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 populism 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 The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Interview with Research Professional about the future of academic Twitter

From this piece on the X-odus (good title!):

Mark Carrigan—an education researcher at the University of Manchester who has written a book on social media for academics—told Research Europe that, pre-Musk, Twitter gave academics a one-stop-shop to network with each other while also connecting with those outside the scientific community. “One of the things that made Twitter important was the scale of the network, the ease with which interactions would take place and content would travel across institutional boundaries. “If you are trying to do external networking it was, at its peak, very powerful because your networks would intersect with media networks, policymaker networks and third sector parties.”

Musk’s changes—including a focus on paid visibility, promoting posts by users who pay a monthly subscription—have made the platform less useful and rewarding for many. Yesilaltay, for example, says the algorithm is behaving in a “weird” way, serving him an inexplicable number of posts about cats and dogs. Carrigan notes that such shifts mean users see fewer posts from those they are
following. Harassment and unpleasantness have also increased, he adds.

All these factors have caused many academics to flee the platform. Carrigan also believes that some who still have accounts now log in much less regularly. Unver agrees that Musk’s takeover has affected academics’ use of X for networking, with an increase in trolls, bots and fake accounts. He puts the rise of disinformation and inauthentic accounts on the site again down to the mass firings, saying Musk “broke the original system”. “The networking function of X is in terminal decline,” Carrigan says. “Information flows in less productive ways [and academics] are not having spontaneous and easy interactions with the diverse people that they once were.”

Splinter factions

There are other platforms that academics seem to be turning to as X declines. These include the business and employment- focused site LinkedIn, the so-called decentralised social media platform Mastodon, and the invite-only Bluesky, which was set up within Twitter in 2019 before being spun out. Carrigan is concerned that users will be scattered across these and other sites. “It is just going to be a lot harder for an academic to accumulate that visibility if you are having to post across lots of different sites,” he says. “Effectively, to get a high public profile an academic would have to become a professional communications practitioner in their spare time. I don’t think that is tenable given academic workloads.” Even if X users migrate to one site over another, or the old Twitter’s functions return, Carrigan thinks academics’ ability to use social media to have a wider influence will still be hampered. “On Twitter, the [networking and public engagement] functions merged together for a lot of people in a fairly natural way. In this social media environment, it is going to be much more difficult to have an effective and broad public presence that is capable of making an impact.”

, , ,