On Sunday 15th August, I'll be chairing an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I'm Peggy from the Scottish Poetry Library; we assisted Don Paterson in programming the poetry strand, and I blogged book festival events from this here very blog last year. The event is called Are Friends Electric? and the blurb runs thus:Biologists have claimed we can only deal with a certain number of close friendships. Facebook’s 400 million active users average 130 friends each. Twitter averages 50 million tweets a day. With this much information and this many people, are we emotionally and personally connected, or just sharing information? Join Jason Bradbury, Gadget Show host and one of the world’s most influential Twitterati, and Mariann Hardey, social media researcher and blogger extraordinaire, for interactive chat.
Supported by ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, in association with The Skinny, this event is an exciting chance to discuss and debate the impact of social media. Here at the SPL, in the last few years, we have whole heartedly embraced the social media developments available to us, so perhaps we are biased about the positive results it can have; we’re able to bring people and poetry together on a global scale, and that has to be a good thing! We're therefore delighted that the book festival has joined Twitter (@edbookfest), so we can keep up with the latest news, enter competitions for books and tickets and chat to fellow book lovers about book festival events!
But what do you think. Are friends electric? Do you feel that you have more than one online persona? Can you really be friends with someone you’ve only met online? We’d love to have your feedback before the event, electric friends!
Join in on Twitter: please make sure you speak to us by using the hashtag #Electricfriend
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