Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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How else could your time on social media be used?

I’ve largely given up on social media at this stage, with the exception of using it to promote events. The reasons for this are complex on one level but in another way they are quite simple. It seems increasingly clear to me that the time I spent on social media could better be spent elsewhere: writing on my blog, having conversations with Claude about ideas and actually talking directly to people I find interesting through e-mail, zoom, phone and f2f. What good I can realise social media is vastly outweighed by writing on my blog and talking to friends and collaborators.

There’s a privilege in that I have an existing platform: this blog gets ~500 views on a typical day, I’ve got ~2000 very engaged LinkedIn followers, a Bluesky account with ~500 followers and three Twitter accounts, two with around 10k and another with 500. I also have a network of interlocutors who I slowly realised over the last year I always enjoy talking to and whom I don’t talk to enough.

My concern is that the incentive structure I’m responding to, in which the quality of social media conversation has degraded while hybrid working culture has normalised immersive interaction with remote connections, will increasingly be recognised by established academics. In contrast how do emerging scholars accumulate these networks without social media?