Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Social media and internal comms in higher education

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently pondering internal comms within universities and how social media can transform it. At present, it is constrained by a degree of over-reliance upon e-mail which is ludicrous. Everyone realises it’s a problem and yet, in spite of the technological options now available, there has seemingly been little serious effort to support infrastructural diversification at an institutional level. However, as well as the problems of e-mail overload, there’s the much more positive question of how new technology can liberate the communicative and collaborative potential inherent in any university. The internal communications infrastructure constrains and enables collaboration within the institution. What happens to the kinds of collaborations which emerge if you use new technologies creatively to maximise enablements and minimise constraints? I increasingly see the possibility of interdisciplinary working as fundamentally one of internal comms. You can incentivise interdisciplinary projects in all sorts of top-down ways but, ultimately, if you can develop an internal communications infrastructure which can pervasively counteract the tendency towards departmental & disciplinary siloization then interdisciplinary collaborations are going to emerge in a bottom-up way, simply because you’ve liberated people to collectively pursue projects which would have previously been impeded by all manner of contingent constraints.