allowing only pro-Princeton comments, that's sort of defeating the purpose of the interactive nature of the FB page.
  4. ...chuckle at some of the images, flag some as inappropriate, and post about the whole situation on my blog?  
I've chosen option #4.

2 comments:

achilles3 said...

holy smokes these are hilarious!

did you show that one to Slate?
the Sprank one is CLASSIC

PHSChemGuy said...

The climate in the building is such that I don't exactly feel comfortable sharing these at school - especially on the off chance that the administrators see the thread.

There are lots more Spranks ones now. The posts have been increasing in number these past few days now that Spring Break is upon us.