Citeable source on the growth of higher ed digital presence?

November 26, 2020 5:24 AM

I'm working on an essay for a law course I'm taking on information privacy; attempting to trace the evolution of "privacy in public" theory in the context of photo consent, and contrast it to both Canadian legislation and the growth pressures people in higher ed marketing are facing. I'm looking for information on how much higher education presence online has grown in the last decade -- increasingly large websites, more social media presences, etc. -- and it's been surprisingly difficult to find anything definitive, but I figured maybe y'all would have some ideas?

Ideally, I'd love to find some research that conclusively states "the average university website had 100 pages in 1995, but 5,000 pages in 2015", or "colleges and universities now maintain on average 20 social media presences per institution, spread across central, faculty, athletic and other accounts." That's the pie in the sky. This isn't absolutely central to the paper, it would just be good to have some data to back up what is fundamentally a pretty common-sense assertion that there is growing need around images in higher ed marketing over time.

posted by Shepherd to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I'm curious where you are searching? For topics like this it helps to either use Google Scholar, or make sure you are using the correct term from academia so you don't end up with SEO pages. In this case "online presence" is useless but "web presence" seems to work pretty well. As an example "web presence univeristy" on Google Scholar gave a few sources to start from. From there you can often click the "Cited by X" links to get related sources if you want something newer.
posted by JZig at 10:26 AM on November 26, 2020