Professor Scott Talan is the personification of social media. Affectionately referred to by several of his colleagues as @Talan, Professor Talan can be found scooting around the District on his Vespa (don’t worry, he doesn’t tweet & scoot!), teaching several public relations courses and occasionally at Chef Geoff’s. But he can never be found without his beloved Sidekick.
It’s difficult for anyone who knows Talan to imagine him before the rise of social media. However, he first learned about it as a grad student when an undergrad in his media study group said to send them a message on Facebook. “What’s that?,” replied Talan. At that time, you could only join Facebook by being invited.
Now a Twitter extraordinaire with over a thousand followers, Professor Talan originally found Twitter to be difficult to use and there weren’t many people on Twitter at the time. Over time, Talan’s tweets evolved from personal (what he had for breakfast, what he was doing that day) to a more informative nature. When he became a professor at AU, Professor Talan used the customary Blackboard and felt it “was good for some things like emailing the class and posting grades but not so good at other things like blogging, discussing, sharing…I was on Facebook and thought it was worth trying. Students get it right away as they are already in this space and soon see the sharing and learning that takes place.”
Professor Talan, like many of us, cannot be separated from his beloved phone: “These devices are literally becoming extensions of our body’s (we are always holding them or they are somehow attached to or near us) and mind as well. It’s a little scary but then again phones improve our ability to communicate, connect, learn, search and enjoy life on the go.”
With our lives constantly on the move, what does that mean for social media? Professor Talan believes the new mantra of social media will be more, more, more because all media is inherently social. In fact, he predicts that “digital social media will become so ubiquitous that we likely wont formally call social media as shall be so obvious what we are all doing. It will become easier to use and share more things.”