Reflecting on social media and academia (in 2024!)

Hi all,

Thanks for a good first class. I wanted to follow up from today with a quick post on social media and academia. Our discussion really drives home the fall from the 2016 optimism to social media that many of us (yes, including me) had for some elements of the genre. To be honest, I still see some value in these spaces – for better or worse I see this as an area for public engagement and one that we need to think through carefully (even if we choose not to participate). There are a variety of folks using it in productive ways (keep an eye on the blog role on the right had side for some good examples). You might look at the 2023 Anthropology Blog Resurvey Project. Or perhaps Colleen Morgan who introduced me to Carrigan years ago.

It *is* worth looking at Carrigan again, 8 years later, and his he lands on the issues he wrote about 7 years ago. His blog is worth a quick visit. He has recent posts on the “The increasingly hierarchical character of academic social media in 2023″. He says,

“I remember when it was possible to fill an event by just tweeting about it a few times from a highly visible account. It made organising events so easy and so much more fun as a result. Whereas now you need to share across countless social platforms and mailing lists. This is what happens when audiences fragment across multiple platforms. More labour involved in publicising and more noise across those platforms due to cross posting. Social media has declining returns for instrumental use unless you’re using paid advertising…The emerging attention economy in 2023 looks like it will take us back to the hierarchical norm. At what point do we all say ‘fuck it’ and just go back to using mailing lists? 🤦‍♂️”

And perhaps more pertinent, “Why academics need to organism, collectivism, and ‘socialise’ social media”. This post discusses a recent book that Carrigan co-authored with Dr Lambros Fatsis called “The Public and their Platforms”:

“Far from rejecting the importance of social platforms as a means of sharing research, however, the study advocates a strategic rethink. The authors call for what they style a ‘Digital Undercommons’: collectives of academics working together to ‘claim’ online spaces where research can be freely discussed, stored and shared with anyone interested in it. Researchers could use these clusters to build links with community groups and campaigns, aiming for ‘rich engagement, rather than massive reach’.

“The heart of this is an attempt to re-theorise what we are doing publicly as researchers,” Dr Mark Carrigan, Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and the book’s co-author, said.

“The proclaimed ideology of social media – as YouTube once put it – is that you can broadcast yourself. In truth, these platforms constrain or enable users, usually according to the interests of firms in Silicon Valley. We need to get rid of some of the conceptual baggage surrounding them in order to use them effectively.””

I think you all might enjoy this follow up!